Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
-63% $9.98$9.98
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: JTN OUTLET LLC
$8.10$8.10
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: -OnTimeBooks-
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Audible sample Sample
Fleishman Is in Trouble: A Novel Hardcover – June 18, 2019
Purchase options and add-ons
Now an Emmy Award–nominated FX limited series on Hulu, starring Claire Danes, Jesse Eisenberg, Lizzy Caplan, and Adam Brody
ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Entertainment Weekly, The New York Public Library
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Washington Post, USA Today Vanity Fair, Vogue, NPR, Chicago Tribune, GQ, Vox, Refinery29, Elle, The Guardian, Real Simple, Financial Times, Parade, Good Housekeeping, New Statesman, Marie Claire, Town & Country, Evening Standard, Thrillist, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage, BookRiot, Shelf Awareness
Toby Fleishman thought he knew what to expect when he and his wife of almost fifteen years separated: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, the occasional moment of tension in their co-parenting negotiations. He could not have predicted that one day, in the middle of his summer of sexual emancipation, Rachel would just drop their two children off at his place and simply not return. He had been working so hard to find equilibrium in his single life. The winds of his optimism, long dormant, had finally begun to pick up. Now this.
As Toby tries to figure out where Rachel went, all while juggling his patients at the hospital, his never-ending parental duties, and his new app-assisted sexual popularity, his tidy narrative of the spurned husband with the too-ambitious wife is his sole consolation. But if Toby ever wants to truly understand what happened to Rachel and what happened to his marriage, he is going to have to consider that he might not have seen things all that clearly in the first place.
A searing, utterly unvarnished debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble is an insightful, unsettling, often hilarious exploration of a culture trying to navigate the fault lines of an institution that has proven to be worthy of our great wariness and our great hope.
Alma’s Best Jewish Novel of the Year • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for Best First Book
- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateJune 18, 2019
- Dimensions6.33 x 1.33 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-100525510877
- ISBN-13978-0525510871
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may ship from close to you
- The world diminished a woman from the moment she stopped being sexually available to it, and there was nothing to do but accept that and grow older.Highlighted by 1,911 Kindle readers
- Whatever kind of woman you are, even when you’re a lot of kinds of women, you’re still always just a woman, which is to say you’re always a little bit less than a man.Highlighted by 1,635 Kindle readers
- AGAIN I’LL SAY IT: Life is a process in which you collect people and prune them when they stop working for you. The only exception to that rule is the friends you make in college.Highlighted by 1,414 Kindle readers
From the Publisher
|
|
|
---|---|---|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews
Review
“When his ex drops the kids off and doesn’t come back, a father of two revisits the choices that led to this moment. He searches for answers, hilariously and heartbreakingly avoiding the darkest questions. Brodesser-Akner’s debut is a referendum on marriage, friendship, and how we live (and love) right now.”—People
“Whip-smart, gleefully scatological . . . [Brodesser-Akner] aims a perfect gimlet eye at the city’s relentless self-regard. . . . But her best trick may be the novel’s narrator: An elusive presence identified at first only as an old friend of Toby’s from their study-abroad days, she turns out to be both the book’s Trojan horse and—in a brilliant third-act pivot—its greatest gift, transforming a fizzy comedy of manners into something genuinely, unexpectedly profound.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Many novelists have written excellent fictional indictments of interpersonal and systemic sexism. Not since Teju Cole’s Open City—a very different book in all other respects—has a novelist put the reader on the wrong side the way Brodesser-Akner does. To do so, she uses a lot of intelligence, a lot of anger, a great sense of humor and a whole new variation on the magic we know from her magazine work. The result is a maddening, unsettling masterpiece, and, yes, you will be moved and inexplicably grateful at the end.”—NPR
“In her witty and well-observed debut, Taffy Brodesser-Akner updates the miserable-matrimony novel, dropping it squarely in our times. . . . Brodesser-Akner has written a potent, upsetting and satisfying novel, illustrating how the marital pledge—build our life together—overlooks a key fact: There are two lives.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Electric . . . Brodesser-Akner’s first foray into fiction—set in Manhattan, the Hamptons, and Israel—is funny, stylish, and insightful, whether describing men’s challenged communication skills or the knife juggler’s agility required to maintain a modern marriage.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s sharp debut novel is packed with humor and heart. In it, the titular trouble begins when Toby Fleishman realizes that Rachel—his wife of 15 years, from whom he’s now separated—is missing. Where has she gone, and why? This book will have you racing through the pages to find the answers.”—Southern Living
“Everything you could wish for in a satisfying summer read . . . Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s page-turner doubles as a satirical take on modern relationships.”—Women’s Health
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Yes, who could have predicted that Toby Fleishman, at the age of forty-one, would find that his phone was aglow from sunup to sundown (in the night the glow was extra bright) with texts that contained G-string and ass cleavage and underboob and sideboob and just straight-up boob and all the parts of a woman he never dared dream he would encounter in a person who was three- dimensional—meaning literally three-dimensional, as in a person who wasn’t on a page or a computer screen. All this, after a youth full of romantic rejection! All this, after putting a lifetime bet on one woman! Who could have predicted this? Who could have predicted that there was such life in him yet?
