All the Sad Young Literary Men
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
By the author of A Terrible Country and Raising Raffi, a novel of love, sadness, wasted youth, and literary and intellectual ambition—"wincingly funny" (Vogue)
Keith Gessen is a brave and trenchant new literary voice. Known as an award-winning translator of Russian and a book reviewer for publications including The New Yorker and The New York Times, Gessen makes his debut with this critically acclaimed novel, a charming yet scathing portrait of young adulthood at the opening of the twenty-first century. The novel charts the lives of Sam, Mark, and Keith as they overthink their college years, underthink their love lives, and struggle to find a semblance of maturity, responsibility, and even literary fame.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In n+1 founding editor Gessen's first novel, three college graduates grapple with 20th-century history at the dawn of the 21st century while trying with little success to forge literary careers and satisfying relationships. Mark is working on his doctoral dissertation on Roman Sidorovich, "the funny Menshevik," but after the failure of his marriage, he's distracted by online dating and Internet porn. Sam tries to write the Great Zionist Novel, but his visits to Israel and the occupied territories are mostly to escape a one-sided romance back in Cambridge. And Keith is a liberal writer who has a difficult time separating the personal from the political. Less a novel than a series of loosely connected vignettes, the humor supposedly derives from the arch disconnect between the great historic events these three characters contemplate and the petty failures of their literary and romantic strivings. But it is difficult to differentiate and thus to care about the three developmentally arrested protagonists who, very late in the novel, take baby steps toward manhood. There's plenty of irony on tap and more than a few cutting lines, but the callow cast and listless narrative limit the book's potential.
