Karl Taro Greenfeld

This foray into the often violent subcultures of Japan dramatically debunks the Western perception of a seemingly controlled and orderly society.

Days and Night's with Japan's Next Generation

Speed Tribes

With an unflinching eye, Triburbia explores Tribeca, Manhattan, where an artists' community has been overrun by those made staggeringly wealthy by the world of finance. A group of fathers - a sound engineer, a writer, a career criminal - meet each morning at a local café after the school run. Over the course of a single year, we learn about their dreams deferred, their secrets and mishaps, as they confront truths about ambition, wealth and sex. Seen through the eyes of these men and the women with whom they share their lives, Triburbia shows that our choices and their repercussions not only define us, but irrevocably alter the lives of those we love. Wonderfully layered and complex, Triburbia creates a powerful portrait of a group of unlikely friends and a neighbourhood in transition.

Triburbia

A wickedly funny dystopian parody set in a financially apocalyptic future America, from the critically acclaimed author of Triburbia. In a future America that feels increasingly familiar, you are your credit score. Extreme wealth inequality has created a class of have-nothings: Subprimes. Their bad credit ratings make them unemployable. Jobless and without assets, they’ve walked out on mortgages, been foreclosed upon, or can no longer afford a fixed address. Fugitives who must keep moving to avoid arrest, they wander the globally warmed American wasteland searching for day labor and a place to park their battered SUVs for the night. Karl Taro Greenfeld’s trenchant satire follows the fortunes of two families whose lives reflect this new dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-financially-fittest America. Desperate for work and food, a Subprime family has been forced to migrate east, hoping for a better life. They are soon joined in their odyssey by a writer and his family—slightly better off, yet falling fast. Eventually, they discover a small settlement of Subprimes who have begun an agrarian utopia built on a foreclosed exurb. Soon, though, the little stability they have is threatened when their land is targeted by job creators for shale oil extraction. But all is not lost. A hero emerges, a woman on a motorcycle—suspiciously lacking a credit score—who just may save the world. In The Subprimes, Karl Taro Greenfeld turns his keen and unflinching eye to our country today—and where we may be headed. The result is a novel for the 99 percent: a darkly funny comedy about paradise lost and found, the value of credit, economic policy, and the meaning of family.

A Novel

The Subprimes

True has a singular path: to be the greatest soccer player of her generation. She'll need to make the Under-17 National Team, then the Residency Program, and the ultimate: the US Women's National Team. Otherwise she can say goodbye to the Women's World Cup. And True will do whatever it takes to be the top girl on the field. With the loss of her mother, True is forced to take care of her autistic younger sister while her grieving father wastes his time gambling. And high school isn't much better: her teammates are getting taller. On the pitch, she’s a soccer player first, a sister second. On the pitch, she's free.-- from jacket.

True

the killer virus that crashed the Middle Kingdom

China syndrome

Shin Takamatsu

Baburu. I figli della Grande Bolla

Recounts the author's relationship with his autistic brother Noah and the struggles their family endured when treating the illness.

A Brother's Memoir

Boy Alone

“I was twenty-three and I had set off for Asia to become a writer, intrigued by lurid tales of booms, busts, drugs, sex, violence, magic. There was a wicked sorcery in Asia, in the economic profligacy of the early nineties, in the way financiers and businessmen took a rapidly wiring and developing continent and looted billions, like a titanic parlor trick converting all that wealth into abandoned office complexes and half-completed shopping malls. . . . I wanted it all—the money, the sex, the drugs. And to this day I believe that if I am honest with myself, despite all I have learned the hard way over the past decade, I would still want it all again, the fucking and the getting loaded and the scheming to get enough money to pay for that life.” In the late 1980s, not long out of college, Karl Taro Greenfeld found himself stranded in New York, a failed writer before his career had even begun. His Jewish-American father angrily cut off support; his Japanese mother suggested he go to Japan to teach English. He did, accepting a job with no more promise than he’d had before. But he stayed in Asia for the next several years, working his way through a series of journalistic posts, watching a culture erupt before his eyes and facing his own demons. Through a series of vividly imagistic stories that range from the rigidly journalistic to the deeply intimate, Standard Deviations recounts Greenfeld’s experiences—both professional and personal—during Asia’s wild ride at the end of the twentieth century. Whether drinking Japanese cough syrup to get high with other Western expatriates, visiting a free-sex ashram in Bombay, or watching a former high school pal self-destruct as an equity analyst in Jakarta, Greenfeld evokes the spirit of a continent in flux at an explosive “bubble” economy’s end—and a man confronting his own identity and aspirations. Raunchy, insightful, eloquent and moving, Standard Deviations is an uncompromising work of cultural observation and self-exploration.

Growing Up and Coming Down in the New Asia

Standard Deviations

Julius Erving

With startling honesty and an unmistakable voice, Dr. J is a historic self-portrait of an American legend, Julius "The Doctor" Erving. With his flights of improvisation around the basket and his towering afro, Julius Erving became one of the most charismatic (and revolutionary) players basketball has ever known. But while the public has long revered this cultural icon, few have ever known of the double life of Julius Erving. Dr. J traces the inner lives of the nearly perfect player and the imperfect man—and how he has come to terms with both.

Karl Taro Greenfeld

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