Bad Jews and Other Stories

New in paperback, Bad Jews and Other Stories is a comic vision of life, love and spiritual adventurism among the determinedly secular class of contemporary American Jews. "Shapiro is an original voice on the contemporary Jewish American literary scene - a voice that registers in richly comic, profoundly moving ways."-Forward.

"Brimming with keen insight into the psyches of hilarious, lovable losers...Shapiro is a writer to watch."-Publishers Weekly

"Bad Jews dissects the character of middle-class, middlebrow Jewish-American men muddling through life."-The Plain Dealer

"Gerald Shapiro casts an incisive eye over his contemporaries."-The New York Times

Gerald Shapiro is the editor of American Jewish Fiction: A Century of Stories, and the recipient of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.

An excerpt: Worst-Case Scenarios

Spivak leaned forward in his chair, ready to pounce. "Let me give you a for-instance," he said, and reached for the telephone that sat in front of him on the polished rosewood conference table. A group of elderly women sat across from him, some tapping their fingers on the tabletop, others holding their purses in front of them like shields. The air in the conference room was lush with the scent of perfume. "Now, let's just say that you're home alone," Spivak began. "It's nighttime. Very late - one, two in the morning." He punched some buttons on the phone. "Okay - the telephone rings."

And it did. The ring blasted into the conference room, and the group of elderly women flinched at the sound. Spivak leaned forward and adjusted the volume on the side of the phone. He looked intently across the table at a tall, buxom woman in a navy blue dress. Her silver hair was thick and piled high on her head, and a broad streak of white shot straight up through the middle of it, rising off her forehead like a runway.

"What should you do?" he asked her. "Should you answer it?"

The phone rang again, just as she was about to speak. "I'd be in bed," she said. "My husband would answer it. The phone's on his side."

The phone rang again. "He isn't there," Spivak snapped.

"He's not?" the

As Rabbi Futterman tells Elliot Suskind in "Suskind the Impresario": "if the mistake you make is bad enough, one is all it takes." This is a premise for tragedy, but Shapiro shapes it into high comedy in the nine stories in his second collection (after From Hunger). Suskind is a San Francisco publicist for Museum of the Mind. He's still despondent over his divorce, which happened 10 years ago, and suddenly his mother dies. Suskind's job is also at stake, and he plans to redeem himself in publicizing the museum's latest exhibit by organizing a bicycle-messenger race across the city. In a piquant twist, this involves him in a sex pageant the night before his mother's funeral, which leads to another bizarre but epiphanic eventAall of which Shapiro orchestrates with the control of a master magician. Middle-aged Leo Spivak in "Worst Case Scenario" travels to San Francisco test marketing his goofball security goods; there he runs into Betsy Ingraham, the object of his unrequited high school passion. Miraculously getting her back to his hotel room for a tryst, Spivak goes off the deep end and winds up at her home, returning her panties to her husband. In the title story, Spivak's disreputable dad dies in Arizona. The funeral turns into a shambles, with a pine coffin (kosher, but cheap), an incompetent rabbi and Leo's impromptu eulogy. By the end of the tale, Leo is afflicted with the feeling that he'll always be a schmuck. Artist Ken Rosenthal in "The Twelve Plagues" wins a prize from a Jewish organization for his contemporary interpretations of the biblical plagues. But the prize donor humiliatingly castigates him because he has added two modern-day blights: call-waiting and no parking spaces. In Shapiro's pessimistic world, even when a character gets what he wants, it immediately evokes a feeling of doom. Brimming with keen insight into the psyches of hilarious, even lovable, losers, the wacky brilliance of these remarkable stories marks Shapiro as a writer to watch. Agent, Maria Massie. (Oct.)
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