Adam Mansbach
Adam Mansbach
Adam Mansbachis an American author, and has previously been a visiting writer and professor of literature at Rutgers University-Camden, with their New Voices Visiting Writers program. Mansbach wrote the "children's book for adults" Go the Fuck to Sleep. Other books Mansbach has written include Angry Black White Boy, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005, and The End of the Jews. Mansbach was the founding editor of the 1990s hip-hop journal Elementary. He lives in Berkeley, California and co-hosts...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth1 July 1976
CountryUnited States of America
If you're a novelist, as I am in real life, you're usually so desperate for any kind of feedback.
If anything, I was a prodigious eater of everything that was put in front of me. That was probably the only thing my parents wouldn't complain about.
I've probably done more than a thousand interviews, and I can't remember what people asked me two months ago or two days ago.
I've always been really involved in figuring out who my audience is and how to reach them.
I try to write in the mornings, as soon as I'm up and caffeinated, and to stay in the chair as long as I can be productive.
I think that being Jewish is in some ways unique because there's this conflation of race, culture and religion.
I like to read in the bathtub. Ideally, that bathtub would be located on a small Greek island.
I came up in hip-hop, where people value the ability to tell it straight.
Graffiti writers were the most interesting people in hip hop. They were the mad scientists, the mad geniuses, the weird ones.
Fundamentally, I'm profoundly influenced by hip-hop, so whatever I do is going to bear that seal.
For many families, gift-giving is a major source of stress - the relentless commercialism, the whining demands, the financial pressure.
Eating is one of the great pleasures of life.
You know you're a hopeless record nerd when your time travel fantasies always come around to how cool it would be to go back to 1973 and buy all the great funk and jazz and salsa records that came out that year on tiny obscure labels and are now really rare and expensive.
Writing novels is largely about endurance and patience. I take a lot of breaks, hit walls, and go do something else while I think things through. But I do it every day, and I try to treat it as a job, something that is not dictated by whimsy or muses.