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More often than any book I can easily recall, Rapp's novel had me
laughing like a fool, embarrassing myself each time I unthinkingly
brought it out in public. Perhaps more surprisingly, that humor felt
entirely natural--born organically from the idiosyncrasies of the
characters themselves rather than foisted on them... Rapp mostly dredges
comedy from Francis' peculiar ways of seeing the world and from the
mundanely weird people who populate it.
— NPR
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Rapp's novel is surprisingly high-spirited, comic without diminishing the emotional depth of his motley crew. That''s largely thanks to Rapp's gift for figurative language.
— Washington Post
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Rapp is such a skillful and evocative writer he can make magic out of the ordinary stuff of daily life... Know Your Beholder has a surprisingly satisfying finish on multiple levels.. It's nothing less than masterful.
— Cleveland Plain Dealer
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Know Your Beholder is funny and sad, smart and moving, dark and hopeful. Adam Rapp writes with a lyrical acumen and wit that are not just impressive, but immensely engaging.
— Jonathan Tropper, New York Times bestselling author of This Is Where I Leave You and One Last Thing Before I Go
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Know Your Beholder is a message from the heart and from the beard, a message from the new weird America to every guy who's ever spent too much time in his bathrobe and every women who's ever considered what that guy would look like if he actually got himself together and shaved. Adam Rapp knows about laughing to keep from crying. He's a melancholy Lenny Bruce of the sentence and his imagination is never less than intense.
— Hari Kunzru%2C author of the national bestseller The Impressionist
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Adam Rapp's Know Your Beholder is a wry, big-hearted novel that captures the contradictions of the American present--with its good intensions, self-deceptions, grand ambitions, and crippling fears.
— David Bezmozgis%2C Giller Prize finalist and author of The Betrayers
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With Know Your Beholder, Adam Rapp has ascended into the upper ranks of American fiction. His narrator, Francis Falbo, is an unforgettable crooner of heartwreck and hilarity, and the narrative itself is woven of uncommon tenderness and beauty as the dreams of the past meet the ghosts in their present.
— William Giraldi%2C author of Hold the Dark and Busy Monsters
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Know Your Beholder is hilarious and deeply sad, often at the same time. Such an eerie beauty permeates this tale--with its haunting descriptions of houses, people, music, tornado storms, agoraphobic terror, lost children, lost minds--that when you finish you feel you've awakened from one of the narrator's strange, heartbreaking dreams, filled with a kind of inexplicable, overwhelming love.
— Brad Watson%2C National Book Award finalist for The Heaven of Mercury
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“Rapp…is a gifted storyteller. He makes demands on his audience, and he rewards its close attention with depth and elegance.”
— New Yorker, praise for the author
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“I love Adam’s writing. His ironic bohemianism totally captures the scruff and tang of the great unwashed struggling literati. If Joyce Carol Oates and Charles Bukowski had a kid, he would be Adam Rapp.”
— Eric Bogosian, award-winning actor and Guggenheim fellow, praise for the author