The Threat

A clever dark comedy about an unassuming New Yorker whose dull, stunted life takes wildly hilarious turns after he receives a death threat. 

Nathaniel Stein, writer for the New Yorker, dishes up an inventively absurdist, dark comedy about an unassuming middle-aged man whose life goes farcically off the rails in The Threat.

 

Melvin Levin is a single, conscientious, rule-following, 41-year-old with a bad back. He lives alone in a New York City apartment, and his social circle consists largely of bestowing good deeds upon an elderly neighbor. One night while Melvin is anticipating a promotion at his totally nondescript job, the boring, dull routine of his life is suddenly overturned when he receives a “plain little note” in the mail: “Mr. Melvin Levin, I’m going to kill you,” the note begins. “You’ve worn out my patients for the last time and your through…” The unelaborate note, complete with poor grammar, becomes like a “flag planted atop the mountain of bad luck” that was Melvin’s life. The threat produces a ferocious sense of anxiety in Melvin, who--having lived with “unerring politeness” and an “unceasing, almost superstitious rectitude, taking great pains to avoid rubbing people the wrong way”--struggles to decipher whom he might’ve wronged. Despite the chilling implications of the note, Melvin ultimately becomes empowered and excited by the idea of having an anonymous, formidable enemy, and he undergoes a hilarious life transformation.

 

Stein’s smart, clever first novel will charm readers with a simple premise that snowballs into a side-splitting, thought-provoking meditation about how one man’s seemingly inconsequential life finally overflows with grandiose meaning when faced with the prospect of death.

The Threat by Nathaniel Stein
Keylight Books (Turner Publishing), $27.99 hardcover, 9781684429691, 192 pages
Publishing Date: January 16, 2024

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review as originally published on Shelf Awareness (February 2, 2024), link HERE 

 

The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center

A thoroughly researched, eye-opening study of the deep value platonic friendships can hold in enriching and empowering personal lives.  

In her first book, The Other Significant Others, Rhaina Cohen, an NPR editor and producer, presents an eye-opening exploration into the many ways friendship, in various forms, can enrich and empower lives for the better. 

In 2022, Cohen attended six weddings in six months. Amidst these pandemic-deferred nuptial celebrations, where couples vowed to spend the rest of their lives together as a “we,” Cohen began to question societal expectations of love and its meaning. Was sex the essential component of a truly committed relationship? Was a person’s life somehow incomplete without a long-term romantic partner? Cohen, married, had always felt that friendships “electrified” her life. Thus, she began to examine the “we” of friendship: what draws people together on a purely platonic plane? What made some friendships endure despite the parties not formally professing a long-term commitment to each other?

 

Cohen presents stories from her own life--along with other historical and contemporary case studies--that deconstruct diverse friendships of all stripes. These include people of varying ages, races, genders, marital states, sexual orientations, and religions. She delves into co-parenting friends; shared homeowners; friends who serve as executors of estates; and even those who act as primary caregivers, helping to shoulder the demands and burdens imposed by illness and debilitating medical treatments.

 

Cohen’s well-researched, appealingly structured narrative stretches modern assumptions of love, making the case that a life bonded by friendship can hold limitless potential for a more fulfilling, deeply meaningful existence.

 

The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center by Rhaina Cohen

St. Martin’s Press (Macmillan), $29.00 hardcover, 9781250280916, 320 pages

Publishing Date: February 13, 2024

To order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review as originally published on Shelf Awareness (February 23, 2024), link HERE