Harry March's troubles begin when Lapham, a self-aggrandizing, ostentatious multimillionaire, commences construction of a 36,000-square-foot house (complete with a cutting-edge air-conditioner that cools his entire eight-acre property) directly across the creek from Harry's island home in Quogue, in the Hamptons. Harry, an island himself, is something of a wreck and half-nuts, but principled. His wife has left him for an event planner in Beverly Hills; he cuts the polo player out of his shirts; and he speaks mainly with his dog, Hector, a born-again Evangelical and a capitalist who admires Lapham's monstrosity as a symbol of American progress. But to Harry, Lapham represents everything that is ruining modern civilization. So he sends daily notes to his nemesis by way of a remote-control toy motorboat, which read: "Mr. Lapham, tear down that house!" When his efforts fail, he turns to politics by other means.]
Lapham Rising follows Harry's progress during a single day -- through the strange habits of Hamptons social life; the power of local real estate (embodied in Kathy Polite, who advertises her agency by swimming naked from her boat every morning); the odd workings of his own mind, such as it is; and into his elaborate plot to devise a weapon of individual destruction with which to bring down Lapham and all the Laphams of the world. Of course, it backfires.

Lapham Rising: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Rosenblatt, Roger

Humor & Satire

Ecco

Harry March is something of a wreck and more than half nuts. Up until now, he has lived peacefully on an island in the Hamptons with his talking dog, Hector, a born-again Evangelical and unapologetic capitalist. But Marchs life starts to completely unravel when Lapham—an ostentatious multimillionaire who made his fortune on asparagus tongs—begins construction of a gargantuan mansion just across the way. To Harry, Laphams monstrosity-to-be represents the fetid and corrupt excess that has ruined modern civilization. Which means, quite simply, that this is war.

Roger Rosenblatt’s dazzling comic gifts are on enviable display....Beet will settle the issue: is Roger Rosenblatt our most audacious comic visionary,or our most audacious visionary comic?”—Joyce Carol Oates
Beet College is doomed...and nobody really cares. The Board of Trustees, led by developer Joel Bollovate, has squandered the endowment. Debutante-cum-self-styled-poet Matha Polite, an indiscriminate radical with a four-student following, wants to bring the institution down. Sweet-tempered terrorist hopeful Akim Ben Ladin (né Arthur Horowitz) sits in his off-campus cave and dreams about blowing Beet up. Faculty members are too busy concocting useless, trendy courses to do anything about it. Not to mention that American higher education is going down the tubes, one less lesser school isn’t going to matter. So why is Professor Peace Porterfield trying to save Beet? Beats us.
“Rosenblatt [applies] his sharp wit to elite education.”—Wall Street Journal

Beet

Beet College is doomed. . . and nobody really cares. The Board of Trustees, led by developer Joel Bollovate, has squandered the endowment. Debutante-cum-self-styled-poet Matha Polite, an indiscriminate radical with a four-student following, wants to bring the institution down. Sweet-tempered terrorist hopeful Akim Ben Ladin (né Arthur Horowitz) sits in his off-campus cave and dreams about blowing Beet up. Faculty members are too busy concocting useless, trendy courses to do anything about it. Not to mention that American higher education is going down the tubes, one less lesser school isn't going to matter. So why is Professor Peace Porterfield trying to save Beet? Beats us.

Beet: A Novel (P.S.)

Harper-perennial

“A painfully beautiful memoir….Written with such restraint as to be both heartbreaking and instructive.” 
—E. L. Doctorow
A revered, many times honored (George Polk, Peabody, and Emmy Award winner, to name but a few) journalist, novelist, and playwright, Roger Rosenblatt shares the unforgettable story of the tragedy that changed his life and his family. A book that grew out of his popular December 2008 essay in The New Yorker, Making Toast is a moving account of unexpected loss and recovery in the powerful tradition of About Alice and The Year of Magical Thinking. Writer Ann Beattie offers high praise to the acclaimed author of Lapham Rising and Beet for a memoir that is, “written so forthrightly, but so delicately, that you feel you’re a part of this family.”

