A Mother's Kisses

by Bruce Jay Friedman

Overview

A Mother's Kisses is the story of Joseph, a tall, scattered looking boy of seventeen and his wonderfully indomitable mother, Meg, who is resolved, in the summer after her son's high-school graduation to start arranging his life for him, even going so far as to accompany him to college. A work of roaring comedy and emotional honesty, A Mother's Kisses is a classic of modern fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226264165
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	11/15/2000
Edition description:	1
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Bruce Jay Friedman lives in New York City. A novelist, short story writer, playwright, memoirist, and screenwriter, he is the author of nineteen books, including Stern (1962), A Mother’s Kisses (1964), The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life (1978), and Lucky Bruce: A Literary Memoir (2011). His best-known works of stage and screen include the off-Broadway hit Steambath (1970) and the screenplays for Stir Crazy (1980) and Splash (1984), the latter of which received an Academy Award nomination. As editor of the anthology Black Humor (1965), Friedman helped popularize the distinctive literary style of that name in the United States and is widely regarded as one of its finest practitioners. According to the New York Times, his prose is “a pure pleasure machine.”

What People are Saying About This

Nelson Algren

Friedman is more interesting than most of Malamud, Roth and Bellow and more important.

Editorial Reviews

LJ's reviewer described Friedman's 1964 farce as a "hugely entertaining, insightful novel" that tells the over-the-top story of a boy's relationship with his clingy, embarrassing mother who wants to be with him even at college. This "story-to-end-all-stories about mother and son relationships" should still be great fun. (LJ 7/64) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Abounds with brilliant scenes and sufficient comic characters to populate a dozen novels, so rich and profligate is Friedman's inventiveness. A marvelously gifted novelist.

Newsweek

"Abounds with brilliant scenes and sufficient comic characters to populate a dozen novels, so rich and profligate is Friedman’s inventiveness. A marvelously gifted novelist.” —Newsweek
 
“A Mother’s Kisses is an even funnier book than Stern. . . . Anxiety rides every page and wit is wounding.” —Time
 
“Synopsizing a Friedman plot is like making a tracing of the Mona Lisa. You can reproduce the shape and dimensions perfectly but nothing that reveals the work’s unique quality. . . . Run, push, play dirty. But get a copy of A Mother’s Kisses immediately.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“So unbelievably fine that it makes you want to fall down and chew on your hat and weep . . .You read three or four pages and you find yourself out of breath.” —The Plain Dealer
 
“A horror comedy . . . Friedman, not content to tip over Whistler’s mother’s chair, uses his book like a steel whip on some cozy acceptances of family and social life.” —Stanley Kauffmann, Life
 
“Hilarious, mordant. Meg is the most fabulous mother in modern fiction.” —Saturday Review
 
“Hugely entertaining, insightful . . . [The] story-to-end-all-stories about mother and son relationships.” —Library Journal
 
 

From the Publisher