An interview with Forbes.com.

And more to come!

If I may offer my biased opinion, I really think you should buy a copy. Not because it's the culmination of my dreams, or because it's the book I always wanted to write, though both those things are true. Lots of people dream of writing a book, many people do, and often those books aren't very good. While I can't say for certainty that Jewball is very good--I can't be objective on that score--I do know that it's a funny, breezy, exciting read, and that it absolutely stacks up with books put out by conventional publishing entities. I worked with great editors and a fantastic cover designer and made sure that Jewball reads and feels like something put out by a professional. There's pride and love on every page, and I hope you all can sense that.

If you'd download a copy, I'd be extremely grateful. If you'd tweet and Facebook about it, I'd be even more grateful. This isn't a book that's going to move via traditional channels. Its success won't and can't be easily quantified. But if the Internet does what it does best--spread the word about things that are awesome--then Jewball stands a chance in the glutted digital marketplace.

So enjoy the book, and, if you feel like it, help a brother out. Thanks so much. See you on the court, and hopefully not in court.

NP

I will make robotic snakes that have fake electronic poison that deactivates your armor. I will have dragons that’s breath deactivates your armor. Then they pick you up in their mouth and then they swallow you. Then you just land in a place with toys, books, TV, video games and snacks and stuff like that.

There will be one haunted house. And that haunted house will have a room with a robotic skeleton that sits in a chair rocking back and forth. The skeleton has a holographic knife and gets up, walks toward you, and then it slices your armor and your armor gets a fake crack in it and your armor is gone. It will make it unable to use for the rest of the round.

You will be able to outnumber your opponent and capture them. There’s going to be as many floors as I can afford. On the top floor, whatever it is, a lot of it is going to be some space thing with aliens that have weapons that do insane damage to your armor. There are holographic UFOs on the roof. They blast at you, obviously.

There will be giant birds that will swoop down, grab you, put you in their nest, and then if they like you they will let you go, and if they don’t, they eat you, take you to an area, and you’re kicked out of the game.

I hope you like my laser tag story.

Here's a profile of me from The Jewish Daily Forward, which made my mother kvell.

Here's an in-depth interview with Propeller Magazine, which made my mother say, "So what is this Propeller Magazine?"

And to round out the picture, here's a piece of Slate about the "rise of the yoga memoir." It rose a year ago, people!

In any case, I'm staying in a far corner of the public eye. That self-published novel about Jewish basketball players in the 1930s is gonna be my ticket!

JEWBALL
A Novel By Neal Pollack

From the bestselling satirist and memoirist Neal Pollack comes a funny, gritty noir portrait of a people on the brink and of a great American game just coming into its own.

1937. As the world prepares for war and the Jews of Europe feel the tightening noose of Nazi oppression, tensions simmer in America. While thousands of homegrown Nazis gather in groups like the German-American Bund, American Jews organize against this scourge, resisting any way they can. Meanwhile, the game of basketball grows in popularity, and Jews rule the court. In Philadelphia, the greatest Jewish basketball team of all prepares to confront the Bund, fists cocked. Here, the Jews write the rules. This is war. This is sports. This is…Jewball.

"Yes, son?"

"I have one goal in life. Do you want to know what it is?"

"I do."

"Well, actually, I have two goals."

"OK."

"One of them is to prove to the world that the Loch Ness Monster exists. And Bigfoot. And the chupacabra. Stuff like that. Which is why I want to be a cryptozoologist. Did you know I want to be a cryptozoologist, daddy?"

"Yes, because you tell me every day."

"Oh yeah, that's right, I do. Well, anyway, my other goal is to prove to the world that aliens exist."

"OK."

"What are your goals in life, daddy?"

"I don't know."

"Oh, come on. You must have some goals."

"I want to write books."

"But you've already done that."

"Then I guess I've met my goals."

"My other goal is to have the dog fart in my mouth and then have the fart come out of my own butt."

"I hope you never achieve that goal, son."

