My Father's Diet

'Imagine a precise, refined eye looking at all the grotesque realities of mall life in Middle America and you'll have a sense of My Father's Diet. It's as if the Joyce of Dubliners were looking at Akron.' Edmund White ---- 'My Father's Diet is a wry and blisteringly honest indictment of American grotesquery. It is also - miraculously - tender about the unwinnable game of masculinity in this country. I loved this book for its humour, its clarity, its wicked prose. Adrian Nathan West is a star.' Lauren Groff ---- 'My Father's Diet is a strange, funny, sad, and wonderful novel. With the precision of a translator who has very good taste, West captures the bizarre vividness of America better than anyone I've ever read.' Lauren Oyler ---- 'Adrian Nathan West, one of our best translators, is also one of our best novelists. He gives such solemn care to such mundane American pap and crap even while denying any redemptive power to the effort and it's that denial - sorrowful, but without anger, without delusion - that constitutes his brilliance. My Father's Diet is among the most ruthlessly true chronicles of the culture - of the patrimony - that we, all of us, have ruined.' Joshua Cohen ---- 'In My Father's Diet, Adrian Nathan West does what the giftless memoirists cannot: he alchemizes experience into art. Here is a rare book not only for sons and their fathers but for any reader who still cares about the reach of sentences well made.' William Giraldi ---- 'Very sardonic, insightful and surprisingly tender.' Alice Fisher, The Portobello Bookshop Edinburgh ---- 'Being mindful in America, West suggests, is not to invite wisdom, but to cultivate a boredom that turns even the nation's lunacy into something as rote as weather.' Jeremy Lybarger