Warren Alexander

Cousins' Club Warren Alexander

Semi-finalist for the 2017 BookLife Prize for General Fiction I can think of very little that could be done to make Cousins' Club more interesting of effective - it is a real achievement. -Writer's Digest ...all written with a sharp, satiric blade... Cousins' Club reminded me strongly of Tristram Shandy... -Review from Readers' Favorite. Cousins' Club, a satirical novel, erupts when a grandmother decides she is tired of being the matriarch of the least successful Jewish family in America. She consults mystical medieval texts that divine the next born grandchild will be a genius who will change their fortunes. But her worries do not stop there. She is also convinced that no one in her clan is smart enough to raise a genius by themselves. Her solution-the child will be passed from household to household to gain their collective wisdom. This picaresque romp takes place in 1950's Brooklyn. The unusual events and the menagerie of characters, which includes radical rogues, cockeyed intellectuals, and pie-eyed strivers will be familiar to readers of Phillip Roth, Bruce Jay Friedman, and Stanley Elkin. In the end, this fantastical story about family begs the question-how wrong can a grandmother be?