Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

Creator and executive producer of BoJack Horseman, recently called Netflix's best original series ever by the online magazine Thrillist, Bob-Waksberg offers a darkly humorous debut collection. For instance, relatives disrupt a wedding by quarreling over how many goats should be sacrificed. With a five-city tour.

April 1, 2019
Eighteen sometimes-whimsical, sometimes-biting short fictions from the creator of Netflix's Bojack Horseman. This offbeat collection of bad romances will be a treat for fans of Bob-Waksberg's animated cult comedy but also fits squarely into the type of wry humor practiced by peers like Amy Sedaris and Simon Rich. It opens with a disastrous date in "Salted Circus Cashews, Swear to God," which uses both typography and tension to land its unresolved ending. There's a dash of Welcome to Night Vale in a longer selection, "A Most Blessed and Auspicious Occasion," in which the happy couple getting married must wrestle with how many goats to sacrifice. Elsewhere, we find an uncomfortable reunion in "These Are Facts," a collection of mundane superheroes in "up-and-comers," and a scathing satire of professional theater in "You Want to Know What Plays Are Like?" While the author's longer prose is deft, his humor lands more squarely in pieces that might seem gimmicky--lists, riffs, and bitterly funny imagined scenarios. These include "short stories," which is made up of a list of premises such as " 'You're not like other girls, ' he said to every girl"; "Missed Connection--m4w," in which "timeless romance" takes on a very different meaning; the deeply uncomfortable "Lies We Told Each Other (A Partial List)," which ends with "I love you too"; "Lunch with the Person Who Dumped You," a lurid choose-your-own-adventure scenario; and "Rules for Taboo," a deeply weird set of rules for a game of that name. Bob-Waksberg caps his collection with a theme park of dead presidents in "More of You That You Already Are," strongly reminiscent of David Sedaris' "Santaland Diaries," and a chaser in "We Will Be Close on Friday 18 July," which pushes existential angst into a simple grammar error. While not pushing to the limits to which Bob-Waksberg is demonstrably capable, a savage sendup of love in all its dubious glory.

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April 29, 2019
Bob-Waksberg, creator of the subversive cartoon series BoJack Horseman, hones his wonderfully absurd and unexpectedly moving style in this selection of stories about love. “A Most Blessed and Auspicious Occasion” pokes fun at the arbitrary absurdity of wedding traditions and expectations by introducing a world in which engagement rings are replaced by expensive “promise eggs” and goats are routinely sacrificed at ceremonies. During a family vacation in “These Are Facts,” a girl bonds with her bratty older half-brother, who uses sarcasm to hide the bitterness he still feels toward their father. Sometimes the author’s premises go on a beat too long, as in “Missed Connection—m4w,” in which two mutually attracted subway riders stay on a train for years but never get up the nerve to talk to each other, or “Rufus,” told from the viewpoint of a small dog and peppered with cutesy nomenclature. But mostly Bob-Waksberg successfully tempers the ridiculous with a sharp tug at the heartstrings. “Rules for Taboo,” in which avoiding certain words during a board game triggers a string of pleasant and unpleasant truths, is a prime example of this skill, and a highlight of the collection. These stories are at times poignant and triumphantly silly, but always manage to ring true. 50,000-copy announced first printing.

May 1, 2019
Readers familiar with Bob-Waksberg's animated, adult Netflix series Bojack Horseman won't expect his debut story collection to be powered by realism. The writing is absurd, its language light and chatty in the way of social media natives. In the story A Most Blessed and Auspicious Occasion, Bob-Waksberg elevates a mundane situation, a couple planning their wedding, by including weird yet understandable conundrums, like the question of how many goats to ceremonially sacrifice to the Wine God or whether to buy a copper or platinum Promise Egg. At its best, the collection is an excellent homage to George Saunders, with its strange details and forms ( Lies We Told Each Other is a list, Missed Connection?m4w is in the form of a Craigslist post) efficiently pulling readers to the emotional heart of a story. But sometimes the stories feel zany just for the sake of zaniness, their human elements buried beneath a slick guise of goofiness. Still, Bob-Waksberg's fiction debut will capture many readers with its formal innovation, playful language, and relatable portraits of romance gone awry.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)