Order Here for the Holidays!It's August 1974, the eve of Nixon's resignation. Jerry Rosen is facing prison for a messy, white-collar crime. Before sentencing, he has to tell his son Philip, a teenager at a theater camp in the Midwest. To the suburban kids at Friedkin camp, history is a game of dress-up. Tragic world events get retold as stage musicals--World War II as South Pacific, the holocaust as Fiddler on the Roof. Anne Frank is a role to play--Philip's friend Kathy Klein plays it to the hilt. For Jerry, who served as an army medic in Germany, and for the camp's compassionate matriarch Lila Sahlins, the past can't be sung away. Jerry's confession unearths secrets that will change the course of Philip's life and trigger a pair of haunting disappearances. A stunning novel set at the crossroads between two generations--one marked by what it witnessed, the other by what it missed.
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WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
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Within a few pages, I had fallen headlong into the world of the Friedkin Camp for Theatre Arts in Swallow Heart Lake Wisconsin. Todd London’s incisively drawn portrait of young souls in 1974, stumbling amidst shadows of the Holocaust on their way to American adulthood, blew me away with its spot-on evocation of the feeling of aching dislocation that colored my own Midwestern-Jewish girlhood. This is a killer coming-of-age story: gripping and compassionate. I haven’t stopped thinking about it."
Lisa Kron
Author / Well and the musical Fun Home
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“With humor and uncommon wisdom, Todd London links the temporal agonies of adolescence with the ageless horrors of the 20th Century and shows us how we can’t face these pains alone. A novel that harrows the heart. This one is going to leave a mark."
Octavio Solis
Author / Retablos and Mother Road
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In If You See Him, Let Me Know, Todd London creates an intricately woven universe drawn within the confines of one week at a children’s summer theatre. As with London’s brilliant debut The World’s Room, the reader is deftly catapulted to a precise space and time—one generation removed from the Holocaust with Richard Nixon imploding and Bernadine Dohrn exploding—yet for Philip and most of the other young thespians of Friedkin Camp, the most pressing concern is authenticating themselves as Sharks and Jets. Still, larger issues manage to creep into the isolated utopia: acquaintance rape years before there was a name for it, white-collar crime and punishment brought home. The events of that summer of ’74 and its long-term aftermath provide for the reader an engrossing journey, culminating in a denouement that is surprising, gratifying, and eminently moving.
Kia Corthron
Author / The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
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Todd London is a master conjurer of the lost—of lost youth, lost promise, lost Chicago, lost America. In If You See Him, Let Me Know, London has penned a memorably bittersweet and heartfelt love letter to a bygone age that feels both immediate and timeless, infused with both hope and regret. Populated by frustrated, frustrating and wholly believable characters and filled with clever, knowing theatrical references, it is at once an evocative road novel, a heartbreaking coming of age story, and an elegiac reflection on what America was in the 1970’s and what it ultimately became.
Adam Langer
Author / Crossing California and The Thieves of Manhattan
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NOW IN PAPERBACK
Paperback Release November 5, 2021
Available Now |
This is Not My Memoir tells the life story of André Gregory, iconic theatre director, writer, and actor. For the first time, Gregory shares memories from a life lived for art, including stories from the making of My Dinner with André. Taking on the dizzying, wondrous nature of a fever dream, This is Not My Memoir is a collaboration between Gregory and Todd London who together create a portrait of an artist confronting his later years.
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Adventure. Compassion. Hatred. Money. Friendship. Marriage. Theatre. Failure. Beauty. Revelation. Cinema. Success. Death. Creation. And re-creation. This is a remarkable story, of a life so deeply lived.
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