Spoiled Brats (including the story that inspired the major motion picture An American Pickle starring Seth Rogen)

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Read by Simon Rich

By Simon Rich

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This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around October 14, 2014. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

Twenty years ago, Barney the Dinosaur told the nation’s children they were special. We’re still paying the price.

From “one of the funniest writers in America” comes a collection of stories culled from the front lines of the millennial culture wars (Jimmy So, Daily Beast). Rife with failing rock bands, student loans, and participation trophies, Spoiled Brats is about a generation of narcissists — and the well-meaning boomers who made them that way.

A hardworking immigrant is preserved for a century in pickle brine. A helicopter mom strives to educate her demon son. And a family of hamsters struggles to survive in a private-school homeroom. Surreal, shrewd, and surprisingly warm, these stories are as resonant as they are hilarious.

Genre:

  • "I can't recommend any Simon Rich book - especially this one - highly enough. From the hyper-competitive rituals of Scrabble players to the laments of a grieving, widowed hamster in an elementary school classroom, each story in Spoiled Brats opens with a brilliant comedic perspective that only gets funnier, more fascinating, more surprising, and more insightful from there. First-rate comedy with a heartbeat, this is one of my favorite books from one of my favorite authors."
    B.J. Novak, author of One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories and star of "The Office"
  • "Simon Rich is a comedic shape shifter, adopting the plights of hamsters and hipsters alike, and Spoiled Brats is vividly hilarious in the way Woody Allen and Donald Barthelme are vividly hilarious. Simon Rich is also much taller in real life than you'd think. Like the reverse of an actor."
    Sloane Crosley, author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number
  • Praise for Simon Rich and his work:

    "It's always fairly obvious when a 'Shouts and Murmurs' piece in The New Yorker is the product of Simon Rich. Telltale signs include the elegant skewering of adult human behavior, as glimpsed through the eyes of children, animals, spectral beings, or inanimate objects-and the fact that the reader is hunched over laughing."
    Joe Berkowitz, Fast Company
  • "His imagined situations read like sketches he might have conceived at his old job as a writer for Saturday Night Live...Rich knows how to balance the smart with the funny."
    Patrick Cassels, New York Times Book Review
  • "This Valentine's Day get a box of chocolates and Simon Rich's hysterical new collection....it might just be the best one-night stand you'll ever have."
    The Washington Post
  • "[The Last Girlfriend on Earth] is technically adept, inarguably funny...Rich's humor is well draw, his punch lines always on time."
    The San Francisco Chronicle

On Sale
Oct 14, 2014
Publisher
Hachette Audio
ISBN-13
9781478927266

Simon Rich

About the Author

Simon Rich has written for “Saturday Night Live,” Pixar and “The Simpsons.” He is the creator and showrunner of “Man Seeking Woman” (FXX) and “Miracle Workers” (TBS), which he based on his books. His other collections include Spoiled Brats and Ant Farm. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.

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