Adam Mansbach's latest novel, The End of the Jews (Spiegel & Grau) won the California Book Award. Named a Best Book of 2008 by the San Francisco Chronicle, it has been called "extraordinary" by the Los Angeles Times, "beautifully portrayed" by the New York Times Book Review and "intense, painful and poignant" by the Boston Globe, and translated into five languages.

Mansbach’s previous novel, the bestselling Angry Black White Boy (Crown), is taught at more than sixty colleges, universities and high schools. A satire about race, whiteness and hip-hop, it was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005, and the recipient of an Honorable Citation from the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards and a PEN/Faulkner Writers in the Schools grant. A theatrical version played for three sold-out months at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, and was named the Best New Play of 2008 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner.

Mansbach is an inaugural recipient of the Future Aesthetics Artist Regrant (FAAR), funded by the Ford Foundation. The grant recognizes artists whose work "innovates beyond that which is already applauded in the present" and is intended to "usher in the next generation of artists who reshape the artistic landscape." He currently serves as the 2009-2010 New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University.

Mansbach's previous books include the novel Shackling Water (Doubleday, 2002), the poetry collection genius b-boy cynics getting weeded in the garden of delights (Subway & Elevated, 2002), and A Fictional History of the United States With Huge Chunks Missing (Akashic, 2006), an anthology of original short stories which he co-edited with T Cooper. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, The Believer, The San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, JazzTimes, Wax Poetics, Poets & Writers, Vibe, The Best Music Writing 2004 (DeCapo), Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip Hop (Basic Civitas, 2006), The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's 'A More Perfect Union' (Bloomsbury), Born to Use Mics (Basic Civitas) and elsewhere.

The founding editor of the pioneering '90s hip hop journal Elementary – called "the best thing ever published on hip hop" by cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson – and a former Artistic Consultant to Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies, Mansbach is considered one of the leading theorists and scholars of hip-hop culture and aesthetics. A dynamic public speaker, he has been featured by media ranging from NPR to HBO to CSPAN, and is a frequent guest speaker on college campuses across the country.

Praise for The End of the Jews:

"Smart... engaging... exquisite. Original in the way it explores the creative interchange between blacks and Jews and the give-and-take dynamic of artistic partnership. Mansbach's characters are sharply drawn... the creative partnerships among artists are suggestively and beautifully portrayed." —New York Times Book Review

"A beautiful, funny, heartbreaking book that manages to take on art, love, identity, class anxiety, being Jewish, and wishing you were black. Very few writers could have attempted all this without farcical results. Adam Mansbach succeeds, brilliantly. [He] displays a seemingly magical gift for writing about any place or milieu. One of the perils of fiction of this scope is that it can degenerate into faux social history and the characters become window dressing for the sweep of events. Mansbach is too good for that, his people too real in all their pain and energy and weakness. No plot summary could ever convey the emotional power of this novel, a meditation on identity, on family, and on art, and what it can cost the people who love the artist. The End of the Jews is an intense, painful, poignant book." —The Boston Globe

"Compelling... Mansbach makes this turf his own through powerful descriptive passages and keen social analysis. The book is a saga of relentless self-creation. It celebrates the exuberance of youth and tenderly acknowledges the difficulties of aging as Tristan's mind and body begin to fail him. Its intelligence and imagination are a delight." —Washington Post Book World

"There's an intriguing twist to this family saga. The End of the Jews is set against some of the great events of the 20th century, each of which figures in how the characters see themselves, their relationships and their art. Mansbach brings off some extraordinary scenes. Unique in my reading experience... The defining moment comes when Tris confronts the tension between his aspirations and his authentic self -- the challenge of finding "something no one can deny." That's the real story here, and it's one that never ends." —The Los Angeles Times Book Review

"It must be said, straight out: Mansbach's prose is a pleasure to read. Witty, gritty, often melodic, it rolls unapologetically through a well-sustained balance of crass and polished, real and imaginary, dramatic and humorous. Self-reflection permeates the narrative, which never takes itself too seriously but still strikes truths both illuminating and heartbreaking. The characters are round, rich, complex and intense. They are characters you can trust to come out of their battles intact, displaying their open wounds and their subsequent scars - many acquired through their interactions with each other - in their inner observations. And Mansbach's physical depictions of the numerous non-white characters are effortlessly and refreshingly descriptive, rather than classificatory, revealing a natural color blindness in both author and characters that should not seem as unusual in white-written literature as it does. This book, ultimately a story of art, family and personal integrity, offers Jews a chance to do two of the things we do best: laugh at ourselves and contemplate our place in the world. As a provocative, masterfully written exploration of cultural identity, it rightfully earns itself a place on shelves and coffee tables worldwide." —Jerusalem Post

Praise for Angry Black White Boy:

"Angry Black White Boy gives new meaning to the term black humor. A singularly jittery blend of urban wit and southern Gothic, it's a book of buoyant rhythm and dark material. A novel of ideas above all... The book covers expansive intellectual and geographical terrain, [and] its drive never falters. Mansbach gets us there by creating a tense world whose figures often are at cross-purposes. Angry Black White Boy, like the truest expressions of hip-hop, graffiti and jazz, is daring and original. It stings like its hero, Macon Detornay, a self-described scorpion of race." —The Boston Globe

"A remarkably successful remix of the traditional race novel. Mansbach monkey-wrenches the formula of the angry black man in the white man's world and incisively cuts to the heart of the issue of race in America today. [Angry Black White Boy] shows us where we as a culture have come from, the distance we have traveled, and how long the road ahead remains. It is first-rate satire grounded in the absurd notion that a simple 'I'm sorry' can start to make things better. The novel will make you laugh, cringe and read until the last page without knowing how it's going to end. It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate conclusion for the story of Macon Detornay, as the uncertainty of fiction dovetails with the uncertainty of reality." —The San Francisco Chronicle

"Mansbach is an able satirist of race issues... captures vividly the inhuman sadism inherent to racial violence." —The New York Times Book Review

"Painfully hilarious... brilliant... leaves readers searching for answers amid the absurdity... not for the fainthearted." --Time Out New York

"A hilarious, terrifying and brutally honest novel about race and American identity. Satire at its finest, it should be required reading for anyone interested in the microscopically thin line between love and hate that defines race relations in America." —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel