Spoiled Brats (including the story that inspired the film An American Pickle starring Seth Rogen) - Tapa blanda

Simon Rich is outrageously, lavishly gifted (Caitlin Moran)

Rich is seriously funny (GQ)

Arguably the wittiest American humourist of his generation (Guardian)

A James Thurber for our times, in Borges' suit, wearing Flann O'Brien's hat (Ian McMillan BBC Radio 3 The Verb)

I lolled - how fabulously funny [on Twitter] (Lauren Laverne 2014-06-10)

Simon Rich is a comedic shape shifter, adopting the plights of hamsters and hipsters alike, and Spoiled Brats is vividly hilarious in the way Woody Allen and Donald Barthelme are vividly hilarious. Simon Rich is also much taller in real life than you'd think. Like the reverse of an actor. (Sloane Crosley, author of I Was Told There’d Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number 2014-06-05)

I can't recommend any Simon Rich book - especially this one - highly enough. From the hyper-competitive rituals of Scrabble players to the laments of a grieving, widowed hamster in an elementary school classroom, each story in Spoiled Brats opens with a brilliant comedic perspective that only gets funnier, more fascinating, more surprising, and more insightful from there. First-rate comedy with a heartbeat, this is one of my favorite books from one of my favorite authors. (B.J. Novak, author of One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories and star of "The Office")

Simon Rich is the funniest writer alive (Matt Haig Twitter 2014-07-31)

If you don't yet know about Simon Rich, you just got lucky. If you do, you'll need no encouragement from me to get hold of his latest collection of short stories ... His sheer invention is captivating. Rich has a wonderful way of making a familiar situation strange and then presenting it in deceptively simple language, within a perfectly lucid, concise structure ... Genius ... He is a Thurber, even a Wodehouse, for today. Who could ask for more? You can give his books to people and just watch them laugh. Only after you've snorted through them yourself, though. (David Sexton Evening Standard 2014-08-07)

I discovered myself reading Spoiled Brats with a broad grin, only interrupted with an equally broad laugh ... A mix of gentle surrealism and smiley satire, the stories are bright, witty and occasionally tart. (Sam Kitchener Sunday Telegraph 2014-09-14)

Having skewered the problems of falling in and out of love in The Last Girlfriend on Earth, Simon Rich's next book is another subject we can all relate to: parents and their kids. From the perils of raising an actual monster in Manhattan - it's pretty hard to find teachers who really understand the talents of a five-year-old with horns and a taste for blood - to Sell Out, the story of Simon's ancestor, returned to life decades after an industrial accident involving pickling brine, these stories are inventive, witty and sometimes a bit too much like real life.