Know Your Beholder

As winter deepens in Pollard, Illinois, agoraphobe Francis Falbo is holed up in his attic apartment, recovering from a series of traumas: his mother's death, his wife's desertion, and his once-ascendant rock band's break-up. Francis hasn't shaved in months and hasn't changed out of his bathrobe for nine days.

All he has left is his childhood home, whose remaining rooms he rents to a cast of eccentric tenants. Francis becomes increasingly entangled in their lives, with results that are disastrous, hysterical, and ultimately healing.

KNOW YOUR BEHOLDER is an exploration of adulthood gone awry, a novel about what we do when our lives have crumbled and we must begin anew.

“"Adam Rapp's Know Your Beholder is a wry, big-hearted novel that captures the contradictions of the American present--with its good intensions, self-deceptions, grand ambitions, and crippling fears."-- David Bezmozgis, Giller Prize finalist and author of The Betrayers”

"Know Your Beholder is hilarious and deeply sad, often at the same time. Such an eerie beauty permeates this tale--with its haunting descriptions of houses, people, music, tornado storms, agoraphobic terror, lost children, lost minds--that when you finish you feel you've awakened from one of the narrator's strange, heartbreaking dreams, filled with a kind of inexplicable, overwhelming love."--Brad Watson%2C National Book Award finalist for The Heaven of Mercury "With Know Your Beholder, Adam Rapp has ascended into the upper ranks of American fiction. His narrator, Francis Falbo, is an unforgettable crooner of heartwreck and hilarity, and the narrative itself is woven of uncommon tenderness and beauty as the dreams of the past meet the ghosts in their present." --William Giraldi%2C author of Hold the Dark and Busy Monsters "Adam Rapp is an exciting and fearless writer. From the dark places of the soul he mines equal parts pain and light. In Know Your Beholder, he has fully and unapologetically rendered each of his characters-men and women alike, both good actors and bad. This rueful and immensely entertaining novel is his best work yet, a transfixing study of the heart's resilience and the complicated beauty of living that provides the kind of consolation that only our greatest fictions can."--A. M. Homes%2C New York Times bestselling author of The Mistress's Daughter and May We Be Forgiven "Adam Rapp's Know Your Beholder is a wry, big-hearted novel that captures the contradictions of the American present--with its good intensions, self-deceptions, grand ambitions, and crippling fears."--David Bezmozgis%2C Giller Prize finalist and author of The Betrayers "Know Your Beholder is a message from the heart and from the beard, a message from the new weird America to every guy who's ever spent too much time in his bathrobe and every women who's ever considered what that guy would look like if he actually got himself together and shaved. Adam Rapp knows about laughing to keep from crying. He's a melancholy Lenny Bruce of the sentence and his imagination is never less than intense."--Hari Kunzru%2C author of the national bestseller The Impressionist "Know Your Beholder is funny and sad, smart and moving, dark and hopeful. Adam Rapp writes with a lyrical acumen and wit that are not just impressive, but immensely engaging."--Jonathan Tropper, New York Times bestselling author of This Is Where I Leave You and One Last Thing Before I Go "Rapp is such a skillful and evocative writer he can make magic out of the ordinary stuff of daily life... Know Your Beholder has a surprisingly satisfying finish on multiple levels.. It's nothing less than masterful."--Cleveland Plain Dealer "Rapp's novel is surprisingly high-spirited, comic without diminishing the emotional depth of his motley crew. That''s largely thanks to Rapp's gift for figurative language."--Washington Post "More often than any book I can easily recall, Rapp's novel had me laughing like a fool, embarrassing myself each time I unthinkingly brought it out in public. Perhaps more surprisingly, that humor felt entirely natural--born organically from the idiosyncrasies of the characters themselves rather than foisted on them... Rapp mostly dredges comedy from Francis' peculiar ways of seeing the world and from the mundanely weird people who populate it."--NPR

Adam Rapp is the author of numerous young adult novels, including 33 Snowfish, Under the Wolf, Under theDog, and The Buffalo Tree, which was the inspiration for this off-Broadway play The Metal Children. Adam Rapphas also written for TV (The L Word, In Treatment) and was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2006.He lives in New York City.

As winter deepens in Pollard, Illinois, agoraphobe Francis Falbo is holed up in his attic apartment, recovering from a series of traumas: his mother's death, his wife's desertion, and his once-ascendant rock band's break-up. Francis hasn't shaved in months and hasn't changed out of his bathrobe for nine days. All he has left is his childhood home, whose remaining rooms he rents to a cast of eccentric tenants. Francis becomes increasingly entangled in their lives, with results that are disastrous, hysterical, and ultimately healing. KNOW YOUR BEHOLDER is an exploration of adulthood gone awry, a novel about what we do when our lives have crumbled and we must begin anew.

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