The Best Revenge — Sol Stein

"It's good to be ambitious. Only remember, the nearer you get to the front of the line, the more people with knives can see your back."


That's Louie Riller giving advice to his son, Ben, who happens to be the most successful producer on Broadway. Louie Riller himself happens to be long dead.


"Joan of Arc heard voices," Ben Riller's secretary tells him. "Why shouldn't you?" But Ben isn't just hearing voices; he's having a running argument with the late Louie about life, love, and Ben's newest production, The Best Revenge, a play that has already gobbled up too much of other people's money and is in danger of closing before it opens.


When, on Louie's advice, Ben visits his father's master shylock, Aldo Manucci, we are suddenly involved with two generations of wonderful underworld characters. One of them pulls the trapdoor under Ben's feet, forcing him to choose between his moral and financial ruin.


In turn hilarious, poignant, and profound, The Best Revenge takes us on a vastly entertaining excursion behind the scenes of the Great White Way, where the drama is often more suspenseful than anything that happens onstage and where the best revenge is, of course, success.


In The Best Revenge, the author of the million-copy seller The Magician, out-triumphs all his previous work. Saul Bellow has said of The Best Revenge, “It reads itself.” And The New York Times affirms, “If you bury yourself in a Sol Stein novel while walking, you'll walk into a wall.”