Making Toast

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Making Toast: A Family Story

Multiple award-winner Roger Rosenblatt has received glowing critical acclaim for his exceptional literary works—from the hilarious novels Lapham Rising and Beet to his poignant, heartbreaking, ultimately inspiring memoir Making Toast. With Unless It Moves the Human Heart, the revered novelist, essayist, playwright, and respected writing teacher offers a guidebook for aspiring authors, a memoir, and an impassioned argument for the necessity of writing in our world. In the tradition of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Rosenblatt’s Unless It Moves the Human Heart provides practical insights and advice on the craft, exquisitely presented by one of contemporary literature’s living treasures.

Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing

Arts & Photography

“There is indeed life after death, and Rosenblatt proves that without a doubt.” —USA Today
From Roger Rosenblatt, the bestselling author of Making Toast and Unless It Moves the Human Heart, comes a poignant meditation on the nature of grief, the passages through it, the solace of solitude, and the healing power of love. Rosenblatt’s Kayak Morning is a classic in the making, akin to A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis—a coming to terms with tragic, senseless loss that offers readers an unsentimental and deeply moving account of the possibility of true redemption. A profoundly beautiful and intimate gift from an exceptional writer, Kayak Morning is Roger Rosenblatt writing bravely and unforgettably from the heart.

Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats

Self-Help

Death & Grief

The Washington Post hailed Roger Rosenblatt's Making Toast as "a textbook on what constitutes perfect writing," and People lauded Kayak Morning as "intimate, expansive and profoundly moving." Classic tales of love and grief, the New York Times bestselling memoirs are also original literary works that carve out new territory at the intersection of poetry and prose. Now comes The Boy Detective, a story of the author's childhood in New York City, suffused with the same mixture of acute observation and bracing humor, lyricism and wit.
Resisting the deadening silence of his family home in the elegant yet stiflingly safe neighborhood of Gramercy Park, nine-year-old Roger imagines himself a private eye in pursuit of criminals. With the dreamlike mystery of the city before him, he sets off alone, out into the streets of Manhattan, thrilling to a life of unsolved cases.
Six decades later, Rosenblatt finds himself again patrolling the territory of his youth: The writing class he teaches has just wrapped up, releasing him into the winter night and the very neighborhood in which he grew up. A grown man now, he investigates his own life and the life of the city as he walks, exploring the New York of the 1950s; the lives of the writers who walked these streets before him, such as Poe and Melville; the great detectives of fiction and the essence of detective work; and the monuments of his childhood, such as the New York Public Library, once the site of an immense reservoir that nourished the city with water before it nourished it with books, and the Empire State Building, which, in Rosenblatt's imagination, vibrates sympathetically with the oversize loneliness of King Kong: "If you must fall, fall from me."
As he walks, he is returned to himself, the boy detective on the case. Just as Rosenblatt invented a world for himself as a child, he creates one on this night—the writer a detective still, the chief suspect in the case of his own life, a case that discloses the shared mysteries of all our lives. A masterly evocation of the city and a meditation on memory as an act of faith, The Boy Detective treads the line between a novel and a poem, displaying a world at once dangerous and beautiful.

The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood

Resisting the deadening silence of his family home in the elegant yet stiflingly safe neighborhood of Gramercy Park, nine-year-old Roger Rosenblatt imagines himself a private eye in pursuit of criminals. With the dreamlike mystery of the city before him, he sets off alone into the streets of Manhattan, thrilling to a life of unsolved cases.
Six decades later, Rosenblatt finds himself again patrolling the territory of his youth. He investigates the lives of the writers who walked these streets before him, such as Poe and Melville; the great detectives of fiction and the essence of detective work; and the monuments of his childhood, such as the New York Public Library and the Empire State Building.
A masterly evocation of the city and a meditation on memory as an act of faith, suffused with a mixture of acute observation and bracing humor, lyricism, and wit, The Boy Detective treads the line between a novel and a poem, displaying a world at once dangerous and beautiful.

BOY DET

EccoPress

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

Books by Rosenblatt, Roger

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

Lapham Rising: A Novel

Lapham Rising: A Novel

Beet

Beet: A Novel (P.S.)

Making Toast

Making Toast: A Family Story

Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing

Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats

The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood

BOY DET