About this ebook
New York Times-Bestselling Author: A Jewish man struggles in midcentury suburbia in this dark comic novel “in the tradition of the Charlie Chaplin movie.”—Time
The first novel by Bruce Jay Friedman, the author of such classics as The Lonely Guy and A Mother’s Kisses, Stern tells the story of a young Jewish man who relocates his family from the city to the suburbs—where they are besieged by voracious caterpillars and a bigotry that ranges from the genteel snub to outright confrontation. When his wife is accosted by a boorish neighbor, Stern begins hatching a plot to exact revenge—a painstaking, procrastination-filled process with hilarious consequences.
“An iridescent tour de force…carnal, humorous, and at times slightly surrealistic.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A strange and touching novel…funny and sad at the same time.”—Time
“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.”—The Nation
The first novel by Bruce Jay Friedman, the author of such classics as The Lonely Guy and A Mother’s Kisses, Stern tells the story of a young Jewish man who relocates his family from the city to the suburbs—where they are besieged by voracious caterpillars and a bigotry that ranges from the genteel snub to outright confrontation. When his wife is accosted by a boorish neighbor, Stern begins hatching a plot to exact revenge—a painstaking, procrastination-filled process with hilarious consequences.
“An iridescent tour de force…carnal, humorous, and at times slightly surrealistic.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A strange and touching novel…funny and sad at the same time.”—Time
“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.”—The Nation
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.”
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