Then Again

Friedman, Elyse

Literature & Fiction

Random House Canada

World Literature

Vintage Canada

A deliciously sly, compulsively readable tale about greed, power and the world’s most devious family.\nWhen Alana Shropshire’s seventy-six-year-old father, Ed, starts dating Kelly, his twenty-eight-year-old nurse, a flurry of messages arrive from Alana’s brothers, urging her to help “protect Dad” from the young interloper. Alana knows that what Teddy and Martin really want to protect is their father’s fortune, and she tells them she couldn’t care less about the May–December romance. Long estranged from her privileged family, Alana, a hardworking single mom, has more important things to worry about.\nBut when Ed and Kelly’s wedding is announced, Teddy and Martin kick into hyperdrive and persuade Alana to fly to their father’s West Coast island retreat to perform one simple task in their plan to make the gold digger go away. Kelly, however, proves a lot more wily than expected, and Alana becomes entangled in an increasingly dangerous scheme full of secrets and surprises. Just how far will her siblings go to retain control?\nSmart, entertaining and brimming with shocking twists and turns, The Opportunist is both a thrill ride of a story and a razor-sharp view of who wields power in the world.

The Opportunist: A Novel

Genre Fiction

MIRA

Long Story Short: A Novella and Stories

House of Anansi Pr

Elyse Friedman's fiction, described as "part Kafka, part South Park" (Toronto Star), is as funny as it is fierce, as witty as it is empathetic. Here, in her best, most mature, and most nuanced work, she offers a dark, comically off-beat, and surprisingly heartbreaking novella about a young man who copes with the passage into adulthood by cultivating an almost fanatically ironic view of the world, but who is ultimately forced to deliver a death blow to irony -- which visits him in the form of a washed-up '80s sitcom star. In the accompanying handful of short stories, Friedman demonstrates her sure touch with everyday situations and her uncanny, precise ability to expose the strangeness at the heart of "normal." Her moving story "The Soother," about a middle-aged man who copes with intense demands from family and friends by visiting a prostitute he pays to coddle and soothe him, won Gold at the 2006 National Magazine Awards for fiction and was published in the Toronto Life summer fiction

Long Story Short

Short Stories & Anthologies

What would you do if you went to bed ugly, fat, and depressed and woke up the next morning in the body of a goddess? This is exactly the miracle that befalls Allison Penny, who has spent most of her twenty-two years on this earth in a serious slump (to say the least). Having long since given up on her life, Allison is stuck in an apartment with an evil sexpot roommate, trapped in a dysfunctional relationship with her alcoholic mother, and miserably working as a cleaning lady to pay the bills. Now, of course, Allison wastes no time in test-driving her new looks, and she experiences all of the power and fun that come with being gorgeous. Men and modeling agencies are falling all over her, and she finally has the con?dence to live her life without trying to disappear into the background. But even for the beautiful people, things can get complicated, and soon Allison finds herself with a whole new set of problems. Darkly hilarious, engaging, and full of surprises, Waking Beauty is a modern-day fairy tale with an all-too-real moral: No matter how much we hate to admit it, it’s what’s on the outside that counts.

