Dylan Brody

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"My only complaint is that I wanted more, which is a good complaint to have. It made me laugh and cry and then laugh again and then pee and then cry. Lots of fluids lost. But in a good way. A book to make you appreciate the tragically funny and beautiful horror of family." - Jenny Lawson, Author Let's Pretend This Never Happened, Furiously HappyDaniel Grunman remembers his grandmother telling him, "We're Jews. We don't believe in tragedy. We believe in horror, atrocity and injustice. And we recognize all of them as inherently hilarious." The Grunmans consider themselves a supremely functional family, in that they manage a wry self-awareness about the drinking, the pot smoking, the long-seething resentments, the brooding jealousies and the perpetual, judgmental subtext. In twenty hilariously poignant flashbulb vignettes a family comes to light, revealed in lean exchanges of unconscious cruelty and recognizable evasion. With deft, delicate brush strokes, award-winning playwright and humorist Dylan Brody delivers a family so specific that we fear we trespass on their intimacy. We observe behavior in such startling detail because our tour guide effortlessly guides us to those small bits that matter most: the fingertip manipulations of a cocktail napkin, the generational echo of an inflective grunt. We watch them behave, we hear them speak, we learn their tells. Deaths, losses, betrayals and slights resonate along umbilical bonds of familial connection. Secrets will be revealed. Son, father, mother and daughter will lash out at one another and reach out toward one another. Words will be spoken and silences will descend. Jokes will be written. It will never be too soon.

When the societal paralysis of despair leads humanity into a dark age, optimism itself becomes a radical concept. If we are to survive as a species we must regain our ability to imagine a future. We must re-energize ourselves to be better not just as people but as a species. The book we need at this time. An instruction manual for saving the world. Award-winning playwright, author, humorist and filmmaker Dylan Brody turns his attention to the serious matter of the world as it and the world as it can be. At the end of a dark age, Mr. Brody has posited, comes a renaissance. When he began writing he had forgotten that in between a plague arises. This salient self-help book for a self-sabotaging civilization takes on the status quo and, more interestingly, or commitment to it. Treating this global pandemic not as a terrible tragedy but as an inflection point in history, this book reminds us that when we have the opportunity to change the world for the better we must engage our best and brightest selves to accomplish the task.

Kelsey Darson falls from world to world doing what is needed of him in each new place, arriving always in a tme of crisis, on cue to play the hero. He meets a woman who tells him she is his lover. He doesn't know her yet because, sjhe explains, they don't fall from world to world in the same order. Another man whom he encounters in world after world keeps trying to kill him. He does not know why. He will come to learn, in time, that the strange man seeks vengeance for a wrong not yet committed by Kelsey, a wrong that Kelsey has committed in revenge for an act that the man does not yet know he is to carry out. Good, evil, love and vengeance spin out in a complex, non-linear tale that reveals itself by the end to be as elegant in its Moebius simplicity as it is timeless in its themes of love, rage, vengeance and remorse.