Felber, Adam

PERSONAL:

Male.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Hollywood, CA.

CAREER:

Writer, novelist, comic, commentator, and television writer. Talk Show with Spike Feresten, Fox Television, writer and performer. Regular panelist on National Public Radio's (NPR) Wait, Wait … Don't Tell Me. Guest on radio programs, including NPR's This American Life.

WRITINGS:

Schrödinger's Ball (novel), Random House Trade Paperbacks (New York, NY), 2006.

Television screenwriter for programs such as Arthur, Wishbone, The Apprentice, and Smoking Gun TV.

SIDELIGHTS:

Radio commentator, humorist, and television screenwriter Adam Felber is a debut novelist whose first book, Schrödinger's Ball, is "illogically, warmly entertaining," commented a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. With physics as its metaphor and science as the underpinning, the book tells the story of four young, twenty-something adults as they search for meaning in their lives and interact with each other, their world, and an extensive cast of secondary and supporting characters. Grant is a computer geek hopelessly floundering in his adherence to technology. Arlene is high-strung and socially awkward, while Deborah is legendary for her marathon sexual exploits. The fourth member of the quartet, Johnny Felix Decate, is a musician who has suffered an unfortunate guncleaning accident, but whose demise, like that of Schrödinger's famous cat, has yet to be observed and brought into existence. With Johnny acting only slightly odder than usual, the four friends encounter characters such as Earl Anderson, the former president of the Free State of Montana; a rat named Lester who hungers after a piece of meat he has located; Bernie, a homeless, schizophrenic prophet of genuine insight; and Erwin Schrödinger himself, who takes up with a woman he met at a yogurt shop and starts selling palm-sized molecules to those who want them. The novel's characters all finally emerge from Felber's raucous narrative and come together at the site of a truck crash that has profound effects for all. "But it's not exactly a climax," observed a Kirkus Reviews contributor; rather, the crash is just one more event in "an assortment of vignettes designed to expose the beautiful randomness of existence." Reviewer Kevin Greczek, writing in Library Journal, commented favorably on the novel's "delightfully intellectual zaniness," while the Kirkus Reviews critic called it a "raucous, willfully absurd debut." Alison Block, writing in Booklist, concluded that Felber's "wit and linguistic acrobatics make this clever mind-bender worth the ride."