Number one New York Times bestselling author Adam Mansbach returns with a blockbuster tale of revenge, redemption, and the world’s most beautiful crime. Dondi Vance is the son of two famous graffiti artists from New York City’s “golden era” of subway bombing. Recently kicked out of his prestigious prep school for selling weed—and his mother’s Brooklyn apartment for losing his scholarship— he’s couch-surfing his way through life, compulsively immune to rumors that his long-lost father, Billy Rage, has returned after sixteen years on the lam.
But Dondi’s old man really is back—what’s left of him, that is. A wizened shell of his former self, Billy is still reeling from a psychic attack by an angry sha-man in the Amazon 
basin when Dondi finds him at the top of a pseudo-magical staircase in DUMBO. The uneasy reunion comes just in time: Anastacio Bracken, the transit cop who ruined Billy’s life and shattered his crew back in 1987, is running for mayor. Only by rallying the forgotten writers of the eighties for an epic, game-changing mission can Billy and Dondi bring Bracken down.
In this mind-bending journey through a subterranean world of epic heroes, villains, and eccentrics, Adam Mansbach balances an intricately plotted, high-stakes caper with a wildly inventive tale of time travel and shamanism, prodigal fathers and sons, and the hilariously intertwined realms of art, crime, and spirituality. Moving throughout New York City’s unseen communities, from the tunnel camps of the Mole People to the drug dens of Crown Heights, Rage Is Back is a kaleidoscopic tour de force from a writer at the top of his game.
“Mansbach has clearly had a play date with Michael Chabon and Junot Diaz, and his fresh, witty novel is one that hip readers will relish . . . Laced with zaniness and cultural bling, it’s a nostalgic tribute to the glory days of street art, back when New York City had character . . . There’s no resisting [Dondi], ‘a nerd with swagger,’ as he riffs on everything from Madison Avenue to yuppies’ racial anxiety . . . And who knows, his swirling descriptions might entice you to pick up an old can of Krylon.”
—Ron Charles, Washington Post
“Exuberant . . . Mansbach’s paean to graffiti art . . . has a wild-style collage form that also ties in plot points involving a hallucinogenic vision-quest, the so-called ‘mole people’ said to live in the city’s tunnels, and time travel.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Hits the ground running and never stops . . . Mansbach’s sharp and edgy style carries this fresh story in and out of subway tunnels and through the grimiest neighborhoods of New York, bringing the New York of now and then together in full relief.”
— Heather Paulson, Booklist
About the Author
Adam Mansbach’s books include the #1 international bestseller Go the F**k to Sleep, the California Book Award-winning novel The End of the Jews, and the cult classic Angry Black White Boy. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, GQ, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and on NPR’s All Things Considered. He lives in Berkeley, California.