Friedman's survival guide for the shy and solitary. Source of the 1984 film "The Lonely Guy" starring Steve Martin and Charles Grodin.

The Lonely Guy's Book of Life

Friedman, Bruce Jay

McGraw=Hill

One morning, jolted by a breakdown of his routine, Mike Halsey, a contemporary combination of Candide and Don Quixote, leaves his lovely lady Pam and his large dog Mort and sets out for the diversions of Japan

Tokyo Woes

Literature & Fiction

Penguin??Books

A few years ago, Christopher Buckley wrote of Bruce Jay Friedman in the New York Times Book Review that he "has been likened to everyone from J. D. Salinger to Woody Allen," but that "he is: Bruce Jay Friedman, sui generis, and no mean thing. No further comparisons are necessary." We are happy to report that he remains the same Bruce Jay Friedman in his unique, unblinking, and slightly tilted essays—collected here for the first time—in Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos. A butler school in Houston, a livestock auction in Little Rock, a home for "frozen guys" in California, JFK's humidor in Manhattan—all are jumping off points for Friedman's baleful and sharply satirical scrutiny of American life and behavior in the second half of the twentieth century. Travel with Friedman from Harlem to Hollywood, from Port-au-Prince to Etta's Eat Shop in Chicago. In these pieces, which were published in literary and mass-circulation magazines from the 1960s to the 1990s, you'll meet such luminaries as Castro and Clinton, Natalie Wood and Clint Eastwood, and even Friedman's friends Irwin Shaw, Nelson Algren, and Mario Puzo. Friedman is a master of the essay, whether the subject is crime reporting ("Lessons of the Street"), Hollywood shenanigans ("My Life among the Stars"), or his outrageous adventures as the editor of pulp magazines (the classic "Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos"). We could sing his praises as a journalist, humorist, and social critic. But, as Buckley tells us, being Bruce Jay Friedman is enough. Bruce Jay Friedman is the author of seven novels (including The Dick, Stern, and A Mother's Kisses), four collections of short stories, four full-length plays (including Scuba Duba and Steambath), and the screenplays for the movies Splash and Stir Crazy.

Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos: Best Nonfiction

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

University of Chicago Press

A Mother's Kisses is the story of Joseph, a tall, scattered looking boy of seventeen and his wonderfully indomitable mother, Meg, who is resolved, in the summer after her son's high-school graduation to start arranging his life for him, even going so far as to accompany him to college. A work of roaring comedy and emotional honesty, A Mother's Kisses is a classic of modern fiction.

A Mother's Kisses

Contemporary

Dust jacket design by S. Neil Fujita. The story of a screenwriter in Hollywood who is out of control.

About Harry Towns

Literary

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Stern

Originally published in 1962, Stern is the story of a Jewish family displaced from the city to the suburbs, and more particularly, of the mild-mannered Everyman, caterpillars as well as shades of bigotry.

Signet

The author of The Lonely Guy's Book of Life offers a survival guide for the midlife male, addressing virtually all of his concerns and offering outrageous suggestions on everything from sexual performance anxiety to memory lapses to cars. 35,000 first printing.

Slightly Older Guy

Simon&Schuster

Bruce Jay Friedman has been hailed by critics as a comic genius, a writer whose vision confronts the malaise of contemporary life with a liberating deadpan humor. Grove Press is proud to reissue one of the classic novels by this acclaimed master of modern humor. About Harry Towns is the story of the eponymous screenwriter, a man reveling in the freewheeling atmosphere of the early 1970s, a bicoastal playboy with a broken marriage and a child he rarely sees. But when his perfectly constructed life begins to spin out of control, he must decide to pick up the scattered pieces of his past to begin anew. Praise for About Harry Towns: "A goddamn heartbreaking delight and you are a fool if you miss it. Friedman has created a character unique, haunting, and completely memorable in stories which tickle, depress, gouge below the belt and at second or third reading hold up as nothing less than a joy." -- The Washington Post Book World

GROVE PRESS

Grove Press continues the reissue of Bruce Jay Friedman's critically acclaimed fiction with The Current Climate by the comedic genius whose work Nelson Algren hailed as "more interesting than most of Malamud, Roth, and Bellow ...[and] more important." The Current Climate continues the hilarious misadventures of the screenwriter from Friedman's novel About Harry Towns. Harry is now twenty years older and living in New York, a frustrated playwright struggling to sell a TV series to make some quick cash-and paralyzed by the decision of whether or not he should get tickets to see Cats.

The Current Climate

Bruce Jay Friedman has been hailed by critics as a comic genius, a writer whose vision confronts the malaise of contemporary life with a liberating deadpan humor. Grove Press is proud to reissue the collected short stories by this acclaimed master of modern humor. Hailed by Newsweek as "a bona fide literary event," The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman brings together Friedman's fifty-seven greatest stories, which appeared in Esquire, Playboy, The New Yorker, and other magazines from 1953 to 1995. "Friedman [is] more interesting than most of Malamud, Roth, and Bellow. . . . What makes him more important is that he writes out of the viscera instead of the cerebrum." -- Nelson Algren, The Nation

The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman

Humor & Satire

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

Books by Friedman, Bruce Jay

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

The Lonely Guy's Book of Life

Tokyo Woes

Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos: Best Nonfiction

A Mother's Kisses

About Harry Towns

Stern

Slightly Older Guy

About Harry Towns

The Current Climate

The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman