Adam Mansbach
Adam Mansbach
Adam Mansbach’s new novel, Rage is Back (Viking) has been named an Amazon.com Best Book of the Month for January 2013, and a Barnes & Noble Best Book. The Washington Post says “Mansbach has clearly had a play date with Michael Chabon and Junot Diaz, and his fresh, witty novel is one that hip readers will relish,” and adds that “There’s no resisting [narrator] Dondi, ‘a nerd with swagger,’ as he riffs on everything from Madison Avenue to yuppies' racial anxiety.” The San Francisco Chronicle writes that “Rage Is Back does for graffiti what Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay did for comic books. Dondi mashes up disparate linguistic registers with an effortlessness that brings to mind Junot Díaz’s perennial narrator, Junior. The ideal interpreter for this journey, he is equally comfortable holding forth on the history of graffiti style, explaining the “tripartite drug economy” of Fort Greene or (like many a smart high school student), bringing it all back to Homer, Plato and The Great Gatsby. …but 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 that fits surprisingly well within the confines of the novel.”
Mansbach’s previous book, Go the Fck to Sleep is a #1 New York Times bestseller, and one of the most talked-about books of the decade. A viral sensation that shot to #1 on Amazon.com months before the book was even available, it has been published in forty languages, and is forthcoming as a feature film from Fox 2000. Mansbach also wrote"Wake the Fck Up,“ a pro-Obama video starring Samuel L. Jackson that has been described by many as the greatest political ad of all time. Released online on September 27, 2012, it received 5 million views in its first week.
Mansbach’s 2008 novel, The End of the Jews, won the California Book Award and was long-listed for the IMPAC-Dublin Prize. His previous novel, Angry Black White Boy, or The Miscegenation of Macon Detornay, was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005; it is taught at more than eighty universities and has been adapted into a prize-winning stage play. He is also the author of the novel Shackling Water, the poetry collection genius b-boy cynics getting weeded in the garden of delights, the graphic novel Nature of the Beast (co-written with Douglas Mcgowan).