About Harry Towns(1974)

Bruce Jay Friedman

Bruce Jay Friedman has been hailed by critics as a comic genius, a writer whose vision confronts the malaise of contemporary life with a liberating deadpan humor. Grove Press is proud to reissue one of the classic novels by this acclaimed master of modern humor. About Harry Towns is the story of the eponymous screenwriter, a man reveling in the freewheeling atmosphere of the early 1970s, a bicoastal playboy with a broken marriage and a child he rarely sees. But when his perfectly constructed life begins to spin out of control, he must decide to pick up the scattered pieces of his past to begin anew. Praise for About Harry Towns: "A goddamn heartbreaking delight and you are a fool if you miss it. Friedman has created a character unique, haunting, and completely memorable in stories which tickle, depress, gouge below the belt and at second or third reading hold up as nothing less than a joy." -- The Washington Post Book World