"Me, too."

"Yes, son?"

Why is there a giant piñata of Elmo hanging next to all those flowers at that store over there?"

"Because this is a Mexican neighborhood."

"Elmo's Mexican?"

"No, piñatas are Mexican."

"Oh."

When you think of a “yogi,” my dad isn’t what comes to mind, unless you’re thinking of Yogi Bear. Like me, he has excessive body hair and a preternatural fondness for luncheon meats. Unlike me, he’s the son of immigrants who barely escaped Germany in 1934, and he served two tours of duty in Vietnam. Also, he watches Fox News at least three hours a day. But when I was in Phoenix for Thanksgiving, my dad and I went to a yoga class together.

Bernie has been taking morning yoga at his gym twice a week for two years. He considers it part of his workout routine. Sometimes he runs on the treadmill, sometimes he lifts weights, and sometimes he does yoga. “My trainer said it’d help my back,” he told me.

“But there must be all kinds of other benefits,” I said.

My dad, possessed of the least-troubled mind in all existence, said, “Eh. I just feel good when it’s done.”

Usually, when I’m in Phoenix, I take yoga classes at a studio near my parents’ house, expensive, sweaty numbers full of snotty people, pretentious flow, and overloud music of the type favored by new-money pseudo-spiritualists. The classes are at my physical level, sometimes even above. Therefore, I sweat acceptably, but I’ve never had a moment of decent conversation or authentic human connection during or after. Meanwhile, my dad goes off to yoga at the gym and arrives home calm and happy while I’m still sitting at the kitchen table in my boxers, staring glumly at my can of Diet Coke.

This time, I thought I’d try it his way. At dinner the night before, I said, “Hey, dad, will you take me to yoga tomorrow?”

He looked pleased, as though I’d asked if I could go to the office with him to see how he spent his day. But since I’d never actually asked for that, this was a fresh experience for both of us. It would be a genuine father-son outing.

“Of course,” he said.

“Do you need a mat?” I asked. “I’ve got an extra in the car.”

“I’ve got one,” he said. “I’ve got two.”

“Really?” I said, as though I couldn’t believe it. “Where did you get them?”

“They sell them at TJ Maxx,” my mom said.

The mainstreaming of yoga was complete.

One night last month I made dinner for the family. As we sat down to eat, I started picking some choice bits off Elijah's plate. He put his hand over mine.

"What are you doing, Neal?" he asked.

"Call me daddy," I said.

"What are you doing, daddy?"

"I'm eating," I said.

"Eat your own food," he said.

"I cooked this, so I can eat it," I said.

"Let him eat his food," Regina said, and I bowed to the real boss.

A minute or so passed. Elijah said:

"Sure, if you go to a restaurant, and the waiter brings the food, and..."

"I don't want to hear about any more Spongebob episodes," I said.

"No, I'm making this up," Elijah said.

"Proceed, then."

"The waiter brings the food, and he starts eating it off the table, and you complain, but he says, 'I can eat it if I want, because I cooked it.'"

My kid was giving me shit. This filled me with great pride, because he was doing it with wit, and narrative, and metaphor. That's my boy, I thought.

"Touché," I said.

"Elijah," Regina said, "that's really funny, but it would be funnier if the chef came out and ate the food."

"Right," I said. "Because the waiter doesn't actually cook the food. He only serves it."

Elijah thought for a moment, and said,

"You're right, that would be funnier."

"Thank you, mama," I said.

"Unless it was a really small restaurant," said the boy.

The book got folded into a somewhat spurious "hipster parenting" meme, and I soon became a spokesperson for one of last decade's most dubious cultural phenomena. I found myself defending things totally outside my experience, like parents who take their babies into Brooklyn bars or buy them $75 designer rock-band T-shirts, and got placed in the cross-hairs of an odd blog rage at the kinds of parents who want to create four-year-old "foodies." Then the haters moved on, finding new things to hate, and I moved on as well, finding new things to whine about.