Waking Beauty: A Novel

Humor & Satire

Broadway Books

The Answer To Everything

"The Answer to Everything is compelling proof that Elyse Friedman is one of Canada's best and most crucial writers. Both cynical and searching, it's a hilarious yet deeply moving portrait of an upstart cult gone wrong-it drew me in from page one but never let me settle, continually surprising me and challenging my take on things. It puts its players through the same paces, and the result is a cast of some of the most memorable characters I've met in a long time. It feels urgently timely, too-a book that I'll be recommending far and wide." -Melanie Little, author of Confidence John Aarons, a brilliant but perpetually broke artist, knows how to cadge a meal or seize an opportunity when he spies one. Turned out on the street by his fully employed, entirely fed up girlfriend, he goes on the hunt for cheap shared accommodation and stumbles upon the ideal set-up-a bedroom in the home of Amy, an attractive psychology student who has been abandoned by her condo-buying roommate. Not only does Amy have a surprisingly affordable penthouse apartment with rooftop patio and a fridge full of high-quality comestibles, but she also has a mysterious across-the-hall neighbour, Eldrich, who appears to be home all day, smoking weed and receiving an odd assortment of visitors. Before long, John is availing himself of Eldrich's pot, food and wine. He notices that these staples are provided gratis to Eldrich by friends and acquaintances who rely on him for spiritual guidance. That's when John, atheist and misanthrope, decides to start a New Age cult with Eldrich as guru. And so, as half art project, half money-making scheme, the Answer Institute is born. With Amy as a partner in the enterprise, the cult flourishes and grows exponentially, attracting a wide range of broken, strange and spiritually hungry individuals, including an obscenely wealthy Singaporean expat, a psilocybin-dealing hippie, a conservative mom mourning the death of her only child, and the star of a popular sci-fi TV show. Eldrich begins to embrace his role as Leader with a little too much zeal and introduces his followers to increasingly peculiar rituals. Amy becomes progressively more enamoured of the funds pouring into the coffers, and John lets sexual jealousy get the better of him. The more successful the Institute gets, the more it spirals out of control, culminating in a bizarre ayahuasca ceremony that ends in a way nobody could have expected. With humour and pathos, The Answer to Everything examines the gap between reason and faith, and the human need for connection, love and transcendence.

Literary

Patrick Crean Editions

John Aarons, a brilliant but perpetually broke artist, knows how to cadge a meal or seize an opportunity when he spies one. Turned out on the street by his fully employed, entirely fed up girlfriend, he goes on the hunt for cheap shared accommodation and stumbles upon the ideal set-up―a bedroom in the home of Amy, an attractive psychology student who has been abandoned by her condo-buying roommate. Not only does Amy have a surprisingly affordable penthouse apartment with rooftop patio and a fridge full of high-quality comestibles, but she also has a mysterious across-the-hall neighbour, Eldrich, who appears to be home all day, smoking weed and receiving an odd assortment of visitors. Before long, John is availing himself of Eldrich's pot, food and wine. He notices that these staples are provided gratis to Eldrich by friends and acquaintances who rely on him for spiritual guidance. That's when John, atheist and misanthrope, decides to start a New Age cult with Eldrich as guru. And so, as half art project, half money-making scheme, the Answer Institute is born. With Amy as a partner in the enterprise, the cult flourishes and grows exponentially, attracting a wide range of broken, strange and spiritually hungry individuals, including an obscenely wealthy Singaporean expat, a psilocybin-dealing hippie, a conservative mom mourning the death of her only child, and the star of a popular sci-fi TV show. Eldrich begins to embrace his role as Leader with a little too much zeal and introduces his followers to increasingly peculiar rituals. Amy becomes progressively more enamoured of the funds pouring into the coffers, and John lets sexual jealousy get the better of him. The more successful the Institute gets, the more it spirals out of control, culminating in a bizarre ayahuasca ceremony that ends in a way nobody could have expected. With humour and pathos, The Answer to Everything examines the gap between reason and faith, and the human need for connection, love and transcendence.

Harper-perennial

Know Your Monkey is the debut poetry collection by Toronto novelist and screenwriter Elyse Friedman. Plainspoken yet vivid, funny yet poignant, these are poems that tell stories. In Bleeding & Laughing at Pineway & Cummer’, a group of teens dizzy with spring and spirits and speed’ race a van through the suburbs after grade nine prom. In The Great Thing My Cousin George Did’, a man simultaneously drives two cars from Toronto to Hamilton: 100 yards then hop out/run back to/the other car/100 yards past the first car /and so on / and so on / with the polio / leg.’ In Paradise Mural’ we meet a woman at a Holiday Inn singles’ dance who always tried to giggle / but it came off the gangplank of her tongue / like it had been / pushed’. Friedman writes candidly about her own experiences with love, family, and work. In Screenwriting 101’, she rails against the formulaic rules that have come to govern the craft of movie-writing. In Rescue’ she fantasizes about being stranded on a desert island with Tom Waits and Charles Bukowski. Never precious or inscrutable, Know Your Monkey gives us rhythmical slices of real and imagined life.

Know Your Monkey

Poetry

a misFit book

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