Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Fiction & Related items

THESE THINGS HAPPEN

Richard Kramer

THESE THINGS HAPPEN by Richard Kramer is a domestic story told in numerous original and endearing voices. A must-read debut novel from the Emmy and Peabody Award winning author, director and producer of "Thirtysomething" and "My So-Called Life".

Set among Manhattan's high-powered liberal elite and told through an ensemble of endearing voices, THESE THINGS HAPPEN is a not-quite-coming-of-age story about a modern family. Fifteen year old Wesley has moved from his mother and stepfather's home to live with his father and his father's male partner for a school term so that father and son might have a chance to bond again. But when Wesley finds himself unexpectedly at the center of an act of violence, everyone around him must reexamine themselves, their assumptions and attitutes. About the author: Richard Kramer was a senior at Yale when the New Yorker wanted to know if he might be interested in selling them the short story he had recently submitted. He was. He came to New York on graduation where, by chance, he got a job on a cruise ship, working as a singles host shepherding terminally ill patients back and forth between New York and Bermuda. While on the ship he read everything ever written by Graham Greene and wrote a contemporary version of PERE GORIOT, set in New York, that was optioned by Francois Truffaut. He also wrote a script, for fun, for the television series FAMILY. As he knew nothing about writing scripts this one, of course, sold, so he was flown out to Los Angeles where, over time, he wrote many films that got right to the edge of being made but somehow never went over the edge. He was more or less on his way back east when his friends Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz called and said “Come produce and write this new show with us that won’t get on the air but will make us a few bucks. And be fun to do. It’s about nothing.” That was thirtysomething, for which Mr. Kramer was head writer, producer, and director, and for which he won an Emmy Award. From there he went on to adapt and produce Armistead Maupin’s TALES OF THE CITY books for Channel Four/PBS (two Emmy nominations, Peabody Award). He produced and wrote for the series MY SO-CALLED LIFE, (Peabody Award), and produced and wrote for the series ONCE AND AGAIN. In the past few years Mr. Kramer has been dividing his time between the east and west coasts. Three years ago he went to graduate school to become a therapist, wanting to have a life where he could say “We have to stop now,” if only to himself. He went for a year, then, on a vacation in Italy, was felled by a rare heart infection in Arrezzo, which has a wonderful Piero chapel and, more importantly, an excellent cardiological hospital six minutes away over cobbled Etruscan roads. That took a year from his life, during which time he began to write this book.

Available products
Book Published 2012-11-01 by Unbridled Books

Comments

Beneath its glimmering wit and knowing portrayal of a very particular New York, Richard Kramer's beguiling first novel is a fresh, brave love story: a story of the many complex ways in which men--and boys reaching toward becoming men--love one another. In his wonderful assembly of fathers, sons, husbands, longtime companions, and adolescents grappling with the heavenly hell of sexual awakening, there is precious little territory of the male heart into which Kramer does not venture with audacity and tenderness. I closed this book feeling delighted, moved, and oddly privileged to have had such a wise escort on a journey both familiar and utterly foreign!

HBO and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions is developing Richard Kramer’s novel THESE THINGS HAPPEN for a television series. The deadline.com article is below. Read more...

A jewel of a book: incisive, funny, wise, and moving. It prompted me, on almost every page, to ask the question I’m most glad to find myself asking of a novel, How did the writer know that?

A dazzling tour de force, alternately exhilarating and devastating, and, at all turns, revelatory.

Like the two main characters it so unforgettably etches, Richard Kramer's first novel exemplifies the virtues of both youth and maturity: it manages to be both wise and wide-eyed, sage and sensitive, deeply funny and, in the end, disarmingly touching. The man behind "thirtysomething" and "My So-Called Life" has taken his trademark qualities--the grownup's shrewdness about the way the world works and the adolescent's disarming emotional nakedness--and fashioned from them a very affecting work of fiction.

A domestic story told in numerous original and endearing voices... so special.

Artful, thoughtful and extremely funny, this is a wonderful first novel about artifice and the discovery of true feeling, about the roles we play and what we choose to make of them.

Like the two main characters it so unforgettably etches, Richard Kramer's first novel exemplifies the virtues of both youth and maturity: it manages to be both wise and wide-eyed, sage and sensitive, deeply funny and, in the end, disarmingly touching. The man behind "thirtysomething" and "My So-Called Life" has taken his trademark qualities--the grownup's shrewdness about the way the world works and the adolescent's disarming emotional nakedness--and fashioned from them a very affecting work of fiction.

Fans of Kramer’s work should enjoy the novel’s clever, quirky dialogue, the characters’ fervid inner monologues and the affectionate depictions of city life. A decidedly 21st-century family tale, THESE THINGS HAPPEN is a poignant portrait of love in all its forms.