"Judah Can't Tell is a morally urgent novel about fatherhood, ambition, and the long shadow of inherited failure. Cal Hoffman's Harris Belkind is one of the most scrupulously rendered American men I've encountered in recent fiction—alive on every page, and unable, finally, to look away from himself."

– John Burnham Schwartz, author of The Commoner and The Red Daughter

"With the veracity of a diarist, Cal Hoffman uses vivid stream-of-consciousness prose to dramatize the story of a precocious young Columbia student doing his very damnedest to stay on the right side of sanity. It's a story that touches the heart and the mind in equal measure."

 

– Doug Wright, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of I Am My Own Wife on Easy to Slip

 

"With prose that is granularly precise and almost unnervingly intimate, Cal Hoffman's Easy to Slip draws us deep inside the mind of a young man as he struggles against psychosis. Hoffman renders his characters' experience with such visceral honesty that a reader cannot help but feel the terrible cost of the battle and the triumph of the hard-won victory."

– Marisa Silver, author of The Mysteries on Easy to Slip

"Intricate, hallucinatory, funny and harrowing, Cal Hoffman's absorbing novel takes us deep into the psyche of an exceptional everyman, whose coming-of-age is at once singular and universal."

– David Auburn, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Proof on Easy to Slip

 

"At once memoir, novel, and reportage, Cal Hoffman brings us his remarkable gift for the most intimate story-telling: probing his own young psyche, through the language and tools of a writer, to unravel and overcome the hellish mysteries of psychosis. It is impossible not to marvel at this harrowing tour of the mind from deep within and the triumphant distance of recovery."

– Carl Bernstein on Easy to Slip, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, author of Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom, All the President's Men, and Loyalties: A Son's Memoir

 

"An uncle's sudden stardom has unforeseen effects on his nephew's family. As his celebrity soars, an impressionable boy must grapple with new definitions of success and an unbearable pressure to be special. When he arrives at college in the gritty New York of the 1970s, his mind is overrun by malevolent voices and visions. Raw, brave, and gripping, Easy to Slip is an uncommon exploration of adolescence, psychosis, and recovery."

– Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March on Easy to Slip