Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander (born 1970) is an American novelist, memoirist, and essayist. He grew up in a strict Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Monsey, New York, where he describes himself as having been "raised like a veal". His writing style is notable for its existentialist themes, biting satire and black humor. His nonfiction often draws comparisons to David Sedaris, while his fiction has drawn comparisons to Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Groucho Marx. His books have been translated into over a dozen languages and are published around the world.

Early life and education

Auslander was born and raised in Monsey, and attended Yeshiva of Spring Valley for elementary school, and then high school at the Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy in Manhattan.

Career

Auslander has published a collection of short stories, Beware of God (2006), a best-selling memoir, Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir (2007), and two critically acclaimed novels. His work, often confronting his religious Jewish background, has been featured on Public Radio International's This American Life and in The New Yorker. He has also written for Esquire Magazine, Gentlemen's Quarterly, The New York Times, and many other publications. He was a finalist for the 2003–04 Koret Jewish Book Award for "Young Writer on Jewish Themes".

In "Foreskin's Lament", Auslander wrote of his mother, "who was the belle of the misery ball", and his father, who was angry and uncommunicative. As a child, he went through the house and destroyed all the pornography he found. As an adult, he rebelled against his religious upbringing.

In 2012, Auslander published his first novel, Hope: A Tragedy, a finalist for the 2013 Thurber Prize, which envisions a homeowner in upstate New York finding an elderly and foul-mouthed Anne Frank hiding in his attic. It won the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize (2013). In 2020, the novel was named by both American and British critics as "the funniest novel of the past decade". Leading British literary critic Andrew Holgate, retiring in 2022, named Hope: A Tragedy one of the 23 Best Books of his 23-year career.

Auslander wrote and created the Showtime television program Happyish, which shot a pilot with Philip Seymour Hoffman, whom he met while adapting his novel Hope: A Tragedy for the screen. After Hoffman's death on February 2, 2014, it appeared that the TV project would be discontinued, but it was recast with Steve Coogan in the lead role and premiered on 5 April 2015.

His novel Mother for Dinner tells the story of a family of assimilated Cannibal-Americans tasked with consuming (as is their tradition) their deceased mother's body. A dark comedy about the cost of identity politics and the weight of the past upon the present, it was called a "riotous dissection of cultural formation" by Publishers Weekly and a "brilliant satire on tribalism" by Booklist. In the Wall Street Journal, Sam Sacks wrote: "Everyone has different ideas about what's funny, and for me, the gold standard is dark Jewish humor—the more masochistic and taboo, the better. This sort of joking is scarce today—cultural homogenization and the current moral panic over giving offense have turned it into something like samizdat—but at least we have Shalom Auslander." In the UK, the book was met with unanimous praise, with critic Stuart Kelly calling it a "work of genius." Its omission from the Booker Longlist prompted an op-ed in The Times to ask, "But why no Mother for Dinner by Shalom Auslander, which is funny, in bad taste and a satire of identity politics?"

In 2021, Auslander began a YouTube series titled "UNGODLY: Good Lessons from a Bad God", which reexamines the Bible with God (cruel, short-tempered, and vindictive) as the antagonist of the story, "as someone we should never be like." Done in a chapter-and-verse format, the goal is to eventually complete the Old and New Testaments.

In 2022, Auslander's essay on the life and work of Franz Kafka, "The Day Kafka Killed His iPhone," won the Peter Gilbert Prize by the Woolf Institute at Cambridge University, England. The essay discusses the artist's paradoxical need to be both involved in the world and removed from it in order to complete their work.

Personal life

Auslander is married to the artist and writer Orli Auslander, and resides in Los Angeles, California. They have two children.

Partial list of works

Books

• Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir
• Beware of God: Stories (2005)
• Hope: A Tragedy (2012)
• Mother for Dinner: A Novel (2020)
• Feh: A Memoir (2024)

Short stories / magazine articles

• The Los Angeles Times: This Year, God Should Atone to Us [1]
• The New Yorker: The Playoffs [2]
• The New Yorker: Save Us [3]
• The Guardian: Shalom Auslander's Top 10 Comic Tragedies [4]
• The Guardian: Interview [5]
• The 10 Types of Jew, Which One Are You? [6]
• Washington Post Op Ed: Don't Compare Trump to Hitler (It Belittles Hitler) [7]
• NPR, All Things Considered: The Groucho Letters [8]
• Tablet: Consider The Ostrich [9]
• The Los Angeles Times, Op-Ed: A Proud Fifth Columnist [10]
• TLS: Book Review, "Hasidism, A New History" [11]

Radio interviews/readings

• Fresh Air with Terry Gross, interview from 2007-10-08
• Death Camp Blues: from The Moth "Death Camp Blues"
• Shalom Auslander reads his true story, "The Blessing Bee." on This American Life
• Pretty Shitty Monkeys: An Interview with Shalom Auslander [12]
• Jessa Crispin: An Interview with Shalom Auslander [13]

Television shows

• Happyish (2015)

YouTube

• UnGodly (2021)

External links

• Official website
• Interview on Bookslut (October 2007)
• Ungodly YouTube channel