The collected short fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman

the long version

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.