Benjamin Taylor's THE BOOK OF GETTING EVEN a LA TIMES Favorite Book for 2008

Favorite Books 2008: The Book of Getting Even
LA Times, December 7, 2008

Alongside Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison and National Book Award-winner Peter Matthiessen, Benjamin Taylor's The Book of Getting Even was selected by the LA Times as a Favorite Book of 2008.

To see the full list, click here.

Ben Taylor Interviews Philip Roth

Featured September 19 as PW Daily's "Picture of the Day," Ben Taylor, author of The Book of Getting Even and Tales Out of School, relaxes with Philip Roth and his publicist before a live broadcast interview of Roth and his new novel, Indignation.

Benjamin Taylor's THE BOOK OF GETTING EVEN and Steerforth Press in the Boston Globe

Sitting back from publisher's role, his eye for talent's still true
By Kathleen Burge / August 3, 2008

Early this summer, a little-known novel ("DeNiro's Game") published by a little-known publishing house (New Hampshire's Steerforth Press) won one of the world's largest literary awards.

Roland Pease, fiction editor for Steerforth Press in New Hampshire, has been instrumental in discovering new writing talent, such as Rawi Hage, author of 'DeNiro's Game.'

HE READS 'EM BEFORE WE DO
It was a coup for a Cambridge man, Roland Pease, who edited the US version of Rawi Hage's book, which was first published in Canada. But it was not his first.

Pease, who ran his independent literary publishing house Zoland Books for 15 years, has a knack for finding talented but undiscovered writers among the hundreds who slog through manuscripts that will never become the pages of a book.

At Zoland, Pease was the first publisher of Ha Jin, who later won a National Book Award for his novel "Waiting." Pease also published the first book of poems by Anne Porter; her work became a finalist for a National Book Award for poetry. Porter, the widow of artist Fairfield Porter, was 83 when Pease put out her first book.

At Steerforth, where Pease, 61, has been fiction editor for the past few years, he chooses only a few books each year for publication. But several have won acclaim. Four of his past five titles, including Castle Freeman's "Go With Me," were named to Barnes & Noble's "Discover Great New Writers" series, said Chip Fleischer, Steerforth's publisher.

"His track record has been unbelievable," he said.

For the full article, click here.

Benjamin Taylor's THE BOOK OF GETTING EVEN reviewed in Seattle Times

"The Book of Getting Even": Young man's tale fascinates, until he graduates

By Mary Brennan
Special to The Seattle Times

"The Book of Getting Even" by Benjamin Taylor
Steerforth, 166 pp., $23.95

Benjamin Taylor's "The Book of Getting Even" is elegant and beautifully evoked, right down to the pediatrician — "the worst, the noisiest Nixon-lover in town" — who appears only in a couple of paragraphs. Set in the 1970s, "Book" follows brilliant, odd Gabriel Geismar, a kid with — literally — two left thumbs and a passion for mathematics, as he leaves his home in the South and heads for college in Philadelphia.

Gabriel is a rabbi's son who grows up in a New Orleans household ruled by his handsome, tyrannical father, who saves all his charm for strangers. At home, his tirades are awful but also funny and cartoonish. "He'd carry on in third person, like a sports hero or gangster: 'Tell a lie to Milton Geismar? You'll wish you hadn't!'"

On Gabriel's last night before leaving for college, he determinedly loses his virginity in a dim cubicle at a gay bathhouse, with eager Clarence Rappley, cold-heartedly described as a "king-sized cracker." After their brief encounter, Gabriel stills his racing mind with a foray into mathematics: "His mind veered to numbers, clean things, the cleanest indeed anywhere in or out of the world." It is a theme — the lifelong duel between mind and body — that resonates through the novel.

At Swarthmore College in Philadelphia, Gabriel meets the eccentric, irresistible brother-sister twins, Marghie and Daniel Hundert, who both fall in love with him. This strange, powerful triangle offers him everything he lacks: Danny and Marghie's parents are literate, worldly, opera-loving Hungarian émigrés — everything Gabriel's family isn't. Their father, to Gabriel's amazement, is a Nobel laureate. Gabriel quickly incorporates himself into the family.

For the full article, click here.

Benjamin Taylor's THE BOOK OF GETTING EVEN in The New Yorker

Books Briefly Noted

THE BOOK OF GETTING EVEN
by Benjamin Taylor (Steerforth; $23.95)

June 9, 2008

Gabriel Geismar, the embattled protagonist of Taylor’s excellent second novel, is the son of a domineering rabbi growing up in nineteen-fifties New Orleans. Homosexual, suffering from a physical deformity (he has a supernumerary thumb), and enthralled by mathematics—“calculability, sweet detachment from the corporeal universe”—Gabriel has “a furious craving for other, nobler origins.” In college, he meets Marghie and Danny Hundert, whose famous physicist father is one of his heroes, and adopts the family as his own. The book explores the tortured and often misguided process by which children attempt to define themselves in relation to their parents (one iteration of the “getting even” of the title), a process from which Danny and Marghie, as Gabriel slowly discovers, are not exempt. Taylor captures their quests for identity in pitch-perfect dialogue and lengthy meditative passages; his elegant plotting feels at once deliberate and improvised.

