Name: Long Island Compromise
Price: 24.72 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner
ISBN: 9780593133491

Type

Physical Book

Author

Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Publisher

Random House

Language

English

Pages

464

Format

Hardcover

ISBN13

9780593133491

Synopsis "Long Island Compromise"

An exhilarating novel about one American family, the dark moment that shatters their suburban paradise, and the wild legacy of trauma and inheritance, from the New York Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble "Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?" In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety. But now, nearly forty years later, it's clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband's emotional health. Their three grown children aren't doing much better: Nathan's chronic fear won't allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything--substance, foodstuff, women--in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she's not a product of her family's pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives' successes and failures. Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family's history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives' tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner

(Author)

View Author's Page

American journalist and author, Taffy Brodesser-Akner was born on October 26, 1975 in New York, growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family. She studied at New York University and married Claude Brodesser, from whom she took her last name.

Brodesser-Akner has worked as a freelance journalist for outlets like GQ, ESPN The Magazine, and Texas Monthly and is a writer at The New York Times. Her articles on celebrities have earned her awards such as the New York Press Club Award and the Mirror Award.

In 2019, she published her first book, Fleishman Is In Trouble, which was released in Spanish under the title Fleishman está en apuros. With it, she was nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020.

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