Synopses & Reviews
New York City, the early 1990s: the recession is in full swing and young people are squatting in abandoned buildings in the East Village while the homeless riot in Tompkins Square Park. The Internet is not part of daily life; the term "dot-com" has yet to be coined; and people's financial bubbles are burst for an entirely different set of reasons. What can all this mean for a young Midwestern man flush with promise, toiling at a thankless, poverty-wage job in corporate America, and hard at work on his first novel about acute knee pain and the end of the world?
With The Year of Endless Sorrows, acclaimed playwright and finalist for the 2003 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing Adam Rapp brings readers a hilarious picaresque reminiscent of Nick Hornby, Douglas Copeland, and Rick Moody at their best--a chronicle of the joys of love, the horrors of sex, the burden of roommates, and the rude discovery that despite your best efforts, life may not unfold as you had once planned.
Review
"This new novel is a testament to Rapp's ability to write in any genre with the same lucid talent....[W]hen this book is emotional, it is heartbreakingly true." Library Journal
Review
"Rapp runs the risk of exhausting the reader with imaginatively embellished details, but it's not necessarily a bad kind of exhaustion: The accumulation of offbeat observations occasionally produces a certain existential hilarity. A familiar story originally rendered." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"If all this sounds somewhat pedestrian, that's because it is, but Rapp's inspired prose and comic set pieces add so much flavor to this entree that readers will be left hungry for more." Booklist
Review
"Adam Rapp's The Year Of Endless Sorrows is an ultra vivid excruciatingly precise buildingsroman a time capsule of a young man's evolution a young man not entirely unlike Rapp himself. It is a story of roommates, and family and desire and the quest for meaning and definition while all the time bumping up against the ennui that is perhaps just the sensation of being alive and the daily absurd irony that is city life." A.M. Homes, author of This Book Will Save Your Life
Review
"I love Adam's writing. His ironic bohemianism totally captures the scruff and tang of the great unwashed struggling literati. If Joyce Carol Oates and Charles Bukowski had a kid, he would be Adam Rapp." Eric Bogosian, author of Talk Radio
Review
"Rapp...is a gifted storyteller. He makes demands on his audience, and he rewards its close attention with depth and elegance." John Lahr, The New Yorker
Review
"From The Year of Endless Sorrows, Rapp's new novel, I wouldn't have pegged him for a playwright or screenwriter....His prose is too rich gleeful, even with its own power and intelligence in nailing down the world. But there is something cinematic in the pacing...that, when combined with Rapp's humor and language skills, creates a delightful and disturbing portrait of the absurd years of post-college, pre-money life in a city." Jill Owens, Powells.com (read the entire Powells.com review)
Synopsis
A young man from the Midwest arrives in New York to take a low-paying job in corporate America in order to work on his first novel dealing with acute knee pain and the end of the world, in a coming-of-age saga set against the backdrop of New York City during the recessionary early 1990s. Original.
Synopsis
From "one of the more daring young stylists working today" (Time Out New York) comes a novel of New York in the early '90s and one man's brutally funny coming of age.
New York City, the early 1990s: the recession is in full swing and young people are squatting in abandoned buildings in the East Village while the homeless riot in Tompkins Square Park. The Internet is not part of daily life; the term "dot-com" has yet to be coined; and people's financial bubbles are burst for an entirely different set of reasons. What can all this mean for a young Midwestern man flush with promise, toiling at a thankless, poverty-wage job in corporate America, and hard at work on his first novel about acute knee pain and the end of the world?
With The Year of Endless Sorrows, acclaimed playwright and finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing Adam Rapp brings readers a hilarious picaresque reminiscent of Nick Hornby, Douglas Copeland, and Rick Moody at their best--a chronicle of the joys of love, the horrors of sex, the burden of roommates, and the rude discovery that despite your best efforts, life may not unfold as you had once planned.
Synopsis
New York City, the early 1990s: the recession is in full swing and young people are squatting in abandoned buildings in the East Village while the homeless riot in Tompkins Square Park. The Internet is not part of daily life; the term "dot-com" has yet to be coined; and people's financial bubbles are burst for an entirely different set of reasons. What can all this mean for a young Midwestern man flush with promise, toiling at a thankless, poverty-wage job in corporate America, and hard at work on his first novel about acute knee pain and the end of the world?
With The Year of Endless Sorrows, acclaimed playwright and finalist for the 2003 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing Adam Rapp brings readers a hilarious picaresque reminiscent of Nick Hornby, Douglas Copeland, and Rick Moody at their best a chronicle of the joys of love, the horrors of sex, the burden of roommates, and the rude discovery that despite your best efforts, life may not unfold as you had once planned.
About the Author
Adam Rapp is the author of numerous plays, most notably Nocturne (Faber, 2002), and Red Light Winter (Faber, 2006), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as six novels for young adults. He lives in New York.