Adam Mansbach
“I'm a polymath when it comes to writing. There's a lot I enjoy, and I also enjoy the process of learning the rules of a new form, the tension of trying to do everything you can within a specific set of constraints... But I also think you learn about one genre by working in another.”
“Adam Mansbach’s latest did not put me the F**k to Sleep. Quite the opposite, this is the update to the
Golem legend I’ve been dreaming of since I survived Jewish Day School. Run don’t schlepp to the nearest bookstore and get ready to split your kishkes laughing.”
“Fast-paced and full of memorable characters, Adam Mansbach’s The Golem of Brooklyn is both a
searing and hilarious tale of how far we’re willing to go to protect ourselves and our community, and who
we become when we do so. Mansbach’s ability to infuse wisdom, political insight, history and humor is
commendable, and makes this book a page-turner.”
“This is a devastating, brilliant book. Somehow, in its completely authentic pain, it manages also to be full of life, at times even sweetly funny, maybe because we see struggles we recognize: of distance, of authenticity, of parenting, of performance, of love. This book feels deeply necessary, not just for the writer, but for all of us.”
“An irreverent take on Jewish life, culture, and lore. No topic is off limits.... This is another zany book for Jews and those who love them.”
“A rollicking, frenetic and hilarious jaunt through the (literal and figurative) New York City underworld . . . [that] does for graffiti what Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay did for comic books . . . [Rage is Back] mashes up disparate linguistic registers with an effortlessness that brings to mind Junot Diaz’s perennial narrator, Junior . . . Beneath all the weed and spray paint, it’s a warmhearted story about a son searching for his father and for himself, a trip through the past and present of an American art form.”
“A new Bible for weary parents.”
“Painfully honest, compassionately cognizant of human frailty and complexity, alive to the magic of creativity yet aware of its consequences–very exciting fiction indeed”
“An insanely smart novel that pulls no punches . . . wild, comic, and dark.”
Adam Mansbach is a novelist, screenwriter, cultural critic and humorist. His most recent book is the memoir in verse, I Had a Brother Once (One World, 2021), which Marlon James praised as “a soaring, unblinking gaze into the meaning of life itself.” Mansbach's other novels include Rage is Back (Viking Press, 2013), The End of the Jews (Spiegel & Grau, 2008), winner of the California Book Award, and Angry Black White Boy (Random House, 2005), which is taught at over a hundred schools and was adapted into a prize-winning stage play in 2008. His next book is the novel, The Golem of Brooklyn, forthcoming from One World Books in August, 2023. He is also the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Go the Fuck to Sleep (Akashic Books, 2011), which has been translated into forty languages, named Time Magazine's 2011 "Thing of the Year," and sold over three million copies worldwide. The two sequels, You Have to Fucking Eat and Fuck, Now There Are Two of You (both from Akashic Books) are also New York Times bestsellers. The audiobooks, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, Bryan Cranston, and Larry David, are pretty fucking good as well. His middle grades series, Jake the Fake Keeps it Real (co-written with Craig Robinson, published by Crown Books), was a Scholastic Book Club Main Selection and winner of the 2021 Grand Canyon Readers Award. With Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel, Mansbach wrote the bestselling A Field Guide to the Jewish People (Flatiron Books, 2019), and For This We Left Egypt (Flatiron Books, 2017) a finalist for the Thurber Award for American Humor.
Mansbach's debut screenplay, for the 2016 Netflix Original Barry, was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and an NAACP Image Award. He recently adapted DL Hughley’s book How Not to Get Shot (and Other Advice From White People) for Comedy Central, and his next feature film is Super High, a stoner superhero comedy starring Andy Samberg, Craig Robinson and Common that is forthcoming from New Line. Mansbach is the recipient of a Reed Award, a Webby Award, and a Gold Pollie from the American Association of Political Consultants for his 2012 campaign video "Wake The Fuck Up," starring Samuel L. Jackson. As the Creative Director of Colehouse Walker Political Outcomes, he has written, produced and directed videos starring Samuel L. Jackson ("Stay the Fuck at Home") Daveed Diggs ("What to my People is the 4th of July"), Craig Robinson, Lewis Black, W. Kamau Bell, Sarah Silverman and Sarah Cooper ("912, What's Your Emergency?"), and Killer Mike ("Georgia History," for the New Georgia Project). Mansbach won a second Reed Award and a second Gold Pollie in 2021, for the Biden-Harris campaign ad "Same Old," which he wrote and directed.
Asked in an interview about how he chose poetry as the form for I Had a Brother Once, he responded, “I was pretty much making the process up as I went along. I was working almost in a trance state. I don't mean to sound mystical about it, but there was an outpouring of so much emotion, a codification of so many thoughts and feelings that had been building up for eight years. And I was also having revelations, making connections I had never made in the process of getting it down on paper. I just kind of went with my intuition, let the ideas branch and connect as they wanted to. It was very, very solipsistic and definitely without any models. I was crying a lot, and pretty much writing to the exclusion of all else.”
Mansbach was the 2009-11 New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University, a 2012 Sundance Screenwriting Lab Fellow, and a 2013 Berkeley Repertory Theatre Writing Fellow. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Esquire, The Believer, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, The Moth Storytelling Hour, and This American Life.
He lives and writes in the Bay Area.
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