More in ‘Keith Gessen’

Styles exist only in retrospect. A Late Style is only late if the author dies immediately after, or, more dramatically, during, the work. An Early Style is only early if the author grows and changes. Regionalisms, and ethnic or national literatures, seem artifactual: today, French and German literatures are remarkably similar; with the invention of ...

Sam, one of the frustrated antiheroes of Keith Gessen’s new novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, spends most of his twenties attempting to write “the first great Zionist epic.” His peer Mark is stuck in Syracuse, stymied by his efforts to finish a dissertation on the Russian Revolution. The novel’s third protagonist, Keith, is ...