Ewald, Broccoli and the exotic Elvira are three young friends on the run - from the horrifying possibility of living mundane lives. They all want just one thing - to be magnificent, on screen or off it, but ideally in front of thousands of people. So Broccoli, self-styled svengali and 'President of the Society of Geniuses', begins Operation Brando, an insanely ambitious plan to make them the biggest stars Hollywood has ever known.Sadly, things don't quite follow this plan and their path to global obscurity is by turns hilarious, absurd and tragic. Operation Brando begins badly and gets rapidly worse: Broccoli is only able to secure auditions for his disciples as extras in risible youth theatre productions and lousy commercials. He thinks Ewald would be perfect for the non-speaking role of a spotty kid, for instance, who has only to fall down stairs to get the part, but even this stretches Ewald's talents a little too far. All three suffer badly from the burning need to be somebody else, somebody none of them are quite able to be, and this focus on the abyss separating desire and reality makes for a richly comic and ultimately moving novel by one of Europe's most exciting young authors.

SILENT EXTRAS

Literature & Fiction

Grünberg, Arnon

Contemporary

Vintage

The new novel by the internationally acclaimed author- "a farce of nuclear proportions"(Vanity Fair) Arnon Grunberg is one of the most subtly outrageous provocateurs in world literature. The Jewish Messiah, which chronicles the evolution of one Xavier Radek from malcontent grandson of a former SS officer, to Jewish convert, to co- translator of Hitler's Mein Kampf into Yiddish, to Israeli politician and Israel's most unlikely prime minister, is his most outrageous work yet. Taking on the most well-guarded pieties and taboos of our age, The Jewish Messiah is both a great love story and a grotesque farce that forces a profound reckoning with the limits of human guilt, cruelty, and suffering. It is without question Arnon Grunberg's masterpiece.

The Jewish Messiah: A Novel

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Penguin Publishing Group

Three hapless friends-- nervous Ewald, impetuous Broccoli, and seductive Elvira-- are down on their luck, slightly unhinged, and determined to make it in bohemian Amsterdam. Together, they hatch a daring and foolish string of plots and schemes in order to make some impact on a world that could largely care less. They want to become famous actors, artists, con men and thieves, but most of all, the three want recognition; they want to make a dent in the world and have the world finally take notice.
Silent Extras is an exuberant meditation on youth, waste, and the unstoppable power of comedy and farce. The novel is less a story of young people looking for meaning than it is a story of the young looking to undermine meaning. When the world makes no sense, all one can do is play along.

Silent Extras: A Novel

St.Martin's Press

Expelled from school and estranged from his father, a cynical young man wanders the streets of Amsterdam, spending his remaining funds on prostitutes and surviving on the strength of his wit and humor

Blue Mondays

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

RANDOM HOUSE UK

A black, funny novel about a once respectable writer on the make. Once a literary novelist of some respectability, now brought low by the double insult of obscurity and crippling debt, Robert G. Mehlman is a man in need of money and recognition, fast. It is, of course, to cookery writing that he turns. A practised decadent, a habitual spendthrift and a serial womaniser, he has, ostensibly, all the right qualities. But the path to fame is never a smooth one. Phantom Pain consists largely of the bitterly funny but unpublished manuscript of Mehlman's autobiography. In it, he tells the parallel stories of his decaying marriage and his puzzling affair with a woman he meets by chance and who accompanies him on the road. Their journey takes them on a chaffeur-driven, midnight run from New York to Atlantic City where they gamble away most of Mehlman's remaining funds and then north, to Albany, where his unlikely salvation, and the inspiration for his book Polish-Jewish Cuisine in 69 Recipes, lie. Framed by a son's account of his famous father, this novel-within-a-novel is a hilariously black account of a writer's fall and his subsequent rise. Phantom Pain has all the characteristic mixture of slapstick and dark despair that has made Arnon Grunberg one of the most interesting, certainly the funniest, and arguably the best Dutch writer working today.

