The Peace Process: A Novella and Stories

A brilliant new collection from one of American literature’s most original and hilarious purveyors of dark comedy 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. Mario Puzo once said that the world of Bruce Jay Friedman’s short fiction is “like a Twilight Zone with Charlie Chaplin.” Ironic, clever, perceptive, and hysterical, The Peace Process is vintage Friedman—fourteen finely crafted tales that take dead aim at the sweet spot between pleasure and pain.

Table of Contents:
Dedication Contents The Big Sister The Storyteller And Where She Stops. … Any Number of Little Old Ladies The Movie Buff A Fan Is a Fan The Friendship Orange Shoes The Choice Nightgown The Strainer The Savior The Impulse The Peace Process: A Novella Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 A Biography of Bruce Jay Friedman

About the Author :
Bruce Jay Friedman (1930–2020) was a novelist, short story writer, playwright, memoirist, and screenwriter. He was the author of many books, including Stern (1962), A Mother’s Kisses (1964), The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life (1978), and Lucky Bruce: A Literary Memoir (2011). His best-known works of stage and screen include the off-Broadway hit Steambath (1970) and the screenplays for the films Stir Crazy (1980) and Splash (1984), the latter of which received an Academy Award nomination. As editor of the anthology Black Humor (1965), Friedman helped popularize the distinctive literary style of that name in the United States and is widely regarded as one of its finest practitioners. According to the New York Times, his prose is “a pure pleasure machine.”

Review :
“The master of the deadpan is on top of his game at 85 with a wise, funny new collection.” —Tablet magazine “Larry David has nothing on Friedman in finding the absurd in ordinary situations. . . . Jewish humor lives in this frequently hilarious and thoughtful collection.” —Kirkus Reviews “[The Peace Process] is vintage Friedman: anarchic and obsessive, funny and sad in equal measure and often in the same story.” —Jewish Book Council “This collection of Friedman’s madcap stories is replete with tricky plots, wacky traps, and characters who ensnare themselves in their own ridiculous choices. . . . Funny, sometimes brutally so. . . . Life affirming.” —Publishers Weekly “A master of his craft, Friedman takes aim at the foibles and frailties of the human male with penetrating wit to reveal the absurdity at the heart of life.” —Foreword Reviews   “Two things I know about books: 1. ) The ones that are longer than 200 pages are generally not any good. 2.) This new one by Bruce Jay Friedman is delightful.” —Michael Cera   “Bruce Jay Friedman’s new collection of stories and novella, The Peace Process, is a great deal of fun.” —The Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, Virginia) Praise for Bruce Jay Friedman “Bruce Jay Friedman has earned a permanent place on the shelf of contemporary American letters.” —Los Angeles Times   “Friedman writes with a wild-eyed wit, a hard-but-gentle touch, and a disturbing grasp of the fundamentals of society.” —San Francisco Chronicle   “Bruce Jay Friedman’s razor-sharp wit and keen observation of the genus American male (1950s to the present) have the power to make men laugh and women weep.” —The Boston Globe   “A great comic actor, if he or she sticks around long enough, might win not an actual Oscar but a consolation prize: a lifetime achievement award. The National Book Awards need something similar for America’s comic writers. Among the first I’d nominate is Bruce Jay Friedman, whose prose, over the past five decades, has mostly been a pure pleasure machine.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times   “Bruce Jay Friedman is an American original whose least engaged considerations can beat the crap out of almost anything else on this block.” —Gordon Lish   “What makes Friedman more interesting than most of Malamud, Roth, and Bellow is the sense he affords of possibilities larger than the doings and undoings of the Jewish urban bourgeois. . . . What makes him more important is that he writes out of the viscera instead of the cerebrum.” —Nelson Algren, The Nation   “The language is so strong, the laughter so wild. . . . If you believe in reading, then when a book comes along by Friedman, you have to read it. It’s as simple as that.” —The Washington Post Book World   “Mr. Friedman has been likened to everyone from J. D. Salinger to Woody Allen. [The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman] should finally establish him for what he is: Bruce Jay Friedman, sui generis and no mean thing. No further comparisons necessary.” —The New York Times Book Review   “Friedman explores themes such as loneliness, aging, fear, parenthood and ethnicity, spinning tales in an expertly modulated voice that lies somewhere equidistant from those of Wilde, Salinger, and Woody Allen.” —Publishers Weekly