“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

Bruce Jay Friedman lives in New York City. A novelist, short story writer, playwright, memoirist, and screenwriter, he is the author of nineteen 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 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.”