He continued writing fiction from his new Berkeley perch. “I’d visited the Bay on book tours and was down to give it a try,” he said. (That novel was inspired by Mansbach’s years working as a roadie for famed jazz drummer Elvin Jones.) In 2004, shortly before the publication of his second novel, “Angry Black White Boy” - a satire about race relations in America revolving around a white, Jewish Columbia student obsessed with hip-hop, not unlike Mansbach himself - he moved across the country to the Bay Area because his then-girlfriend wanted a change of scenery. His grandmother wrote a poetry column for the Boston Globe, and his father, Charlie, was a Globe editor for nearly four decades.Īfter graduating from Columbia, he published a book of poetry and a novel, “Shackling Water,” about a young, Black saxophonist in Harlem. “I’m still like a very elderly boy in the eyes of the Jewish religion,” he quipped during a 2020 City Arts & Lectures event in San Francisco.Ī devotion to language, not religion, was his inheritance. He was expelled from Sunday school for acting out and did not have a bar mitzvah. (Photo/George Barahona)īorn in Worcester, Massachusetts, Mansbach, 45, was raised in an “extremely secular Jewish family,” he said.

A lot of times an opportunity will land in front of me, and I’ll go, ‘Let me see if I can do that.’” The forthcoming box set of Adam Mansbach’s “Fuck” trilogy of non-children’s books. “I’m always interested in figuring out and mastering the rules of different genres. “I didn’t go into this with any master plan,” he said when asked to explain his unusual career trajectory in a recent interview with J. In other words, he’s got range - serious f***ing range. In the years since the publication of “Go the Fuck to Sleep,” the father of three has written screenplays (including for the 2016 Netflix drama “Barry,” about a college-age Barack Obama, and the forthcoming “Super High,” a stoner superhero comedy to star Berkeley-raised Andy Samberg), Jewish-themed humor books, a graphic novel about a Florida alligator wrestler, an epic poem about mourning the death of his younger brother, and political ads for the Biden presidential campaign and other liberal causes, to name a few projects. These fake children’s books may be his claim to fame, but Mansbach is a more protean and prolific - and profoundly Jewish - writer than fans of those books may know. The book has sold more than 3 million copies to date and spawned two equally obscene sequels, “You Have to Fucking Eat” and “Fuck, Now There Are Two of You.” (A box set of all three comes out on Oct. Adam Mansbach is, and possibly always will be, best known as the “Go the Fuck to Sleep” guy.Ī decade ago, the Berkeley author rocked the publishing world with his genre-defying picture book for adults about the universal parental struggle of putting a young child to bed.

Go the F**k to Sleep by Adam Mansbach