The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman

It is no easy task to determine for which Bruce Jay Friedman is most well-known: his novels, short stories, screenplays or plays. As Stanley Kauffmann states, Friedman is a sort of "wry Salinger." His skillful understatement, his gift at implication, his slightly vaudevillian touch is perhaps captured most beautifully in his short stories. Some of his most successful works of short fiction are showcased here: "Let's Hear It for a Beautiful Guy," "Our Lady of the Lockers" and "Black Angels." These works, published between 1953 and 1995, are a veritable powerhouse of American social commentary, studded with the eccentricities and black humor that make Bruce Jay Friedman's style so uniquely his own.
The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman also includes such celebrated, but never collected, classics as "Icing on the Cake," "The Gent" and "Pitched Out," stories like "The Mission," which The National Observer called "the funniest short story of the past twenty years," as well as never-before-published stories - "The Gentle Revolutionaries" and "The Golden Years" among them.

From poignant bildungsroman to sly satire, from wicked comedy to surrealistic farce, this virtuosic collection covers more than four decades' worth of short stories (1952-1995) by novelist (Stern), screenwriter (Stir Crazy), and playwright (Steambath) Friedman. With a caricaturist's gift for evoking complexities in a few quick strokes, Friedman illuminates the minds of both ordinary guys and egregious eccentrics as they grapple with pivotal decisions. A college professor contemplates life as a pimp; another man dreams of helping Sammy Davis Jr. relax. A hospital patient's EKG follows fluctuations in a stock price; a suicide "jumper" refuses to be sweet-talked by a cop. The 48 stories here are grouped into seven sections ("Crazed Youth"; "Sex"; "Death," and so on); several of the tales feature Harry Towns, a screenwriter who wrestles with personal responsibility, the uncertainty of Hollywood life and a recreational cocaine habit. In still other stories, one Martin Gans attends strangers' funerals to make sure enough fuss is made; Mr. Prinzo devises a perverse test of his analyst's discretion; Mr. Dworkin weaves elaborate sexual fantasies as he interviews job applicants. Throughout, 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.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Readers who feel short stories are too high-flown--too literary, arcane, and serious--will find counterbalance in Friedman, whose stories have uncomplicated structures, obvious gists, intelligible metaphors, and unambiguous endings and come wrapped in humor. This compilation of his output in the short story form between 1953 and 1995 has a thematic arrangement, with categories such as "Mother," "Crazed Youth," and "Sex." Some of the more outstanding pieces are "The Subversive," about the narrator's air force buddy whom the narrator believed to be the most all-American guy he ever met until his friend commits a crazed act; "The Gent," concerning a man who succumbs to a seduction by his best friend's daughter; and "The Night Boxing Ended," in which ringside heckling goes way out of bounds. For all popular fiction collections. Brad Hooper

Like his film script Splash, the typical Friedman story begins in the realm of the mundane, takes a quick surreal detour, and travels erratically through an idiosyncratic and highly risible countryside. In "The Big Six," for example, clumps of broccoli from a special can allow the eater to return to the past and "consummate early seductions that went awry." Originally published between 1953 and 1995, these 48 stories provide wry commentary on social behavior spanning almost half a century. In a semblance of order, the stories appear under headings like "Crazed Youth," "Mother," "Sex," and "Death." At times these categories themselves seem to be a part of Friedman's running joke. For example, "The Holiday Celebrators" is a tale about gamblers who must arrange traffic fatalities so that they can win bets on the holiday death toll. Inexplicably, this story comes in the middle of the section labeled "Sex." Recommended for most collections.?Albert Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.