Bruce Jay Friedman

In these pages you'll meet Jacob, who as a junior counselor at summer camp wakes up his young charges at midnight to tell them that their parents have been executed by the Nazis, and Alexander Kahn, a failed novelist turned journalist who breaks the law within sight of the prison warden, so taken is he with the camaraderie he's discovered in the joint when compared with the thin gruel of companionship he's experienced outside. You'll meet Harry, the once famous screenwriter, and a moral man who "lacks a moral follow through." And in the title novella, the tragic and great Beau DeVyne.

"When struggling homicide precinct clerk Paul Gurney decides to quit his job after a divorce, he isn't sure what the future holds. But after a shady Broadway impresario approaches him about creating a musical based on the homicide newsletter he published, Gurney soon plunges headlong into the world of would-be actors, sharky agents, lecherous songwriters, and other assorted (and sordid) hacks, hams, and con artists....And then it gets worse."--BOOK JACKET.

A Father's Kisses is a tale featuring one William Binny, a fiftyish retired poultry distributor suffering from the loss of a loving wife and up to his ears in his love for his soon-to-be pubescent daughter, Lettie, a delight, a conundrum, for whom he would die or - if the process were reversed - kill.

In this fresh, wry, and often hilariously funny book, Bruce Jay Friedman addresses virtually every one of the Slightly Older Guy's concerns, shooting holes in his fears and offering outrageous suggestions on how to get through this precarious and unfamiliar phase. The Slightly Older Guy is reassured about his memory ("Have you ever really been able to tell the difference between Chita Rivera and Rita Moreno?"); is advised to develop a "slider" when he can no longer rely on his "high hard one"; has served up to him a special diet geared to his ever-changing nutritional needs (the remarkable half-portion approach to dining). He's enlightened on finance ("Never ask a waiter for stock tips"), career changes (from accountant to lounge act), the tremendous importance of friends, the perils and delights of an "eleventh-hour romance," and the tricky business of taking on a young wife. Wills, epitaphs, car selection, and more - it's all included in this fascinating romp, in which Friedman guides the Slightly Older Guy through the delicate shoals of his new lifestyle. Readers of both sexes and of all ages (yes, there are SOGs in their twenties and some in their sixties) will find the evolution of a shaky, befuddled, suddenly "mature" man into a confident, well-anchored Slightly Older Guy funny, poignant, and enormously touching.

This play concerns the misadventures of an American in the South of France. His wife has just gone off with a black skin-diver, and he is trying to be very fair and non-racial about it, although with indifferent results. His next-door neighbor is a bikini-clad American girl, who drops in chiefly to tell him pointless stories. She is also willing to comfort him, but his main interest is dramatizing himself as interchangeably forgiving and vengeful. The other visitors include a thief and a policeman who, being French, patriotically takes the French thief's side against him. The fatuous psychiatrist shows up, as does an impossible American who thinks he understands other races. The wife and her two black friends arrive, one the skin-diver who puts on a bogusly genial kind of minstrel act, the other a romantic type who makes love poetically. The play is about the relationships and interactions of these characters.

"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."--BOOK JACKET.

Silenced by the horrors of Nazi Germany, a Jewish satirist is inspired to write again by his biggest fan: Joseph Goebbels. A retired English teacher dies on the operating table and wakes up to an afterlife in which literature does not exist; he can claim any masterpiece as his own, from The Catcher in the Rye to Crime and Punishment--if only he can remember what actually happens in those stories. On his first trip to the Holy Land, a down-on-his-luck filmmaker reluctantly agrees to help a young Israeli Arab escape to New York, only to watch in dismay as the upstart lands a buxom, Yiddish-speaking girlfriend and a monster movie deal..."The Peace Process" is vintage Friedman -- fourteen finely crafted tales that take dead aim at the sweet spot between pleasure and pain.

Writer, screenwriter, playwright, editor, actor, teacher: Bruce Jay Friedman has done it all, charming the glitziest industries of American culture for more than half a century. Lucky Bruce is his long-awaited memoir, and it's everything we'd expect: here is Friedman at his best, waltzing from Madison Avenue to Hollywood and back again, and reilluminating with brilliant clarity the dazzle of post-war American life. Self-effacing, wry, sharp, and funny, Friedman details with lovable candor his friendships and rivalries with the greatest writers, actors, publishers, directors and personalities of the last fifty years. He stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Steve Martin and Woody Allen. He's a dynamo of comedy and a recognized master of American letters. And in this memoir, whether he's fist-fighting with Norman Mailer, explaining to Richard Pryor why there are so few Jewish junkies, or writing screenplays in a closet with Natalie Wood as his secretary, Friedman is the king of understated charm.--From publisher description.

Rip Van Winkle / Washington Irving [Young Goodman Brown]( / Nathaniel Hawthorne [Fall of the House of Usher]( / Edgar Allan Poe The lightning-rod man / Herman Melville The diamond lens / Fitzjames O'Brien The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County / Mark Twain The outcasts of Poker Flat / Bret Harte [Damned Thing]( / Ambrose Bierce The turn of the screw / Henry James The Hiltons' holiday / Sarah Orne Jewett The gift of the Magi / O. Henry The moving finger / Edith Wharton The open boat / Stephen Crane Lou, the prophet / Willa Cather The men of Forty Mile / Jack London Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald [A rose for Emily]( William Faulkner Big two-hearted river / Ernest Hemingway Flight / John Steinbeck