HarperCollins Adult
The CrusadesStuffed
Browse Titles

Making Toast

Roger Rosenblatt

Print PDF
Print PDF
 Export Backlist to Excel
Making Toast
 

Marketing Campaign

• National Television Campaign
• National Radio Interviews, Including NPR
• National Print Campaign and Reviews
• Academic and Library Marketing
• Online Advertising and Promotion, Including E-card, to Literary Blogs and Sites
• Outreach to Grief Support Groups
• Advance Reader’s Edition
 

Roger Rosenblatt

Roger Rosenblatt’s essays for Time magazine and PBS have won two George Polk Awards, a Peabody, and an Emmy. He is the author of six Off-Broadway plays and 13 books, including the national bestseller Rules for Aging and Children of War, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has written two satirical novels, Beet and Lapham Rising, also a national bestseller. In 2008 he was appointed Distinguished Professor of English and Writing at Stony Brook University.



 

Backlist

Beet
Beet
Roger Rosenblatt
  • Trade PB
  • 9780061344282
  • 1/27/2009
  • $13.99 ($17.99 Can.)
  • Marketing Code: AV
Lapham Rising
Lapham Rising
Roger Rosenblatt
  • Trade PB
  • 9780060833626
  • 5/22/2007
  • $13.95 ($17.99 Can.)
  • Marketing Code: AV
 

Also Available

Extras


Quotes

"A gem of a memoir, deceptively simple in its proportions, but in truth: sad, funny, brave and luminous. . . . Without self-pity or sanctimony, the author reminds us in this rare and generous book that there is no remedy for death. The way to live, he concludes, is 'to value the passing time"; the best we can do is to pay attention and to love each other well.'"


- Los Angeles Times
"There are circumstances in which prose is poetry, and the unornamented candor of Rosenblatt's writing slowly attains to a sober sort of lyricism. But this is more than just a moving book. It is also a useful book. Perhaps because beauty is the antithesis of use, there is something especially marvelous about useful beauty. MAKING TOAST, a memoir of helpfulness, may actually help some of the people who read it. There are not many books that are important in this way: Helen Garner's The Spare Room, a shatteringly honest and artful account of assisting a friend through her dying, is another such book. The epigraph to Garner's austere masterpiece, from Elizabeth Jolley, captures also the large spirit of Rosenblatt's book: "It is a privilege to prepare the place where someone else will sleep." Rosenblatt's children and grandchildren chose their father and grandfather well. His toast is buttered with wisdom. "


- Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic
"It may seem odd to call a book about such a tragic event charming, but it is. There is indeed life after death, and Rosenblatt proves that without a doubt."


- USA Today
"[MAKING TOAST] is about coping with grief, caring for children and creating an ad hoc family for as long as this particular configuration is required, but mostly it's a textbook on what constitutes perfect writing and how to be a class act."


- Carolyn See, The Washington Post
"[An] exquisite, restrained little memoir filled with both hurt and humor."


- NPR's All Things Considered
"Sad but somehow triumphant, this memoir is a celebration of family, and of how, even in the deepest sorrow, we can discover new links of love and the will to go on."


- O, The Oprah Magazine
"Hauntingly lovely."


- Christian Science Monitor
"Making Toast is written so forthrightly, but so delicately, that you feel you’re a part of this family. Rosenblatt’s writing turns a story that might be too uncomfortable to read, or too sentimental, in the direction of simple facts that required sophisticated, but instinctual, responses. How lucky some of us are to see clearly what needs to be done, even in the saddest, most life-altering circumstances."


- Ann Beattie
"Roger Rosenblatt means, I believe, to teach patience, love, a fondness for the quotidian, and a deftness for saving the lost moment—when faced with lacerating loss. These are brilliant lessons, fiercely learned. But Rosenblatt comes to them and to us—suitably—with immense humility."
 


- Richard Ford
“The blow of the improbable: a highly achieved daughter who is the mother of very young children is tragically struck down in her radiant prime. Husband, children, and grandparents are bereft, and what can come of such a maelstrom of grief? Making Toast, Roger Rosenblatt’s piercing account of broken hearts, records how love, hurt, and responsibility can, through antic wit and tenderness, turn a shattered household into a luminous new-made family.”


- Cynthia Ozick
"A beautiful account of human loss, measured by the steady effort to fill in the void.


- Publishers Weekly