Funny writer wins serious award
What if you’re the only one who thinks it’s funny?
That’s the worry that plagued longtime GMG fan Doug Brendel, known for his Outsidah.com humor site, after he wrote his novel Praying for Mrs. Mombasa.
“Even after your family and friends read it and laugh,” he says, “you still wonder if they’re just being polite.”
But then the book began winning awards, a total of seven, including a Global Book Award for Humorous Fiction, and the Gold Medal for Humor in the Reader Views Literary Awards competition (sort of the Olympics for self-published books).
“Eventually you say to yourself, Yeah, it must be funny,” Doug says.
Now the novel has received award #8: the International Impact Book Award for Contemporary Fiction.
“This award is extra-satisfying because it recognizes the book not just for its humor but for its place in our culture,” says the author. “I wanted this novel to make a strong statement against racial and sexual stereotyping, and especially with this recognition, I’m beginning to believe that the book accomplishes that.”
Noted as “a hilarious, surreal, irreverent look at how hope works,” Praying for Mrs. Mombasa has defied description by reviewers because it doesn’t fit easily into any conventional genre. The story’s neurotic narrator, for example, gets into testy tiffs with the characters.
Mombasa has also been controversial because “it features ethnic stereotypes, then turns them on their head,” Doug says. “Also, it seems there’s a 6-year-old who smokes Virginia Slims. Shocking, I know.”
Some North Shore bookstores have declined to carry the book. But it’s available in paperback at Dogtown Book Shop in Gloucester as well as Tidal Pages Bookshop in Ipswich, with the paperback and Kindle editions and the audiobook (read by the author) available on Amazon.
For more information, contact the author via Outsidah.com.
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Cover design by Kristina Grundmann
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“Praying for Mrs. Mombasa is a beyond-clever story, inside of a play that’s not actually occurring, in front of an audience that doesn’t actually exist. It will blow your mind, and assumptions, away.” —from the Reader Views Five Star Review
(photo by Cynthia August Images)
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