The Celebrants

Informationen zum Autor Steven Rowley Klappentext A Big Chill for our times, celebrating decades-long friendships and promises—especially to ourselves—by the bestselling and celebrated author of The Guncle. It’s been a minute—or five years—since Jordan Vargas last saw his college friends, and twenty-eight years since their graduation when their adult lives officially began. Now Jordan, Jordy, Naomi, Craig, and Marielle find themselves at the brink of a new decade, with all the responsibilities of adulthood, yet no closer to having their lives figured out. That’s not for a lack of trying. Over the years they’ve reunited in Big Sur to honor a decades old pact to throw each other living “funerals,” celebrations to remind themselves that life is worth living—and living well. But this reunion is different. They’re not gathered as they were to bolster Marielle as her marriage crumbled, to lift Naomi after her parents died, or to intervene when Craig pleaded guilty to art fraud. This time, Jordan is sitting on a secret that will upend their pact. A deeply honest tribute to the growing pains of selfhood and the people who keep us going, coupled with Steven Rowley’s signature humor and heart, The Celebrants is a moving tale about the false invincibility of youth, and the beautiful ways in which friendship helps us celebrate our lives, even amid the deepest challenges of living. Leseprobe YESTERDAY ONCE MORE (Jordan, 2023) He was an astronaut, he imagined, like in one of those movies; his mission took him to a distant planet on the far reaches of the solar system, Saturn, perhaps, or Neptune. He was gone a nominal amount of time-three years, maybe five, significant but not interminable-but somehow everyone Jordan Vargas knew on Earth had aged a lifetime while he was in space. Naomi with her readers, struggling to figure out the television's remote as if the technology had eluded her, her irritated face twisted in frustration. Craig in the kitchen employing the flashlight on his phone to read take-out menus, muttering the whole time about the Big Sur retreat's soft ambient light while confusing yellow curry with green. What was the difference? The color, yes, obviously. But one had more turmeric. What the hell color is turmeric? Marielle educating them in great detail about the kittens she'd brought for the weekend. They were born without eyes, a condition called microphthalmia , she explained, c aused by a genetic mutation that can sometimes result in smaller-than-usual tongues . And Jordan Tosic, loyal Jordy, his husband and other half, the man who made them the Jordans to so many. (Should we invite the Jordans ? You don't know the Jordans ?! We love the Jordans !) Jordy's metamorphosis, like Jordan's own, was less shocking, as they'd been together since college and had witnessed each other aging slowly, each having had ample time to adjust to the other's weathering like the wearing of a beloved chair's upholstery over time. Of course Jordan Vargas wasn't an astronaut, or anything close to it. He was a public relations executive, bound to Earth by gravity, a mortgage, a business he owned with his husband, and aging immigrant parents who moved the family from Bogotá when Jordan was eight to give him and his brother a better life. He was someone who vibrated not from sitting above liquid-fueled cryogenic rocket engines aboard a shuttle ready to launch, but with the genuine thrill of securing his clients ample media coverage. Or at least he used to, until slowly over the years he came to resent both the clickbaitification of journalism and the troublesome clients whom he saw more as crises than people. And it wasn't space travel that kept him away from these friends, a dangerous mission (as poetic as it might be to imagine), so much as his own busy life and the sad fact that friends-even b...

Product details

• Authors: Steven Rowley
• Publisher: Putnam Publishing Group
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 16.05.2023
• EAN: 9780593714478
• ISBN: 978-0-593-71447-8
• No. of pages: 320
• Dimensions: 152 mm x 229 mm x 21 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature > Contemporary literature (from 1945)