His third book, "The Confessions of Max Tivoli", was released in 2004; a "New Yorker" piece by John Updike called it “enchanting, in the perfumed, dandified style of disenchantment brought to grandeur by Proust and Nabokov.” Mitch Albom then chose "The Confessions of Max Tivoli" for the "Today Show" Book Club and it soon became a bestseller. The story of a man aging backwards, it was inspired by the Bob Dylan song "My Back Pages." It is similar in theme to the Fitzgerald short story and the film "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button".