TELL ME HOW THIS ENDS WELL

TELL ME HOW THIS ENDS WELL is an ambitious, gripping, darkly funny family drama about the reckoning of three adult children with their profoundly flawed parents, set in a speculative, near-future America rife with anti-Semitism and terror, from an award winning short story writer.

In 2022, Jewish-Americans face an increasingly unsafe landscape. A flood of Israeli refugees into the country has brought deep hostilities and latent anti-Semitism to the forefront of American life. Amid this fraught climate, the Jacobson family gathers in Los Angeles for Passover, reuniting from around the world for the first time in years. But despite the backdrop of increased intolerance and terror, their immediate problems seem to be more personal than political. The family is coming apart at the seams and the three adult children, Mo, Edith, and Jacob, find themselves in various states of crisis, the result, each claims, of a lifetime of mistreatment by their hateful, undermining father, Julian.

The Jacobson offspring have begun to suspect that Julian is hastening their mother Ruth's demise, and years of resentment reach a climax as the siblings debate whether they will go through with the real reason for their reunion: an ill-considered plot to murder their father and end his iron rule once and for all. That is, if they can put their bickering, grudges, festering relationships with their partners, and distrust of one another to the side long enough to act. And God help them if their mother finds out...

Darkly comic, disturbingly prescient and incredibly accomplished, TELL ME HOW THIS ENDS WELL interweaves the stories of this very troubled family into a rare and compelling exploration of the state of America itself, asking profound, chillingly perceptive questions about where the world and each of us could be headed.

DAVID SAMUEL LEVINSON is the author of the collection of stories, Most Of Us Are Here Against Our Will, and the novel, Antonia Lively Breaks The Silence (Algonquin Books, June 2013). He's been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize and won an award for fiction in The Atlantic Monthly. He's received multiple fellowships from Yaddo, the Jentel Foundation, the Millay Colony, Ledig House, Pouch Cove, the Santa Fe Arts Institute, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. You can find his stories and poems in RE:AL, storySouth, The James White Review, The New Penguin Book of Short Stories, The Brooklyn Review, Prairie Schooner, The Toronto Quarterly, West Branch, and Post Road, among others. In 2008 to 2009, he served as the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. In 2011, he won the Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship for Writers. From 2013 to 2015, he was the Creative Writing Fellow in Fiction at Emory University.