Phantom Pain

Literary

Random House]

Listen to Arnon Grunberg discuss Phantom Pain on "The Connection" with Dick Gordon. A one-time literary novelist of some respectability, now brought low by the double insult of obscurity and crippling debt, Robert G. Mehlman is a man in need of money and recognition, fast. But Mehlmanís publisher is only interested in his long overdue novel, since the people donít want short stories, and his portfolio was liquidated months ago. So, it is to culinary writing that he turns. A practiced decadent, a habitual spendthrift, and a serial womanizer, he has, ostensibly, all the right qualities. But the path to fame is never a smooth one. Phantom Pain is the bitterly funny but unpublished manuscript of Mehlmanís autobiography. In it, he tells the parallel stories of his decaying marriage and his puzzling affair with a woman he meets by chance and who accompanies him on the road. Their journey takes them on a chauffeur-driven, midnight run away from New York City to Atlantic City where they gamble away most of Mehlmanís remaining funds and then North, to Albany, where he finds unlikely salvation and the inspiration for his book, Polish-Jewish Cuisine in 69 Recipes. Framed by Mehlmanís sonís account of his famous father, this novel-within-a-novel is a darkly hilarious tale of a writerís fall and his subsequent rise. Phantom Pain has all the characteristic mixture of slapstick and stark despair that has made Arnon Grunberg one of the most interesting, certainly the funniest, and arguably the best Dutch writer working today.

Other Press

Regretting his family's Nazi ties when he befriends a Jewish youth group, a Swiss teen decides to convert to Judaism and devotes his life to alleviating the sufferings of Jewish people in accordance with his own haphazard logic, an effort that is marked by his intimate relationship with a rabbi's son. By the author of the award-winning Blue Mondays.

Penguin Press HC, The

Longlisted for the 2014 Best Translated Book Award
"Grunberg chronicles the mistakes of a morose Dutch bourgeois and constructs a delectable psychological thriller."—Le Figaro
Jörgen Hofmeester once had it all: a beautiful wife, a nice house with a garden in an upperclass neighborhood in Amsterdam, a respectable job as an editor, two lovely daughters named Ibi and Tirza, and a large amount of money in a Swiss bank account. But during the preparations for Tirza's graduation party, we come to know what he has lost. His wife has left him; Ibi is starting a bed and breakfast in France, an idea which he opposed; the director of the publishing house has fired him; and his savings have vanished in the wake of 9/11.
But Hofmeester still has Tirza, until she introduces him to her new boyfriend, Choukri—who bears a disturbing resemblance to Mohammed Atta—and they announce their plan to spend several months in Africa. A heartrending and masterful story of a man seeking redemption, Tirza marks a high point in Grunberg's still-developing oeuvre.
Arnon Grunberg started his own publishing company at the age of 19 and wrote his first, of many, best-seller at 23. He's twice won the AKO Literature Prize, the Dutch equivalent of the Booker Prize. He's also twice won the prize for the best debut novel—once under a pseudonym.
Sam Garrett has translated a number of works by Arnon Grunberg and Tim Krabbé, among others. He won the Vondel Translation Prize for his translation of Frank Westerman's Ararat.

Tirza

Open Letter

Brilliant absurdist chronicle of a hapless outsider's struggle to do the right thing.&nbsp; Arnon Grunberg's fourteenth novel charts the downfall of Geniek Janowski, a Polish-German firefighter doing his best to be a good father, husband, lover and colleague, only to fail on all fronts. &nbsp;Geniek leads a seemingly unremarkable life with his wife, Wen, and their son, Jurek, in the sleepy Dutch province of Limburg, where everyone simply calls him "The Pole" because they can't pronounce his real name. He is the only foreigner and the only vegetarian at the fire station, yet to him the crew feels like a band of brothers. &nbsp;When he discovers that the wife of his colleague, Beckers, is dying, The Pole is reminded of the role she played in his own life following the death of his eldest son, Borys--namely, by providing consolation in the form of unorthodox sexual acts. Racked by guilt, The Pole confessed the affair to his wife, and the retreated to a monastery for a year, where he ended up living in the henhouse. On his return, he is allowed to rejoin the fire brigade, though everyone in town has their doubts. &nbsp;Grunberg has lost none of his edge in this acutely absurdist account of the powerlessness of human beings to alter their fate. Comfort, salvation, love, and solidarity seem out of reach. In the world of Good Men, illusions about humanity and, above all, brotherhood will never prevail.

Good Men

Humor & Satire

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

Books by Grünberg, Arnon

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

SILENT EXTRAS

The Jewish Messiah: A Novel

Silent Extras: A Novel

Blue Mondays

Blue Mondays

Phantom Pain

Phantom Pain

The Jewish Messiah: A Novel

Tirza

Good Men