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Fraud: Essays Paperback – April 23, 2002
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In his debut collection of essays, Rakoff uses his razor-sharp wit and snarky humor to deliver a barrage of damaging blows that, more often than not, land squarely on his own jaw–hilariously satirizing the writer, not the subject. Joining the wry and the heartfelt, Fraud offers an object lesson in not taking life, or ourselves, too seriously.
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Publication dateApril 23, 2002
- Dimensions5.18 x 0.53 x 7.97 inches
- ISBN-100767906314
- ISBN-13978-0767906319
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Rakoff possesses a sociologist's eye for places where today’s consoling myths reside."
–New York Times
"David Rakoff’s Fraud showcases his rapier wit, slashing in all directions with slice-of-life insights and cutting remarks, sometimes nicking himself with self-deprecation in his dexterous duello with the American experience." –Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Rakoff likes to paint himself as urbane to a fault, an outsider anywhere unpaved. But then, in the woods or on a mountaintop, he reveals himself, despite his searing and hilarious observations, to be a completely unrelenting romantic."
–Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
"David Rakoff's hilarious, bittersweet stories are epic struggles–between smoky bars and the great outdoors, management and labor, Santa Claus and Sigmund Freud, New York versus everywhere else, and, not least, neighbor-to-the-North against South. Rakoff is such an American original it turns out he’s Canadian. Vive the brain drain!"
-Sarah Vowell, author of Take the Cannoli
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
About the Author
David Rakoff is the author of four New York Times bestsellers: the essay collections Fraud, Don’t Get Too Comfortable, and Half Empty, and the novel in verse Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish. A two-time recipient of the Lambda Literary Award and winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, he was a regular contributor to Public Radio International’s This American Life. His writing frequently appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Wired, Salon, GQ, Outside, Gourmet, Vogue, and Slate, among other publications. An accomplished stage and screen actor, playwright, and screenwriter, he adapted the screenplay for and starred in Joachim Back’s film The New Tenants, which won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short. He died in 2012.
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I'm inclined to believe the rumors after my initial encounter when I first call to set up the interview. Erla actually seems to be sobbing on the other end of the phone, all the while talking to me. Then again, in her defense, who actually picks up the phone in the middle of a crying jag? Besides, without having to push, she tells me to come the next day at four o'clock.
I was expecting a wild hair, clanking jewelry, a tatterdemalion velvet cape from whose folds wafted the scent of incense, a house full of candles, dream catchers, cats, and bad art. Instead, I found a friendly if somewhat shy woman in her forties living in a lovely apartment on the top floor of a Reykjavik townhouse with a bay window. Aside from a tiny elf figure made of three painted stones, piled up snowman style outside her front door, Erla's house is decorated in the tasteful, middle class aesthetic one might expect of a piano teacher: landscape paintings, old furniture. The place is warm and cozy on a particularly blustering, windy day.
Erla's friend Bjork is there to translate, although Erla's English is sufficient to slap me down at our rather awkward beginning. I ask when she first realized she could see Hidden People. "This is very stupid to ask when I see. When I was born. Like that one right there." she says, indicating a place on the coffee table beside a Danish modern glass ashtray. She then catches herself. "Oh that's right. You can't see it." she shakes her head slightly, amused at her forgetfulness that others do not possess her gift. It's a somewhat disingenuous moment, like when your friend, newly back from a semester in Paris, says to you, "It's like, uhm, oh I forget the English word, how you say....fromage?"
Apparently the coffee table in front of me is a veritable marketplace of elves milling about, many of them in separate dimensions and oblivious to one another. Bjork takes over, essentially ferrying me through this gnomish cocktail party:
"One sits there, two are walking over here, one sits there. When she plays music they come. It attracts them."
I am suddenly overcome with a completely inappropriate urge: the barely suppressed impulse to slam my hand down on the coffee table really, really hard, right where she's pointing.
Apparently the elves on the table are in too remote a dimension, and are too small to talk to. Conveniently, every home also comes equipped with a House Elf, about the size of the average three-year-old, with whom one can communicate. "Every home?" I ask.
"Yes you have one in your house in New York, too." Bjork assures me.
If only my House Elf, sick and tired of my skepticism, was taking pains to prove his existence once and for all by cleaning my apartment for me at that very moment, I joke. Leadest of balloons.
But Bjork points out that house elves are a privilege, not a right. When the energy of a given house gets too negative, she says, when there is drinking or fighting, the elves will leave. Not terribly surprisingly, mysticism, New Age philosophy, Recovery-speak, and elves are conflated as one. Erla says that elves are a manifestation of nature, they are inherently good; without them we would choke on our own pollution. There is almost no more urban point of view of nature than this pastoral, idyllic one: Humankind bad, Nature good. As in, drinking and fighting bad, elves and flowers good. But it's a false dichotomy. After all, following this logic, Sistine Chapel bad, Ebola virus good?
Product details
- Publisher : Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; First Edition (April 23, 2002)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0767906314
- ISBN-13 : 978-0767906319
- Item Weight : 6.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.18 x 0.53 x 7.97 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,086,781 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,137 in Humor Essays (Books)
- #8,065 in Fiction Satire
- #30,902 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
David Rakoff wrote the bestsellers Fraud, Don’t Get Too Comfortable and Half Empty. A two-time recipient of the Lambda Literary Award and winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, he was a regular contributor to Public Radio International’s This American Life. His writing frequently appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, Wired, Salon, GQ, Outside, Gourmet, Vogue, and Slate, among other publications. An accomplished stage and screen actor, playwright, and screenwriter, he adapted the screenplay for and starred in Joachim Back’s film The New Tenants, which won the 2010 Oscar for Best Live Action Short. He died in August 2012 at the age of 47, shortly after finishing his novel entitled Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die; Cherish, Perish.
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Witty, word-wise, dry, sarcastic... David Rakoff fell into the same category as David Sedaris. I wish he'd had the time to pen more essay collections like this. Gone far too soon, a great talent.
If you're a New Yorker, or well versed in New York culture, this book was literally written for you. For the rest of us, the book contains a lot of non-namedropping moments of sheer brilliance, but you have to be willing to drudge through all those worthless names to see it.
This book is not an easy read by any standard. In terms of bombast and sesquipedalian delivery, Rakoff resides atop the food chain. But it's precisely the creative prose that kept me perusing these marginally compelling stories. It's somewhat unfortunate because it's should be about the tales, not the delivery. You might not need a dictionary to follow Rakoff along this labyrinth of expressive techniques, but you will require some reading double-takes to keep up. I recommend the book for adequate entertainment value and unique phraseology.