A page-turning memoir that shouldn’t be missed. Auslander’s nonfiction writing style is often compared to David Sedaris, and readers will see why with this title. It could motivate readers to keep trudging onward, even when life seems overwhelming.
- Library Journal
Feh is Auslander’s fretful, blackly comic, hazily hope-tinted Inferno...
Auslander, then, is a reluctant Swiftian, reflexively contemptuous of mankind while open, against the odds, to the possibility of redemption.
- Times Literary Supplement
Outrageously funny…With humor and heart-wrenching detail, Auslander confronts his deep-seated self-loathing and warns of how received stories can do psychological damage… The memoir is as iconoclastically funny as Auslander's fiction, but it's also reassuring.
- Shelf Awareness
Shalom Auslander finds another taboo to break... Auslander’s literary career has been built on equal parts comedy, heterodoxy and self-loathing…His oeuvre is deliberately unsettling and funny... Even if we work to fix our predicament — expunge ourselves of pointless shame, stop courting needless self-harm — it’s unlikely we’ll ever stop entirely hating ourselves. But we can try, as Auslander does for much of ‘Feh,’ to write a story that’s still honest, without feeding into the hate.
- The Washington Post
FEH: A Memoir
One of the London Times
Best Non-Fiction Books of 2024
From the acclaimed author of Foreskin’s Lament, a memoir of the author’s attempt to escape the biblical story he’d been raised on and his struggle to construct a new story for himself and his family. Like all his work, it is also relentlessly funny, subversively heartfelt and fearlessly provocative.
Huzzah for one of our most merciless humorists. Auslander's prose isn't just laudable, it's frightening.
- David Sedaris
Shalom Auslander is a truth teller whose punim you want to pinch… ‘Feh’ is a dark, daffy chronicle of failure and disappointment…though because of his prose style — lots of one-liners and crisp dialogue set off in dashes — it seems far shorter… ‘Feh’ inverts the old tagline ‘never let them see you sweat’; it is all sweat on display, salty and messy, the exposed shirt stains of someone determined to be a bronze medalist even at the insecurity Olympics.
- The New York Times
A book full of droll humor and offbeat insights... A personal journey that speaks to deep parts of the human condition.
- Kirkus Reviews
Auslander writes like a man who uses comedy not as a weapon, but as the only language he knows, and I’m jealous of anyone who hasn’t discovered him yet because, oh, the joys that await you.
- The Sunday Times
The humour is mordant and, at times, savage... Kafka is very much a touchstone, and is indeed Auslander’s deepest influence as a storyteller. The other influence is Beckett. All the rest is Auslander’s own extremely distinctive voice.
- The Spectator
He is juvenile, sarcastic, outrageous, and not only one of the funniest but one of the most profoundly moral writers I know.
- Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman
Poignant, profane and scabrously funny.
- AP News
The most moving, indeed enlightening sections of the book reveal how Auslander slowly begins to break out of the dark… For in the end, the psychological pain caused by feh can be eased only through laughter… At the end of Feh, Auslander... discovers an alternative community, a tribe of feh outcasts who survive by joking away their shame.”
- Jewish Book Council
Novelist Auslander (Mother for Dinner) delivers a poignant…study of the religious guilt he incurred while growing up in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community... The result is an often-brutal, sometimes-rewarding journey out of the darkness.
- Publisher's Weekly
MOTHER FOR DINNER
Sunday Times Best Novel of the Year
The Economist Best Novels of the Year
A work of genius. - The Scotsman
You're unlikely to read anything funnier this year.
- The Big Issue
Auslander uses his signature dark humor to brilliantly satirize tribalism in America… This could be a portrait of any ethnic group that has been consumed by America, though, in this case, it’s unclear who is devouring whom.
- Booklist
Auslander turns his taboo-shattering satiric gaze to cannibalism in this outrageous, salty take on contemporary culture... a riotous dissection of cultural formation and a community’s hunger for meaning.
- Publisher's Weekly
HOPE: A Tragedy
A Sunday Times Best Book of the Decade
('and possibly funniest')
Auslander writes like some contemporary comedic Jeremiah, thundering warnings of disaster and retribution. What makes him so terrifyingly funny is that he isn't joking.
- Howard Jacobson, winner of the
Man Booker Prize
Blends tragedy, comedy and satire in the mold of Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka.
– Wall Street Journal
A virtuoso humorist, and a brave one.
– NY Times Book Review
My pick for the funniest novel of the past decade.
– Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
FORESKIN'S LAMENT: A Memoir
A New York Times Best Book of the Year
A scathing theological rant, a funny, oddly moving coming-of-age memoir, and an irreverent meditation on family, marriage, and cultural identity... I loved it.
- Tom Perrotta
Even at his most rebellious, Portnoy-era Roth couldn't hold a candle to Shalom Auslander... Beneath the extremely funny shtick is one ferociously angry book.
- Entertainment Weekly
Funny, fierce and subversively heartfelt.... with his middle finger pointed at the heavens and a hand held over his heart, Auslander gives us Foreskin's Lament.
- NY Times Book Review
BEWARE OF GOD: Stories
The debut of the freshest voice in Jewish Literature since Phillip Roth arrived on the scene... youthful, energetic, wholly original.
- AM Homes
...a poet laureate may be in the making...
- LA Times Sunday Book Review
An extraordinary collection, which has an energy,
a precision and a deep black humour I haven't seen in a long time... It's like drinking fourteen shots
of vodka.
- The Guardian