Still, he told me, it was jarring. Rachel was gone now, and her goneness was so incongruous to what had been his plan. It wasn’t that he still wanted her—he absolutely did not want her. He absolutely did not wish she were still with him. It was that he had spent so long waiting out the fumes of the marriage and busying himself with the paperwork necessary to extricate himself from it—telling the kids, moving out, telling his colleagues—that he had not considered what life might be like on the other side of it. He understood divorce in a macro way, of course. But he had not yet adjusted to it in a micro way, in the other-side-of-the-bed-being-empty way, in the nobody-to-tell-you-were-running-late way, in the you-belong-to-no-one way. How long was it before he could look at the pictures of women on his phone—pictures the women had sent him eagerly and of their own volition—straight on, instead of out of the corner of his eye? Okay, sooner than he thought but not immediately. Certainly not immediately.
He hadn’t looked at another woman once during his marriage, so in love with Rachel was he—so in love was he with any kind of institution or system. He made solemn, dutiful work of trying to save the relationship even after it would have been clear to any reasonable person that their misery was not a phase. There was nobility in the work, he believed. There was nobility in the suffering. And even after he realized that it was over, he still had to spend years, plural, trying to convince her that this wasn’t right, that they were too unhappy, that they were still young and could have good lives without each other—even then he didn’t let one millimeter of his eye wander. Mostly, he said, because he was too busy being sad. Mostly because he felt like garbage all the time, and a person shouldn’t feel like garbage all the time. More than that, a person shouldn’t be made horny when he felt like garbage. The intersection of horniness and low self-esteem seemed reserved squarely for porn consumption.
But now there was no one to be faithful to. Rachel wasn’t there.
She was not in his bed. She was not in the bathroom, applying liquid eyeliner to the area where her eyelid met her eyelashes with the precision of an arthroscopy robot. She was not at the gym, or coming back from the gym in a less black mood than usual, not by much but a little. She was not up in the middle of the night, complaining about the infinite abyss of her endless insomnia. She was not at Curriculum Night at the kids’ extremely private and yet somehow progressive school on the West Side, sitting in a small chair and listening to the new and greater demands that were being placed on their poor children compared to the prior year. (Though, then again she rarely was. Those nights, like the other nights, she was at work, or at dinner with a client, what she called “pulling her weight” when she was being kind, and what she called “being your cash cow” when she wasn’t.) So no, she was not there. She was in a completely other home, the one that used to be his, too. Every single morning this thought overwhelmed him momentarily; it panicked him, so that the rst thing he thought when he awoke was this: Something is wrong. There is trouble. I am in trouble. It had been he who asked for the divorce, and still: Something is wrong. There is trouble. I am in trouble. Each morning, he shook this off. He reminded himself that this was what was healthy and appropriate and the natural order. She wasn’t supposed to be next to him anymore. She was supposed to be in her separate, nicer home.
But she wasn’t there, either, not on this particular morning. He learned this when he leaned over to his new IKEA nightstand and picked up his phone, whose beating presence he felt even in those few minutes before his eyes officially opened. He had maybe seven or eight texts there, most of them from women who had reached out during the night via his dating app, but his eyes went straight to Rachel’s text, somewhere in the middle. It seemed to give off a different light than the ones that contained body parts and lacy bands of panty; it somehow drew his eyes in a way the others didn’t. At five a.m. she’d written, I’m headed to Kripalu for the weekend; the kids are at your place FYI.
