All the Sad Young Literary Men

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All the Sad Young Literary Men is the debut novel of Keith Gessen, the founder of the journal n+1 . It was published by Viking in April, 2008.

Contents

Plot

Gessen's novel centers around the stories of three literary-minded friends: Keith, a Harvard-educated writer living in New York City; Sam, living in Boston and writing the "great Zionist epic"; and Mark, who is trying to complete a history dissertation on the Mensheviks at Syracuse University.

Title

The title is derived from F. Scott Fitzgerald's third collection of short stories, All the Sad Young Men . This collection includes two of Fitzgerald's most famous stories about privilege and romance surprised by the chillier realities outside a university's gates, "Winter Dreams" and "The Rich Boy."

Reception

In The New York Review of Books , novelist and critic Joyce Carol Oates called the novel "mordantly funny, and frequently poignant," adding "in this debut novel there is much that is charming and beguiling, and much promise." [1] In The New York Times Book Review , Andrew O'Hagan wrote:

"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. Mark and Sam and Keith may encapsulate a certain generational passion for careers over values, but their adventures here often serve laughingly to set them down among the aging troubles of the world. There must, after all, be a way of life in which literary young men are not enslaved to the sad business of always having to do better than 'the people they went to college with.'” [2]

By contrast New York called the novel "self-satisfied" and "boringly solipsistic". [3]


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References

  1. Joyce Carol Oates, "Youth!", The New York Review of Books, May 1, 2008.
  2. Andrew O'Hagan, "N + 2," The New York Times Book Review, April 13, 2008.
  3. "Is This Book Worth Getting?". NYMag.com. Retrieved 2017-11-16.