I met Shalom Auslander in 2013 when my wife Ferne Pearlstein and I interviewed him for our film The Last Laugh. Born and raised in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of Monsey, New York, Shalom documented his dramatic break with that world in scabrous, hilarious, poignant detail in his 2007 book Foreskin’s Lament: A Memoir. (Winner of The King’s Necktie Prize for Best Title.) His subsequent debut novel, Hope: A Tragedy (2012)—featuring a foul-mouthed Anne Frank still living in an attic in upstate New York—cemented his reputation as one of the darkest, funniest, and most lacerating literary voices in America today, drawing comparisons to Roth, Vonnegut, Heller, and even Twain.

Shalom’s unique background put him high on the list of people I wanted to interview for this site.

Click here for the rest of this week’s blog post. Facebook would not allow me to promote the title because of its profanity.

But they are OK with letting the Kremlin steal an election….