All the Sad Young Literary Men, Keith Gessen
All the Sad Young Literary Men, Keith Gessen
1 Rating(s)
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All the Sad Young Literary Men

Author: Keith Gessen

Narrator: Scott Brick

Unabridged: 7 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/10/2008

Synopsis

A charming yet scathing portrait of young adulthood at the opening of the twentyfirst 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 concerning Russian revolt, 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, thwarted by inherited notions of greatness and memories of his broken family, finds solace in the arms of the selfless woman who most reminds him of his past. At every turn, at each characters 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.

About Keith Gessen

Keith Gessen is the author of A Terrible Country and All the Sad Young Literary Men and a founding editor of n+1. He is the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator or co-translator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and a work of oral history, Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl. A contributor to the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the London Review of Books, he is an assistant professor at the Columbia Journalism School.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Greg on January 25, 2009

I wanted to like this book more. Based on the five star system, I have to give it a three. In reality it's a weak three and a half stars, maybe a three point four stars. The book is about a three (I think, I was thinking of this book about an hour after finishing it, and I was trying to think how ma......more

Goodreads review by Nathan on August 20, 2008

The biggest disappointment about this book is not the obvious fact that Gessen could just barely fictionalize three different aspects of himself (obsessive Jew, obsessive Russophile, obsessive politically minded do-gooder smart person) and pass them off as distinct characters, but rather that the no......more

Goodreads review by Lee on October 23, 2010

This book -- expectations for this book weren't so high thanks to so many low-star reviews on here. But, hey, it exceeded expectations. This book -- it's not a novel or a collection of linked stories. It's autofiction in which a consistent authorial presence presents itself in three barely character......more

Goodreads review by Kristopher on September 15, 2008

Another summer reading recommendation from my boss, he billed this one as "literary candy," a description that I whole-heartedly repeat to you all. The strangely-titled book (reference to Fitzgerald, yet again!) follows a group of Harvard students who are swiftly cast out into the real world full of......more

Goodreads review by Oriana on August 13, 2010

So since I am a (still) recovering Gawker addict, I had to wait a while to read this. I guess there's supposed to be some kind of unspoken feud between n + 1 and McSweeney's, and since McSweeney's is one of my favorites, I had to let my knee-jerk hate-inclination subside, in order to give this book......more

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