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ONE OF THE TIMES’ BEST LITERARY NON-FICTION BOOKS OF 2024

‘Hurrah for one of our most merciless humorists. Auslander’s prose isn’t just laudable, it’s frightening’ David Sedaris

From the acclaimed author of Foreskin’s Lament, a memoir of the author’s attempt to escape the biblical story he’d been raised on and his struggle to construct a new story for himself and his family.

Shalom Auslander was raised like a veal in a dysfunctional family in the Orthodox community of Monsey, New York: the son of an alcoholic father; a guilt-wielding mother; and a violent, overbearing God. Now, as he reaches middle age, Auslander begins to suspect that what plagues him is something worse, something he can’t so easily escape: a story. The story. One indelibly implanted in him at an early age, a story that told him he is fallen, broken, shameful, disgusting, a story we have all been told for thousands of years, and continue to be told by the religious and secular alike, a story called “Feh.”

Yiddish for “Yuck.”

FEH follows Auslander’s midlife journey to rewrite that story, a journey that involves Phillip Seymour Hoffman, a Pulitzer-winning poet, Job, Arthur Schopenhauer, GHB, Wolf Blitzer, Yuval Noah Harari, and a pastor named Steve in a now-defunct church in Los Angeles.

Can he move from feh to merely meh? Can he even dream of moving beyond that? Auslander’s recounting of his attempt to exorcize the story he was raised with-before he implants it onto his children and/or possibly poisons the relationship of the one woman who loves him-isn’t sacred. It is more-than-occasionally profane. And like all his work, it is also relentlessly funny, subversively heartfelt, and fearlessly provocative.

Publisher Review

‘Hurrah for one of our most merciless humorists. Auslander’s prose isn’t just laudable, it’s frightening’ * David Sedaris * ‘I howled with laughter’ * Sunday Times * ‘Shalom Auslander is a truth teller whose punim you want to pinch…Feh is a dark, daffy chronicle of failure and disappointment…Feh inverts the old tagline ‘never let them see you sweat’; it is all sweat on display, salty and messy, the exposed shirt stains of someone determined to be a bronze medalist even at the insecurity Olympics’ * New York Times * ‘Auslander is one of America’s sharpest comic provocateurs’ * Jewish Chronicle * ‘Auslander blends both a sense of despair and a self-deprecating whimsy in his latest …Part personal history, part self-examination, and part social commentary, his book addresses everything from Kafka to capitalism…A page-turning memoir that shouldn’t be missed… It could motivate readers to keep trudging onward, even when life seems overwhelming’ * Library Journal * ‘Outrageously funny…With humor and heart-wrenching detail, Auslander confronts his deep-seated self-loathing and warns of how received stories can do psychological damage…The memoir is as iconoclastically funny as Auslander’s fiction, but it’s also reassuring’ * Shelf Awareness * ‘A poignant…study of the religious guilt….The result is an often-brutal, sometimes-rewarding journey out of the darkness’ * LitHub *