Synopses & Reviews
From a Pulitzer Prize finalist comes a hilarious and heartbreaking novel about a musician climbing back from rock bottom.As winter deepens in snowbound Pollard, Illinois, thirty-something Francis Falbo is holed up in his attic apartment, recovering from a series of traumas: his mother's death, his beloved wife's desertion, and his once-ascendant rock band's irreconcilable break-up. Francis hasn't shaved in months, hasn't so much as changed out of his bathrobe-"the uniform of a Life in Default"-for nine days.
Other than the agoraphobia that continues to hold him hostage, all he has left is his childhood home, whose remaining rooms he rents to a cast of eccentric tenants, including a pair of former circus performers whose daughter has gone missing. The tight-knit community has already survived a blizzard, but there is more danger in store for the citizens of Pollard before summer arrives. Francis is himself caught up in these troubles as he becomes increasingly entangled in the affairs of others, with results that are by turns disastrous, hysterical, and ultimately healing.
Fusing consummate wit with the seriousness attending an adulthood gone awry, Rapp has written an uproarious and affecting novel about what we do and where we go when our lives have crumbled around us. Sharp-edged but tenderhearted, Know Your Beholder introduces us to one of the most lovably flawed characters in recent fiction, a man at last able to collect the jagged pieces of his dreams and begin anew, in both life and love. Seldom have our foibles and our efforts to persevere in spite of them been laid bare with such heart and hope.
Review
Praise for Adam Rapp"I love Adam's writing. His ironic bohemianism totally captures the scruff and tang of the great unwashed struggling literati. If Joyce Carol Oates and Charles Bukowski had a kid, he would be Adam Rapp."--Eric Bogosian
"Rapp . . . is a gifted storyteller. He makes demands on his audience, and he rewards its close attention with depth and elegance."--John Lahr, The New Yorker
Review
"Rapp . . . is a gifted storyteller. He makes demands on his audience, and he rewards its close attention with depth and elegance."--John Lahr, The New Yorker
Review
"Adam Rapp's The Year Of Endless Sorrows is an ultra vivid excruciatingly precise buildingsroman--a time capsule of a young man's evolution--a young man not entirely unlike Rapp himself. It is a story of roommates, and family and desire and the quest for meaning and definition while all the time bumping up against the ennui that is perhaps just the sensation of being alive and the daily absurd irony that is city life."--A.M. Homes
Review
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Know Your Beholder is a message from the heart and from the beard, a message from the new weird America to every guy who's ever spent too much time in his bathrobe and every women who's ever considered what that guy would look like if he actually got himself together and shaved. Adam Rapp knows about laughing to keep from crying. He's a melancholy Lenny Bruce of the sentence and his imagination is never less than intense."--
Hari Kunzru, author of the national bestseller The ImpressionistReview
"Adam Rapp's Know Your Beholder is a wry, big-hearted novel that captures the contradictions of the American present--with its good intensions, self-deceptions, grand ambitions, and crippling fears."--David Bezmozgis, Giller Prize finalist and author of The Betrayers
Review
Praise for Adam Rapp"I love Adam's writing. His ironic bohemianism totally captures the scruff and tang of the great unwashed struggling literati. If Joyce Carol Oates and Charles Bukowski had a kid, he would be Adam Rapp."--
Eric Bogosian "Rapp . . . is a gifted storyteller. He makes demands on his audience, and he rewards its close attention with depth and elegance."--John Lahr, The New Yorker
"Adam Rapp's The Year Of Endless Sorrows is an ultra vivid excruciatingly precise buildingsroman--a time capsule of a young man's evolution--a young man not entirely unlike Rapp himself. It is a story of roommates, and family and desire and the quest for meaning and definition while all the time bumping up against the ennui that is perhaps just the sensation of being alive and the daily absurd irony that is city life."--A.M. Homes
Review
"Adam Rapp is an exciting and fearless writer. From the dark places of the soul he mines equal parts pain and light. In Know Your Beholder, he has fully and unapologetically rendered each of his characters-men and women alike, both good actors and bad. This rueful and immensely entertaining novel is his best work yet, a transfixing study of the heart's resilience and the complicated beauty of living that provides the kind of consolation that only our greatest fictions can."--A. M. Homes, New York Times bestselling author of The Mistress's Daughter and May We Be Forgiven
Review
"With
Know Your Beholder, Adam Rapp has ascended into the upper ranks of American fiction. His narrator, Francis Falbo, is an unforgettable crooner of heartwreck and hilarity, and the narrative itself is woven of uncommon tenderness and beauty as the dreams of the past meet the ghosts in their present."
--William Giraldi, author of Hold the Dark and Busy Monsters
Review
"Know Your Beholder is hilarious and deeply sad, often at the same time. Such an eerie beauty permeates this tale--with its haunting descriptions of houses, people, music, tornado storms, agoraphobic terror, lost children, lost minds--that when you finish you feel you've awakened from one of the narrator's strange, heartbreaking dreams, filled with a kind of inexplicable, overwhelming love."--Brad Watson, National Book Award finalist for The Heaven of Mercury
About the Author
An acclaimed playwright, Adam Rapp was a 2006 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for RED LIGHT WINTER and is the recipient of the Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation Award. He is also the author of three YA novels, including UNDER THE WOLF, UNDER THE DOG (a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist); a graphic novel, BALL-PEEN HAMMER; and the adult novel THE YEAR OF ENDLESS SORROWS (FSG, 2006). (I'm not convinced that Adam sleeps.) As a filmmaker, he wrote and directed WINTER PASSING, starring Zooey Deschanel and Will Ferrell. This year, he will begin production on the film version of RED LIGHT WINTER-starring Olivia Wilde-which he adapted from his play. Scott Rudin is producing the movie.