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
In theory, parents are supposed to empathize with one other - find common cause in the fervent desire to preserve and protect the world for the next generation, and connect on some deep, almost mystical level that those poor souls who have not experienced this kind of all-consuming love cannot possibly comprehend.
The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.
There is perhaps no better way to appreciate the dizzying stupidity of the United States than to chat with 25 consecutive morning radio hosts.
To capture sound is to isolate a moment, canonize it, enter it into the historical register.
While I'm working, I stick with music that won't distract me - the dub stylings of Scientist and King Tubby, maybe some Beethoven string quartets.
To me, 'The End of the Jews' - both the title and the novel itself - is about the end of pat, uncritical ways of understanding oneself in the world.
We had a kid. The kid was awesome. She didn't fall asleep easily. We complained about it. We got frustrated. But we didn't look for an out. We just accepted that this was part of parenting.
The publishing industry stopped having new ideas out of respect for the untimely death of Ernest Hemingway in 1961 and has been doing everything the same way ever since.
Of course, the opposite of white privilege is not blackness, as many of us seemed to think then; the opposite of white privilege is working to dismantle that privilege. But my particular hip-hop generation proved to be very serious about figuring it all out and staying engaged.
No one in my family has been observant for generations, but we all identify with being Jewish.
One thing any DJ needs in his crate, especially at a barbecue, is a selection of 15-minute-plus jams.
One of the pleasures of getting older and making a living the way you want to is that your social circle becomes rarified, and the people who enter have been vetted.
I believe that writers have a responsibility to evolve the language, whether by introducing new words or new usages. Shakespeare alone is responsible for something like 3400 words and phrases.
My daughter is a very adventurous eater. I'm not the guy who sits around lamenting that all my kid will eat it is Tater Tots and chicken nuggets. With my kid, it's more a capricious and whimsical decision-making.