A Replacement Life - Hardcover

"A memorable debut by a wonderfully gifted young writer...Boris Fishman has written a beautifully nuanced, tender, and often very funny novel about conscience and familial loyalty that will linger long in the memory."--Joyce Carol Oates

"Boris Fishman fearlessly tackles the grandest subjects, among them the nature of honor and the transferability of suffering. That he succeeds this well, and with so much style and grace, marks him as a writer not only to watch but envy."--Tom Bissell

"A novel that works beautifully on many levels. It's about the compromises involved in telling any story...Boris Fishman finds a new way to negotiate these tensions, a new language, even as he sometimes shows how he does it, a little magic act all its own."--Arthur Phillips

"A REPLACEMENT LIFE is a hell of a book. Told with amazing virtuosity, fun and serious, funny and sad, profound and eminently readable, it will make you happy until it's over. And then you will be sad."--Darin Strauss

"Fishman has talent galore, and an attractive love interest, funny set-pieces, a brochure-beautiful Big Apple, and spectacular, acutely self-conscious prose are all most enjoyable."--Booklist

"With a sense of humor and a sense of tragedy, A REPLACEMENT LIFE explores a hidden New York...There's a touch of Gogol here, a touch of Babel, a touch of Dostoyevsky, but out of these materials Boris Fishman has fashioned something distinctively and triumphantly his own."--Brian Morton, author of STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING

"Boris Fishman's A REPLACEMENT LIFE is so strong in voice, humor, and compassion that it transcends fiction's limitations to become something wilder and more contained--like life. What a remarkable debut--true and resonant, humorous and real."--Hilton Als

"Fishman invests Slava's moral quandary with realism and pathos, while resolving it in a way that's simultaneously unpredictable and satisfying...Like his protagonist, Fishman manages to keep all these plates spinning, finally bringing them to a clean stop with impressive style."--Shelf Awareness

"Mordantly funny and moving... Justice is eventually served in A REPLACEMENT LIFE along with plenty of black comedy, but the book is less about doing right or wrong than about where absolutes, moral or otherwise, do not apply ... impressive."--New York Times

"Fishman's firm yet light authorial hand, his gift for character and plot development, and his searing use of the English language belie his youth and his novice-novelist status. His witty dialogue and wry, believable descriptions leaven the dark, dense bread of the tale."--Chicago Tribune