 | |
| Author | Keith Gessen |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Viking Press |
Publication date | April 10, 2008 |
| ISBN | 978-0-670-01855-0 |
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. [1] [2] [3]
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.
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."
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." [4] 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.' [5]
By contrast New York called the novel "self-satisfied" and "boringly solipsistic". [6]
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