Welcome to the Great American Graffiti Novel Number one New York Times bestselling author Adam Mansbach returns with a blockbuster tale pf revenge, redemption, and the world's most beautiful crime. Dondi Vance is the son of two famous graffiti artists from New York City's 'golden era' of subway bombing. Recently kicked out of his prestigious prep school for selling weed-and his mother's Brooklyn apartment for losing his scholarship-he's couch-surfing his way through life, compulsively immune to rumors that his long-lost father, Billy Rage, has returned after sixteen years on the lam. But Dondi's old man really is back - what's left of him that is. A wizened shell of his former self, Billy is still reeling from a psychic attack by an angry shaman in the Amazon basin when Dondi finds him at the top of a pseudo-magical staircase in Dumbo. The uneasy reunion comes just in time- Anastacio Bracken, the transit cop who ruined Billy's life and shattered his crew back in 1987, is running for mayor. Only by rallying the forgotten writers of the eighties for an epic, game-changing mission can Billy and Dondi bring Bracken down. In this mind-bending journey through a subterranean world of epic heroes, villains, and eccentrics, Adam Mansbach balances an intricately plotted high-stakes caper with a wildly inventive tale of the time travel and shamanism, prodigal fathers and sons, and the hilariously intertwined realms of art, crime, and spirituality. Moving throughout New York City's unseen communities, from the tunnel camps of the Mole People to the drug dens of Crown Heights, Rage Is Back is a kaleidoscopic tour de force from a writer at the top of his game. 'An ambitious and immersive look into the New York graffiti scene. A finely detailed, richly colored work drawn with an artful hand.' Chuck Hogan, author of The Town 'A great, raucous ride-a lament for the hypocrisy of the present, as well as an ode to a lost NYC of the eighties, where street art and cultural chaos were in constant struggle against greed and corruption. The voice of the narrator-melancholy and hilarious, acerbic and wise-leaps out form page one, grabs you, and doesn't let go.' Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia 'A lush tale of time travel, mysticism, justice, the adventures of a boy and his dad-woven into the fabric of a bygone era in NYC. Fresh, compelling, and nostalgic all at once-a must for lovers of graf culture and those of us who lived it.' Pharoahe Monch

"Adam Mansbach--a young and mostly unknown jazz musician, rapper, poet, screenwriter, and novelist - had just had his first brush with fame from a most unlikely source: a book of rhyming couplets about putting his young daughter to sleep that had improbably sold millions of copies and shot to the top of bestseller lists. Just as his dreams of writing success were coming true - interviews on late-night and morning shows, standing-room only events, an audiobook read by Samuel L. Jackson and Werner Herzog (not all dreams make sense) - he received a call from his father, with news about his older brother, David. 'my father said david has taken his own life & i answered as if i didn't understand or hadn't heard. my reply was what? & he repeated it. there is plenty to regret & perhaps this is insignificant but i wish i had not made him say it to me twice.' This epic poem tells the story of a young man grappling with the death of his beloved and troubled older brother - but more than that, trying to understand the nature of love, family, and mortality itself. In his Go the Fuck to Sleep, Mansbach deftly captured for millions of readers the comic tension betweeen the love we have for our newborn children and the ways they drive us crazy; here, he uses that same sensitivity and ability to find a fresh language for common human experience to illuminate the search for meaning within grief at the other end of life. Mansbach finds himself facing a sudden void where once he brother stood without any way to make sense of the loss. This poem turns into his ritual of grief, his way of redeeming and understanding loss - and moving on"--

Tristan Brodsky, sprung from the asphalt of the Depression-era Bronx, goes on to become one of the swaggering Jewish geniuses who remake American culture, but slowly suffocates his poet wife, who harbors secrets of her own. Nina Hricek, a driven young Czech photographer, escapes from behind the Iron Curtain with a group of black American musicians, only to find herself trapped yet again, this time in a doomed love affair. And finally, Tris Freedman, grandson of Tristan and lover of Nina, a graffiti artist and unanchored revolutionary, cannibalizes his family history to feed his muse. In the end, their stories converge, and the survival of each requires the sacrifice of another.