About the Author
John Kaufmann has been a linguist, a cab driver, a teacher, a homeless person, an equities trader and a tax lawyer. He was proficient at two of those six professions. Since 2013, he has been a mobile home park owner.
In The Death of the Hired Man, the wife says that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. The husband replies, with a bitter double meaning, that it is something people don’t need to deserve. After he bought his first park, Kaufmann learned that, to a resident, a lot in a mobile home park is both of these things. It is also – Kaufmann learned – an entry on a balance sheet. It bothered him that it could be two things at once. To the people who live in his parks, they are home. To him, they are an investment. How could he square that circle? That thought nagged at him for years. It bothered him enough to write a book about it. The book is called Leisure Living. It will be published in November 2026.
The book is a meditation on business and real estate. Since it is literary fiction, it is also about the usual stuff that literary fiction is about – consciousness, sex, memory, the passage of time.
Kaufmann lives with his family in southern New York State and continues to write. If you give him a mezcal, he will tell you what is in the works. He is happy to make predictions, just not about the future.