Synopses & Reviews
A charming yet scathing portrait of young adulthood at the opening of the twenty-first century,
All the Sad Young Literary Men charts the lives of Sam, Mark, and Keith as they overthink their college years, underthink their love lives, and struggle through the encouragement of the women who love and despise them to find a semblance of maturity, responsibility, and even literary fame.
Heartbroken in his university town, Mark tries to focus his attention on his graduate work on the Russian Revolution, only to be lured again and again to the free pornography on the library computers. Sam binds himself to the task of crafting the first great Zionist epic even though he speaks no Hebrew, has never visited Israel, and is not a practicing Jew. Keith, more earnest and easily upset than the other two, is haunted by catastrophes both public and private and his inability to tell the difference.
At every turn, at each character's misstep, All the Sad Young Literary Men radiates with comedic warmth and biting honesty and signals the arrival of a brave and trenchant new writer.
Review
"A fiercely intelligent, darkly funny first novel." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"[A]s clever and self-consciously important and intermittently brilliant as his magazine....One of the pleasures of Gessen's novel is how well he reproduces the speech patterns of brainy, left-wing Ivy Leaguers..." Slate.com
Review
"The themes of 'Like Vaclav' aren't quite as sustainable in novel form, but Gessen still manages to tackle serious political subjects while poking fun at how seriously his characters take themselves. Strongly recommended." Library Journal
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"[His] failure to sufficiently individualize the characters has the makings of a fatal flaw but is somewhat offset by Gessen's cutting humor. For more compelling male coming-of-age stories, steer readers to Nick Hornby or Tom Perrotta." Booklist
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"Cruelty and affection and erudition and innocence are so perfectly balanced in these stories, they almost make me wish I were young again." Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections and The Discomfort Zone
Review
"Here is a funny, felt book by a writer supremely attuned to the vagaries of love and history, or at least to the wounding abstractions that often seem like the vagaries of love and history, especially to overwound young men. The distinction, I think, lies at the heart of this powerful, surprising fiction. Whether we like it or not, Keith Gessen has written an engaged and engaging debut." Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land and Venus Drive
Review
"Before age 30, Gessen made his mark as a public intellectual and literary critic. But his artistic debut may dwarf those other, considerable contributions. Gessen's fiction teases out subtle insights into travails both political and romantic, and with powerful humor. Heaven will take note." Mary Karr, author of The Liar's Club and Cherry
Review
"[I]nteresting and agreeable...a considerably better-than-average exercise in slacker fiction....There can be no doubt...that [Gessen] has plenty of talent to work with." Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World
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"Complications abound, and some of them are the book's fault, but Gessen's style is good-natured and ripe enough to allow a satisfying sweetness to exist in these characters as they journey around the carnival of their own selfishness." Andrew O'Hagan, The New York Times Book Review
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"[Gessen's] achingly comic command of the hopes, vanities, foibles and quandaries of his peers has produced something better than fashionably maneuvered satire....He evokes the world's culture along with our own." Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times
Review
"Even as a novel of ideas, All the Sad Young Literary Men feels empty more poseur than purposeful. Gessen has smarts and ambition and talent. But until he gets his head out of his own backside, this literary movement that he claims to be leading will remain curiously inert." Dallas-Ft. Worth Star Telegram
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"It reminds me less of the Fitzgerald collection its name plays off than the movie St. Elmo's Fire....What this book tells about Keith Gessen is that he is out to revive the novel of political commitment, and bring to the bludgeoned Left a bit of lugubrious fun." Dallas Morning News
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"Gessen's writing is accessible, but he sprinkles in so much philosophy, politics, obscure figures from the Russian revolution and Israeli-Palestinian history that having Google at the ready improves the reading experience....[An] invigorating first novel." Cleveland Plain Dealer
Review
"Gessen has captured perfectly the narcissistic ennui of privileged youth for whom self-flagellation is an art form; or, as Dave Eggers remarks in the acknowledgments to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 'The Self-Aggrandizement Disguised as Self-Flagellation as Even Higher Art Form.'" Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books (read the entire New York Review of Books review)
Synopsis
A novel of love, sadness, wasted youth, and literary and intellectual ambition-"a wincingly funny debut" (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.
Synopsis
Four interlocking novellas (and twenty footnotes) form a richly comic Pynchonesque feast about love, academia, an elusive Tibetan novelist who might be a plagiarizer, and SOFA, a mysterious protest group whose very initials are ambiguous.
Synopsis
Four interlocking narratives set in four American cities form a richly comic feast about love, academia, an elusive Tibetan novelist—and SOFA, a protest group so mysterious its very initials are open to interpretation.
Bad Teeth follows a cast of young literary men and women, each in a period of formation, in four very American cities—Brooklyn, Bloomington, Berkeley, and Bakersfield. A Pynchonesque treat, its four (or more) books in one: a bohemian satire, a campus comedy, a stoners reverie, and a quadruple love story. The plots coalesce around the search for a mysterious author, Jigme Drolma (“the Tibetan David Foster Wallace”), who might in fact be a plagiarist. But how does the self-styled arch-magician Nicholas Bendix figure into this? What will happen when SOFA unleashes the “Apocalypse”? And whats to become of Lump, the cat?
About the Author
Keith Gessen was born in Russia and educated at Harvard and Syracuse. He is a founding editor of the literary magazine n+1. This is his first book.