Books
The Brickman Stories: Saving Stanley
The Brickman Stories
Winner of the H.L. Davis Award for Short Fiction at the 2004 Oregon Book Awards and GLCA's 2005 New Writers Award, Scott Nadelson's interrelated short stories are graceful, vivid narratives that bring into sudden focus the spirit and the stubborn resilience of the Brickmans, a Jewish family of four living in suburban New Jersey. The central character, Daniel Brickman, forges obstinately through his own plots and desires as he struggles to balance his sense of identity with his longing to gain acceptance from his family and peers. In "Kosher," Daniel's disdain for his parents' values and lifestyle, for their materialism and need for security, leads him to take a job as a telemarketer for the Robowski Fund for the Disabled, a charity benefiting two people only: Daniel and Helen Robowski. And in "Young Radicals," Daniel gathers research for a thesis on early Soviet history by interviewing his grandfather, now a retiree in Florida, who painted factories and sang Communist work songs in 1920s Leningrad before immigrating to America. This fierce collection provides an unblinking examination of family life and the human instinct for attachment.
A Life in Progress: The Next Scott Nadelson
A Life in Progress
Beginning in the summer of 2004, Scott Nadelson's life fell apart. His fiancee left him a month before their planned wedding for another woman who made her living performing as a drag king. He moved into a drafty attic. His car's brakes went out. He learned that his cat was dying. Over the next two years, he'd struggle, with equivocal and sometimes humiliating results, to get back on his feet, in the process re-examining his past to understand his present circumstances.The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress is a literary self-portrait that revolves around the dissolution of a relationship but encompasses the long process of a young man's halting self-discovery. Exploring episodes from the life of its author/narrator marked by failure, suffering, and hope, as well as literary and cultural influence, the book weighs the things that make us want to give up against the things that keep us going. Though many of the pieces are comic and self-deprecating—some self-lacerating—they are above all meditations on the nature of the self and the way it can be constructed through memory, desire, and the imagination. Together they form a larger narrative, a search for fulfillment and identity in a life often governed by fear.
With humor and unflinching honesty, Scott Nadelson scrutinizes his life to discover who he is and finds just how elusive such a discovery can be. To read the resulting book is to join him on a personal journey that is thoughtful, surprising, occasionally hilarious, and unapologetically human.
Stories: Aftermath
Stories
The characters in Scott Nadelson's third collection are living in the wake of momentous events—the rupture of relationships, the loss of loved ones, the dissolution of dreams, and yet they find new ways of forging on with their lives, making accommodations that are sometimes delusional, sometimes destructive, sometimes even healthy. In "Oslo," a thirteen-year-old boy on a trip to Israel with his grandparents grapples with his father's abandonment and his own rocky coming-of-age. In "The Old Uniform," a young man left by his fiancee revisits the haunts of his single days, and on a drunken march through nighttime Brooklyn, begins to shed the false selves that have kept him from fully living. And in the title story, a couple testing out the waters of trial separation quickly discover how deeply the fault lines of their marriage run and how desperately they want to hang onto what remains.Mining Nadelson's familiar territory of Jewish suburban New Jersey, these fearless, funny, and quietly moving stories explore the treacherous crossroads where disappointments meet unfulfilled desire.