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The ChâteauFebruary 13, 2018
Paul Goldberg, the author of The Yid, takes us behind the scenes of a Florida condo board election, delivering a wild spin on Miami Beach, petty crime, Jewish identity, and life in Trump's America… It is January 2017 and Bill has hit rock bottom. Yesterday, he was William M. Katzenelenbogen, successful science reporter at The Washington Post, with years of experience and industry awards. But things have taken a turn. Fired from his job, aimless, with exactly $1,219.37 in his checking account, he learns that his college roommate, a plastic surgeon known far and wide as the “Butt God of Miami Beach,” has fallen to his death under salacious circumstances. With nothing to lose, Bill boards a flight for Florida’s Gold Coast, ready to begin his own investigation---a last ditch attempt to revive his career. There’s just one catch: Bill’s father, Melsor. Melsor Yakovlevich Katzenelenbogen (so-named in tribute to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and the October Revolution)—poet, literary scholar, political dissident, small-time-crook—is angling for control of the condo board at the Chateau Sedan Neuve, a crumbling high-rise in Hollywood, Florida, populated mostly by Russian Jewish immigrants. The current board is filled with fraudsters, in cahoots with contractors and levying “special assessments” on residents, and Melsor will use any means necessary to win the board election. And who better to help him—through means both legal and illegal—than his estranged son? As he did in The Yid, Paul Goldberg has taken something we think we know and turned it on its ear. Featuring a colorful cast of characters, THE CHÂTEAU injects the genre of the investigative journalist with surprising idiosyncrasy, subverting the crime novel with dark comic farce in a setting that becomes, masterfully, a microcosm of Trump’s America. THE CHÂTEAU guarantees that you will never look at condo boards, crime, kleptocracy, vodka, Fascism, or Florida the same way again. |
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Reviews
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Kirkus (starred review)"A master of dark, cutting humor, restless and allusive ... Goldberg confirms his status as one of Jewish fiction's liveliest new voice."
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