Mother's Kisses

An indefatigable, irresistible, and wildly inappropriate Jewish mother takes her 17-year-old son to school in this uproarious coming-of-age comedy Tall and scattered-looking, Joseph has just graduated from high school and is ready for college. But is college ready for him? Apparently not, judging by the rejection letter he receives from Bates and the deafening silence that greets his application to Columbia. While his friends pack their bags for schools across the country, Joseph mopes around the apartment in his bathrobe and checks the mailbox obsessively. It's enough to make his mother fear for the boy's sanity--so she resolves to take matters into her own hands. What follows is a sidesplitting series of misadventures as Meg, whom the New York Times Book Review called "the most unforgettable mother since Medea," pulls out all the stops to get her boy what he wants.

"Abounds with brilliant scenes and sufficient comic characters to populate a dozen novels, so rich and profligate is Friedman's inventiveness. A marvelously gifted novelist." --Newsweek "A Mother's Kisses is an even funnier book than Stern. . . . Anxiety rides every page and wit is wounding." --Time "Synopsizing a Friedman plot is like making a tracing of the Mona Lisa. You can reproduce the shape and dimensions perfectly but nothing that reveals the work's unique quality. . . . Run, push, play dirty. But get a copy of A Mother's Kisses immediately." --The New York Times Book Review "So unbelievably fine that it makes you want to fall down and chew on your hat and weep . . .You read three or four pages and you find yourself out of breath." --The Plain Dealer "A horror comedy . . . Friedman, not content to tip over Whistler's mother's chair, uses his book like a steel whip on some cozy acceptances of family and social life." --Stanley Kauffmann, Life "Hilarious, mordant. Meg is the most fabulous mother in modern fiction." --Saturday Review "Hugely entertaining, insightful . . . [The] story-to-end-all-stories about mother and son relationships." --Library Journal

Bruce Jay Friedman (1930-2020) was a novelist, short story writer, playwright, memoirist, and screenwriter. He was the author of many books, including Stern (1962), A Mother's Kisses (1964), The Lonely Guy's Book of Life (1978), and Lucky Bruce: A Literary Memoir (2011). His best-known works of stage and screen include the off-Broadway hit Steambath (1970) and the screenplays for the films Stir Crazy (1980) and Splash (1984), the latter of which received an Academy Award nomination. As editor of the anthology Black Humor (1965), Friedman helped popularize the distinctive literary style of that name in the United States and is widely regarded as one of its finest practitioners. According to the New York Times, his prose is "a pure pleasure machine."