For the full article, click here.

Benjamin Taylor's The Book of Getting Even reviewed in Boston Globe

Short Takes
By Amanda Heller
Boston Globe, May 18, 2008

The Book of Getting Even
By Benjamin Taylor
Steerforth, 176 pp., $23.95

In August 1970, Gabriel Geismar leaves home for college, not a moment too soon for this disaffected son of a New Orleans rabbi. A puckish twin brother and sister, Marghie and Danny Hundert, worldly seniors, take him under their wing. When he meets their parents, Hungarian émigrés exuding Old World gravitas and New World intellectual cachet (Gregor Hundert is a renowned physicist, onetime colleague of the godlike Oppenheimer at Los Alamos), Gabriel is convinced that this is the family he was intended for. As charmed by the attentive Southern boy as he is by them, the elder Hunderts enfold Gabriel, who becomes more their natural heir as the years go by than the children nature gave them.

Marghie loves Gabriel, but to no avail, since Gabriel loves Danny, while Danny, slipping into psychological meltdown, is devoted to the tragicomic destiny he has created for himself as a martyr to the cause of protesting the war in Vietnam. War and peace, the fracturing of generations, the sexual revolution and its casualties - with irony and pathos this beautifully written novel treats the defining themes of an era, filtered through the restless, eccentric intelligence of a striking cast of characters.

For the other books reviewed in this article, click here.

Benjamin Taylor's THE BOOK OF GETTING EVEN reviewed in Booklist

The Book of Getting Even.
Taylor, Benjamin (author).

May 2008. 176p. Steerforth, hardcover, $23.95 (9781586421434).
REVIEW. First published March 15, 2008 (Booklist).

Even as a teenager, mathematics prodigy Gabriel Geismar finds ways to cope with life; he distracts himself from what is base (such as seeking sex in a men’s bathhouse) by thinking of numbers, and he finds a new family after a hateful standoff with his rabbi father. As a 16-year-old freshman at Swarthmore in 1970, Gabriel is approached by fraternal twins Danny and Marghie Hundert; both fall in love with him, and he reciprocates these feelings physically with Danny. An unexpected bonus is the twins’ father, the renowned physicist Dr. Gregor Hundert, who, along with his wife, envelopes Gabriel in familial love, then guides his budding career. Tragedy ensues, as the Vietnam War causes Danny to follow his principles to extremes, while his father suffers dementia. Losses aside, Gabriel—with a doctorate and associate professorship in astrophysics—finds solace in his concept of the universe, from multiple galaxies to the smallest insect. A beautifully written and keenly intelligent novel, set in a context of cosmology, this is in turn humorous, almost unbearably moving, and comforting, as it points the way to Gabriel’s “perfect freedom.” — Michele Leber

For Booklist reviews, click here.

Benjamin Taylor's THE BOOK OF GETTING EVEN Reviewed in Publisher's Weekly

Fiction Reviews: Week of 1/28/2008
-- Publishers Weekly, 1/28/2008

The Book of Getting Even
Benjamin Taylor. Steerforth, $23.95 (176p) ISBN 978-1-58642-143-4

In this delightful, character-driven coming-of-age novel, Gabriel Geismar grows up in mid–20th-century New Orleans as the only son of a rabbi, maturing into a brilliant, homosexual mathematician who is out of sync with his father's values. At Swarthmore in 1970, Gabriel meets the twins Daniel and Marghie Hundert, the children of Nobel Prize–winning physicist Gregor Hundert, one of the so-called Hungarian Eight who emigrated to America and worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the bomb. Fascinated by the stately, Old World professor and his kindly wife, Lilo, and deeply attached to Marghie, a cinema-obsessed vegetarian, and to Daniel, an angry counterculture figure, Gabriel spends the summer with the family at their Wisconsin retreat, which yields cherished conversation and understanding. As Gabriel departs to study astrophysics at the University of Chicago, the tempo of Daniel's activism builds, and Marghie begins running a movie house. When the once great professor sinks into senile dementia, Lilo makes a necessary but terrible decision for them all. The editor of Saul Bellow's forthcoming letters, Taylor turns in a smart, humane look at what Gabriel calls the era's “intergenerational rancor.” (May)

For other reviews in this issue, click here.