Book Passage Presents

Thursday, May 6th, 2021 • 5:15pm PT • Live • Online

A brilliant, genre-defying work—both memoir and epic poem—about the struggle for wisdom, grace, and ritual in the face of unspeakable loss.

my father said
david has taken his own life

Adam is in medias res—in the middle of his own busy life, and approaching a career high in the form of a #1 New York Times bestselling book—when these words from his father open a chasm beneath his feet. I Had a Brother Once is the story of everything that comes after. In the shadow of David’s inexplicable death, Adam is forced to re-remember a brother he thought he knew and to reckon with a ghost, confronting his unsettled family history, his distant relationship with tradition and faith, and his desperate need to understand an event that always slides just out of his grasp. This is an expansive and deeply thoughtful poetic meditation on loss and a raw, darkly funny, human story of trying to create a ritual—of remembrance, mourning, forgiveness, and acceptance—where once there was a life.

Adam Mansbach is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Go the F**k to Sleep, the novels Rage Is Back, Angry Black White Boy, and The End of the Jews (winner of the California Book Award), and a dozen other books, most recently the bestselling A Field Guide to the Jewish People, co-written with Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel. Mansbach wrote the award-winning screenplay for the Netflix Original Barry, and his next feature film, Super High, starring Andy Samberg, Craig Robinson, and Common, is forthcoming from New Line. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, The Believer, and The Guardian, and on This American Life, The Moth, and All Things Considered.

Daniel Alarcón is the author of At Night We Walk in Circles, which was a finalist for the 2014 PEN-Faulkner Award, as well as the story collections War by Candlelight and The King Is Always Above the People, and the novel Lost City Radio. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Granta, n+1, and Harper’s, and in 2010, he was named one of the New Yorker‘s “20 under 40.” He is executive producer of Radio Ambulante, and teaches at the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York.

Adam Mansbach photo by Pete Rosen; Daniel Alarcón photo courtesy of author