It took two readings to realize what that meant, and Toby, ignoring the erection he’d allowed to flourish knowing that his phone was rife with new masturbation material, jumped out of bed. He ran into the hallway, and he saw that their two children were in their bedrooms, asleep. FYI the kids were there? FYI? FYI was an afterthought; FYI was supplementary. It wasn’t essential. This information, that his children had been deposited into his home under the cover of darkness during an unscheduled time with the use of a key that had been supplied to Rachel in case of a true and dire emergency, seemed essential.
Product details
- Publisher : Random House; First Edition, 10th printing (June 18, 2019)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0525510877
- ISBN-13 : 978-0525510871
- Item Weight : 1.35 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.33 x 1.33 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #379,290 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,614 in Fiction Satire
- #6,668 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #21,192 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine and the author of two novels: Fleishman Is in Trouble (2019, Random House), which she adapted into an Emmy-nominated limited series for FX in 2022; and Long Island Compromise (2024, also Random House). She lives in New York City.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Aside from a rare talent for description that digs deep and then surfaces a distilled understanding that makes perfectly clear the underpinnings of the scene, the author equips readers with the ability to follow the characters lock-step in a way that feels personal, revealing, and uniquely participatory. Think: If Bob Ross were to have broken down the unforgiving/unforgivable ennui and tortuous stagnation rewarded to women siloed by gendered expectations of career/partnerhood/motherhood/ambition/sexuality/aggression/fulfillment in the same way he could dismantle, clarify, and reconstitute a landscape into its component parts. Even the delivery of this story, which is accomplished by following the challenges posed to the (sympathetic) male hero, embodies the concepts explored in the book that a woman's story can only be told (accepted?) through the male experience. We like Toby, we root for Toby, and his experience is no less valid or significant... But the unheard story is that of Rachel, whose half of the marital decline is summed up in only a few pages- a footnote to the story of Toby.
The point is not that the book focused on Toby and his experience, but is much deeper; would the story, if told exclusively from the position of Rachel, be palatable? As sympathic? Would Rachel also be seen as the hero/victim, or as an ungrateful, dissatisfied, and overly ambitious semi-villain who selfishly placed her material wants over family and a devoted partner? Would this book even be received by readers if it told the story of a driven woman who was forced to balance, somewhat precariously, a career and children and found her life unsatisfactory despite undeniable success, relative wealth/privilege, and a supportive husband? Or would its "acceptance" be another "the future is female" empty gesture at best, at worst a nagging, self-indulgent example of a third wave feminist trope? The author seems to suggest, through the side story of the narrator, that this focus- the lens that transforms the counternarrative of Rachel into a digestable, secondary story- is a deliberately covert way to make this point. And it's effective.
The book tells a good story. But more significantly, reading it was therapeutic. All the frenetic, painfully conflicted ways of thinking about paths and paths not taken, the tradeoffs required to aim high (but not too high), to be a partner (but too often more paternalistic than partnered in the uneven negotiation of egos and expectations), and the unwavering guilt of it all... The way these considerations are put on us and put on ourselves, the way even women judge other women- directly or indirectly, these things aren't talked about. Not really.
This book presents a kind of comfort in knowing that one's experience and ways of processing and feeling aren't unique. That your variety of madness and disquiet aren't personal. And that if, when you read Toby's story, you both sympathize and instinctively feel the presence of the anti-matter in that universe, that of Rachel's experience, you are not selfish or alone.
BUT…after about 30 pages, i flipped to the last page & then read the final 20 pages to find out WHAT HAPPENED?? where is she & how did she get there?? i wanted to know the in between enough to read it in 2 sittings.
I know that my way of reading fiction-especially suspenseful stories-isn’t for everyone, but once i knew how it ended, i was fully immersed in the storytelling.
The description of a character’s progression into a mental breakdown is gripping & devastating. I could almost physically feel a character’s period of a week or so of sleeplessness.
Another stand out for me was diagnosis & treatment of a patient of Toby’s, a storyline which runs episodically throughout the story.
So it’s a mixed bag, but on the whole, a good one.
I loved the writing style of this book and the narration by Allyson Ryan. I can't wait to read Taffy's coming works and see what the future holds for her.
THIS BOOK IS FOR YOU IF: You love a glimpse into a failing marriage with some modern takes and struggles that will keep you guessing and on the edge of your seat.
The narrative is very interesting, introspective and very funny. It is also sad. The story is a real definition of what is expected of women in their relationships and their work. The desire to be more is often not appreciated or understood.
Lots of sex, but not in an exploitive way more in a way that explains the characters.
Told from three perspectives the book tells the whole story really well.