Now, thanks to Toyota, I can safely declare the era of hipster parenting dead.

By this point, you've probably all seen the ads with that towheaded child-monster who declares, "just because you're a parent, doesn't mean you have to be lame." The solution to that lameness? Buying a Toyota Highlander!

There are several ads, each one more obnoxious than the next: The kid goes through his parents' house, throwing out all their "lame" cultural possessions, including a surprising number of velvet clown paintings; he berates his dad for washing a wood-paneled minivan in the driveway; apparently, his parents catch on, and he suddenly becomes a child of privilege who watches his in-seat Highlander DVD player while his friend is trapped in a sedan listening to his folks sing "Angel Of The Morning" over and over again. Another ad, even more offensively, features the kid snarking lispily, tossing his "cool" backpack into his "cool" car, while another kid cowers in embarrassment as his dad implores him to get into the station wagon.

The first time I saw one of these, I had a very primal thought: I want to strangle that little fucker. But I shouldn't blame him. I should blame the people that green-lit his lines. If Toyota is trying to penetrate the psychology of the contemporary parent, it's way off.

"Yes, son?"

"You know what the government is doing?"

"What?"

"They're hiding the truth about aliens from us."

"Is that so?"

"Yeah, they think that if they tell us the truth, people will panic in the streets and burn down buildings."

"OK."

"Seriously, daddy. Don't say OK. The government is hiding. The truth. About aliens. From us. They have all the evidence about Area 51 stored in a secret location and will kill anyone who finds it."

"Obviously, you've been talking to your mother."

"She believes, daddy."

"I know."

"Also, there are robot dinosaurs that are going to eat everyone."

"OK."

"I was kidding about the robot dinosaurs."

"I know."

"But not the aliens."

"OK."

Watch out, yogis: The wickedly satirical Neal Pollack is among you. Pollack, who made a name for himself in the early days of the hipster literary journal McSweeney's and as a former columnist for Vanity Fair, braves the mostly female world of the yoga studio for a journey one can only hope will take him from boyish bad behavior quickly toward manhood. His new book, Stretch: The Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude, is that rarest of breeds, a yoga memoir--man style.

Though Pollack, author of Alternadad and a contributor to Yoga Journal, accepts his mantle as another "doughy 35ish white man," he's not really interested in the challenges of being a man in a woman's field (unless it has to do with eyeing "smokin' hot babes"). This book is all raucous internal dialogue that recounts his struggle to reconcile yoga with his practices of smoking dope, singing ribald country and western songs, and munching beef jerky after class.

Seven years along, he starts teaching his "own special brand of yoga nonsense" that combines his friendly, piercing humor with asana. Stretch's "rake's progress" and happy ending give women an insight into the male mind as well as wry comfort to the modern yoga dude.

--review by Eric Shaw

NP

Soon after yoga school began, three weeks that feels like three months ago, a small group of people asked the management if the doors could open a little earlier. They wanted to meditate, starting at 6:45 AM, to help prepare themselves for the rigors of the day. This particular subsection of the yoga world tends to operate on a little-old-lady schedule, light early-bird dinner and up before dawn, so the request didn’t surprise me.

Though I’d rather scrape my anus with a carrot peeler than do even more yoga, I also tend to move pretty fast once I finally do get out of bed. I’m usually one of the first people to arrive at any event, class, or function. Therefore, while I’m not part of the go-go morning meditation bunch at yoga school, I’ve tended to get there while they’re still at the end of their inward bliss of solitude. I sit on the front step and receive visitors.

The meditators have apparently noticed. On Friday morning, one of them came up to me as I sat on my mat, not stretching.

“Can you do me a favor?” he asked.

“Depends,” I said.

“For some reason,” he said, “your voice is the only one all of us hear while we’re meditating, and we were wondering if you could keep it down.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But you’re meditating, so…”

“I know,” he said. “Trucks go by and all. But still. You’re really loud.”