“Bacharach has a great comic voice―shrewd, deadpan, and dirty―and The Bend of the World fears no weirdness.” Sam Lipsyte

“Mighty strange doings” mark the Pittsburgh of Jacob Bacharach’s audacious and hilarious debut novel, a town where “yeti, UFOs, rumors of orgiastic rites, intimations of the Mayan apocalypse and ‘psycho-temporal distortions’ add that extra zing to the bustling night life” (James Wolcott). On the edge of thirty, and comfortably adrift in life, Peter Morrison finds his personal and professional life taking a turn for the weird as his attempts to transition into adulthood are thwarted by conspiracies both real and imagined. In this madcap coming-of-age novel, where no one quite comes of age, Bacharach brings an “immensely entertaining” and “Vonnegut-like sensibility” (Library Journal ) to the “aptly surreal satire” (Dan Chaon) of hipsters, corporations, and American life in the adolescent years of the twenty-first century. “A disarming, intelligent and seriously funny debut,” The Bend of the World “marks the arrival of Jacob Bacharach as a writer to watch” (Bob Hoover, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).

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Praise, mostly, for The Bend of the World

The New Yorker “Briefly Noted”

Bacharach has a keenly satiric eye, and, some sophomoric moments aside, his book is a delightful study of extended adolescence.

Full-Stop review essay: 

It is this difference that pushes the novel back to the wandering human machines of Voltaire and Defoe.

Pittsburgh City Paper feature/review of The Bend of the World.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette review of The Bend of the World.

However, it also marks the arrival of Jacob Bacharach as a writer to watch. He’s nervy, unafraid to confront important issues and romantic enough to create telling relationships.

The Stars at Noonday review:

The Bend of the World is easily the best novel I’ve read this year.

LitReactor “Bookshots” review of The Bend of the World.

The Bend of the World is a terrific read – funny, disturbing, endlessly entertaining. The author,  Jacob Bacharach, captures the wacky essence of Pittsburgh: the peculiarities of Pittsburghese, the local dialect (in which the city is rendered as “Pixburgh”); the warpedness of its residents; the weirdness and immateriality of corporate life; the unshakeable bond between seemingly mismatched friends.

My interview with The Qwillery.

“The Bend of the World reads like dystopian Fitzgerald.” A review at Corduroy Books.