"A comedy of bad manners, darting wisecracks, deadpan chagrin, and drug-hazed pratfalls" (James Wolcott), The Bend of the World is a madcap coming-of-age novel in which no one quite comes of age and everything you know is not a lie, it's just, well, tangential to the truth. In the most audacious literary debut to come out of the Steel City since The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, we meet Peter Morrison, twenty-nine and comfortably adrift in a state of not-quite-adulthood, less concerned about the general direction of his life than with his suspicion that all his closest relationships are the products of inertia. He and his girlfriend float along in the same general direction, while his parents are acting funny, though his rich, hypochondriac grandmother is still good for admission to the better parties. He spends his days clocking into Global Solutions (a firm whose purpose remains unnervingly ambiguous) and his weekends listening to the half-imagined rants of his childhood best friend, Johnny. An addict and conspiracy theorist, Johnny believes Pittsburgh is a "nexus of intense magical convergence" and is playing host to a cabal of dubious politicians, evil corporate schemes, ancient occult rites, and otherwise inexplicable phenomena, such as the fact that people really do keep seeing UFOs hovering over the city. Against this strange background, Peter meets Mark and Helen, a slightly older couple, new to town, whose wealth and glamour never fully conceal the suggestion of something sinister, and with whom he becomes quickly infatuated. Mark is a corporate lawyer in the process of negotiating a buyout of Global Solutions, and initiates Peter into the real, mundane (maybe) conspiracies of corporations and careers, while Helen―a beautiful and once prominent artist―is both the echo and the promise of the sort of woman Peter always imagined, or was always told he ought to find for himself.
As Peter climbs the corporate ladder, Johnny is pulled into the orbit of a mysterious local author, Winston Pringle, whose lunatic book of conspiracies seems to be coming true. As Johnny falls farther down the rabbit hole, the surreal begins to seep into the mundane, and the settled rhythm of Peter's routine is disrupted by a series of close encounters of third, fourth, and fifth kinds. By the time Peter sets out to save his friend from Pringle's evil machinations (and pharmacological interventions), his familiar life threatens to transform into that most terrifying possibility: a surprise.
In The Bend of the World Philip K. Dick meets Michael Chabon, and Jacob Bacharach creates an appropriately hilarious, bizarre, and keenly observed portrait of life on the edge of thirty in the adolescent years of twenty-first-century America.

The Bend of the World: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Bacharach, Jacob

United States

Liveright

Reflecting on his brother's death from opioid addiction, Jacob Bacharach turns Didion's masterpiece into a blueprint for grief and self-discovery Literary Nonfiction. Essay. Reading Joan Didion's iconic memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, Jacob Bacharach's thoughts are never far from his brother, Nate, who died of an opioid addiction. Although he tries to be a "a cool customer" like Didion, he finds Nate's story breaking through the text, stirring memories of their tight-knit childhood and defying his attempts to find "the truth" about a tragic death. In A COOL CUSTOMER, Bacharach turns The Year of Magical Thinking into a blueprint for grief and self-discovery that anyone can follow. This book is part of a new series from Fiction Advocate called Afterwords. "Bacharach smartly weaves his family story with a literate discussion of Didion's narratives and cultural position to make a snappy and inviting book you could easily read in one sitting."—Rebecca Foster

A Cool Customer: Joan Didion's THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING (...AFTERWORDS)

History & Criticism

Fiction Advocate

“Bacharach has a great comic voice― shrewd, deadpan, and dirty―and The Bend of the World fears no weirdness.”―Sam Lipsyte “Mighty strange doings” mark the Pittsburgh of Jacob Bacharach’s audacious and hilarious debut novel, a town where “yeti, UFOs, rumors of orgiastic rites, intimations of the Mayan apocalypse and ‘psycho-temporal distortions’ add that extra zing to the bustling night life” (James Wolcott). On the edge of thirty, and comfortably adrift in life, Peter Morrison finds his personal and professional life taking a turn for the weird as his attempts to transition into adulthood are thwarted by conspiracies both real and imagined. In this madcap coming-of-age novel, where no one quite comes of age, Bacharach brings an “immensely entertaining” and “Vonnegut-like sensibility” (Library Journal ) to the “aptly surreal satire” (Dan Chaon) of hipsters, corporations, and American life in the adolescent years of the twenty-first century. “A disarming, intelligent and seriously funny debut,” The Bend of the World “marks the arrival of Jacob Bacharach as a writer to watch” (Bob Hoover, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).

Humor & Satire

A biting, tragicomic fable for our neurotic times, The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates conquers Tolstoy’s adage that "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Is there any father worse than Abraham?
Are there any unhappier families than the first family of Genesis?
In the follow-up to his acclaimed debut, The Bend of the World, Jacob Bacharach enlivens these existential questions in a madcap tale that replaces the biblical Ur with New York City, the land of Canaan with the rust-belt river valleys of western Pennsylvania. Told in a comic voice that Sam Lipsyte once called "shrewd, deadpan, and dirty," The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates hilariously transposes the biblical story of our first patriarchs into a modern world even madder than the ancient Middle East.
Fleeing from a failed relationship, Isabel Giordani leaves Manhattan for Pittsburgh to accept a job at the underachieving nonprofit Future Cities Institute and insinuates herself into the aimless lives of Isaac Mayer and his father, Abbie. An architect turned crooked real estate developer, Abbie claims to be chasing after an unexpected heavenly vision―one that inevitably embroils the Mayer family within the political and familial machinations of Fayette County, Pennsylvania. Bacharach explores the perpetually fraught themes of love, family, God, and real estate in an irreverent and unnervingly tender tale that Edan Lepucki celebrates as "simultaneously funny and tragic, sacred and profane…wise and clever from the first page to the last."

The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates: A Novel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bacharach, Jacob. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bacharach, Jacob

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bacharach, Jacob. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Bend of the World: A Novel

A Cool Customer: Joan Didion's THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING (...AFTERWORDS)

The Bend of the World: A Novel

The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates: A Novel