by Adam Langer is set in Rogers Park, a primarily Jewish neighborhood of Chicago in which classes are separated by California Avenue. Not only class boundaries are traversed in this brilliant and often hilarious first novel but life’s boundaries -from Bat Mitzvah, graduation, loss of virginity, assimilation, marriage, divorce, even death — as the stories of three families, all with teenage children, are told. Early readers have called CROSSING CALIFORNIA “a Jewish Corrections” while others have opined that it reads like episodes of the Simpson’s written by Phillip Roth.
Adam Langer is a playwright and the fiction editor of Book Magazine. This is his first novel. A six figure preemptive offer by Cindy Spiegel of Riverhead/Putnam purchased World English rights from Marly Rusoff. Lisa Queen at IMG will sell translation rights. — April 29, 2003
(Sales notices appeared on Publishers Marketplace and Publishers Weekly)
