Spoiled Brats (including the story that inspired the film An American Pickle starring Seth Rogen)

Having skewered the problems of falling in and out of love in The Last Girlfriend on Earth, Simon Rich's next book is another subject we can all relate to: parents and their kids. From the perils of raising an actual monster in Manhattan - it's pretty hard to find teachers who really understand the talents of a five-year-old with horns and a taste for blood - to Sell Out, the story of Simon's ancestor, returned to life decades after an industrial accident involving pickling brine, these stories are inventive, witty and sometimes a bit too much like real life.

About the Author :
Simon Rich is a graduate of Harvard University, where he was president of The Harvard Lampoon. He has worked for Pixar and Saturday Night Live, and is now working on other film and TV projects as well as his books. He has published Last Girlfriend on Earth [9781846689222], Elliot Allagash [9781846687556], and What In God's Name [9781846688492] with Serpent's Tail. He lives in New York City.

Review :
Simon Rich is outrageously, lavishly gifted Rich is seriously funny Arguably the wittiest American humourist of his generation A James Thurber for our times, in Borges' suit, wearing Flann O'Brien's hat I lolled - how fabulously funny [on Twitter] Simon Rich is a comedic shape shifter, adopting the plights of hamsters and hipsters alike, and Spoiled Brats is vividly hilarious in the way Woody Allen and Donald Barthelme are vividly hilarious. Simon Rich is also much taller in real life than you'd think. Like the reverse of an actor. I can't recommend any Simon Rich book - especially this one - highly enough. From the hyper-competitive rituals of Scrabble players to the laments of a grieving, widowed hamster in an elementary school classroom, each story in Spoiled Brats opens with a brilliant comedic perspective that only gets funnier, more fascinating, more surprising, and more insightful from there. First-rate comedy with a heartbeat, this is one of my favorite books from one of my favorite authors. Simon Rich is the funniest writer alive If you don't yet know about Simon Rich, you just got lucky. If you do, you'll need no encouragement from me to get hold of his latest collection of short stories ... His sheer invention is captivating. Rich has a wonderful way of making a familiar situation strange and then presenting it in deceptively simple language, within a perfectly lucid, concise structure ... Genius ... He is a Thurber, even a Wodehouse, for today. Who could ask for more? You can give his books to people and just watch them laugh. Only after you've snorted through them yourself, though. I discovered myself reading Spoiled Brats with a broad grin, only interrupted with an equally broad laugh ... A mix of gentle surrealism and smiley satire, the stories are bright, witty and occasionally tart. Simon Rich...is in the 'Blazing Saddles' phase of his writing career... as hilarious a portrait as you'll find of the self-involved, easily outraged, post-post-post-ironic world into which we've dumped the next generation. Simon Rich is very much laugh-out-loud funny. He can conjure authentic, from-the-abdomen laughter on almost every page. He stacks surrealism on top of slick satire on top of pure childish silliness in such a brilliant and condensed way, there are sometimes three laugh-out-loud moments within the same paragraph ... He is exactly the right kind of writer for the internet: funny, high-concept, accessible, short, sharable, a James Thurber for the Twitter age ... this collection of stories isn't simply the funniest book of the year. It might just make us think about the spoiled brats we've become. Spoiled Brats reads like Kafka with jokes...It bounces from the ridiculous to the sublime: every page bursts with a new gag or three, but despite its seemingly bright, zingy, occasionally (and deservedly) tart tone, you'll be struck by a tender humanity, and like the best satire, a deep sense of morality. The American novelist and screenwriter Simon Rich writes the kind of humorous books you dearly wish that editors on this side of the Atlantic would be more frequently brave enough to commission: loose, chaotic collections of essays, united by the vaguest of themes (in this case, children who are thoroughly oblivious to just how good life in the 21st century is for them) whose point, above all, is to raise as many laughs as possible ... Spoiled Brats cements Rich's reputation as a James Thurber for the iPhone generation. Best of all are two essays where the 30-year-old Rich pokes fun at his own privileged upbringing: one narrated by the neglected hamster at his prep school, another where his ancestor, a pickle-factory worker, wakes up in the modern world, having been preserved in brine, and proceeds to illustrate just how trifling Rich's (and by extension 21st-century New York's) day-to-day problems are. This is the work of a joyous, untrammelled imagination, with a level of self-awareness beyond its years.