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by David Samuel Levinson
An ambitious, gripping, darkly funny family drama about the reckoning of three adult siblings with their profoundly flawed parents, set during Passover in a near-future America rife with anti-Semitism and terror, from an award-winning short-story writer.
In 2022, Jewish Americans face an increasingly unsafe landscape. A flood of Israeli refugees into the country has brought deep hostilities and latent anti-Semitism to the forefront of American life. Amid this fraught climate, the Jacobson family gathers in Los Angeles for Passover, reuniting from around the world for the first time in years. But despite the backdrop of increased intolerance and terror, their immediate problems seem to be more personal than political. The family is coming apart at the seams and the three adult children, Mo, Edith, and Jacob, find themselves in various states of crisis, the result, each claims, of a lifetime of mistreatment by their hateful, undermining father, Julian. The Jacobson offspring have begun to suspect that Julian is hastening their mother Roz's demise, and years of resentment reach a climax as the siblings debate whether they will go through with the real reason for their reunion: an ill-considered plot to murder their father and end his iron rule once and for all. That is, if they can put their bickering, grudges, festering relationships with their partners, and distrust of one another to the side long enough to act. And God help them if their mother finds out…
Darkly comic, disturbingly prescient, and incredibly accomplished, Tell Me How This Ends Well interweaves the stories of this very troubled family into a rare and compelling exploration of the state of America itself, asking profound, chillingly perceptive questions about where our world, country, and each of us could be headed.
"Imaginative, intelligent, cluttered, long on black humor, and just long." - Kirkus
"The story's environment is claustrophobic, and in the book's depiction of latter day anti-Semitism, Levinson leavens the humor with some chilling cautionary notes." - Publishers Weekly
"With well -crafted characters, this unsettling saga will be appreciated by those who enjoy dark novels with wit and sass." - Library Journal
"Tell Me How This Ends Well is Cormac McCarthy's The Road doing 70mph in reverse on the 405. David Samuel Levinson's dystopian vision is deeply strange in the best way, perverse and precise and teeming with life, reminiscent of George Saunders, Flannery O'Connor, Nathanael West. A comic novel firing on all cylinders, with one eye on the highway and the other to our future." - Daniel Torday, author of The Last Flight of Poxl West
"Like absolutely nothing I've read before, Levinson's brilliantly unsettling, fiercely funny novel takes on both dangerous intolerance in the near-future world, and in the confines of one wildly destructive family, where ties tighten like nooses and kith and kin can become like warring political systems. Affecting and hilarious, and filled with dark truths that gleam like jewels. I totally loved it."
- Caroline Leavitt, author of Cruel Beautiful World
"Tell Me How This Ends Well is a wickedly funny, intelligent examination of the dynamics of a uniquely strange family, and David Levinson guides these characters through a plot that intensifies in such unexpected ways. Against a backdrop that feels both terrifying and yet utterly plausible, Levinson again and again finds ways to make the struggles of this clan explode with a kind of humor that most writers could not dream of pulling off. A daring, memorable novel." - Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang
"David Samuel Levinson's Tell Me How This Ends Well is an absolute joyride through the dark, beautiful terrain of the near future. This is a book that is, arguably, about everything - about family and love and hatred and politics and the indomitable self, and Levinson tackles the whole thing with abundant intelligence, seriousness and humor, and convinces, once again, of the novel's enduring power to grasp the future." - Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat and Other Stories
"Witty, acerbic, hilarious, terrifying, and true, David Samuel Levinson's Tell Me How This Ends Well is a treasure." - Amanda Eyre Ward, author of The Nearness of You
"Tell Me How This Ends Well is one of those rare stories that are both painfully intimate and terrifyingly universal." - Lara Vapnyar, author of Still Here
This information about Tell Me How This Ends Well was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David Samuel Levinson is the author of the novel, Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence and the story collection, Most of Us Are Here Against Our Will. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has received fellowships from Yaddo, the Jentel Foundation, Ledig House, the Santa Fe Arts Institute, the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship for Writers. He has also been published in The Atlantic, RE:AL, storySouth, The James White Review, The New Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, The Brooklyn Review, Prairie Schooner, The Toronto Quarterly, West Branch, and Post Road, among others. He has formerly served as the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College and as the Fellow in Fiction at Emory University.
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