Read more
Zusatztext 49440706 Informationen zum Autor Keith Gessen Klappentext A novel of love, sadness, wasted youth, and literary and intellectual ambition-"a wincingly funny debut" ( Vogue ) Keith Gessen is a Brave and trenchant new literary voice. Known as an award-winning translator of Russian and a book reviewer for publications including The New Yorker and The New York Times , Gessen makes his debut with this critically acclaimed novel, a charming yet scathing portrait of young adulthood at the opening of the twenty-first century. The novel charts the lives of Sam, Mark, and Keith as they overthink their college years, underthink their love lives, and struggle to find a semblance of maturity, responsibility, and even literary fame.His Google was shrinking. It was part of a larger failing, maybe, certainly, but to see it quantified... to see it numerically confirmed... it was cruel. It wasn’t nice. Sam considered the alternatives: he had friends with no Google at all, zero hits, and he even had friends, like Mark Grossman, whose name drew up the hits of other Mark Grossmans, the dentist Grossman and the banker Grossman and Grossmans who had completed 10-kilometer runs. But Sam wondered?the afternoon was young and there was time for it?whether Mark Grossman might not be better off. A man of the future, he would appear on Google yet. There, he would say when that moment came. I, too, am Grossman. Sam: not Grossman. Sam: not even the size of Sam-of-old, Sam of last year, Sam of two weeks ago. After he’d failed to produce the great Zionist epic he’d been contracted to produce, after he’d stopped writing the occasional freelance article on the second Intifada, after he’d resumed his temp job to begin paying back the advance, there was, in the world, increasingly less Sam. [He backed away from the computer, into the dark, heavy tapestry that split his living room in two and composed of this pathetic little desk and shelf, with its mass of undigested papers, its pile of battered books?a tax-deductible home office. Occasionally he photographed it, this consolation, this small triumph over the masters of his fate. His Google, too, had been a consolation once: if in those heady days, a book deal in his pocket, a girlfriend of complex cosmetic habits in his bedroom, his little AOL mailbox was momentarily silent and unmoving he simply strolled over to Google to confirm that he still existed. Did he ever! Three-hundred-some-odd pages of Samuel Mitnick on the World-Wide-Web, accessible to people everywhere, at any time. Want some Sam? Here you go. Some more? Click, click. Even absolutist states, even China had Google?and there were a lot of people, he’d thought then, in China. But not enough, apparently, or maybe they just weren’t clicking through... for here he was.] He wasn’t due at Celerity until four, it was barely one, and he needed to get out. Tomorrow night his date with Christine, author of sex advice, he should really stay and clean up, clean himself up, but this apartment was more than he could bear. And, in any case, if Christine hadn’t seen the signs by now, she’d never see them. His unreliable car; his jeans with a hole in them just above the ankle. From what? He had no idea. They would have dinner, dinner at Fae’s, the place where people saw you in the window when they walked by. He looked too shoddy to leave the house but he left the house. Out there: no Google; in here: Google; on Google: no Sam. Or almost no Sam. Twenty-two. He was at twenty-two and plunging. He patted his pocket for keys and moved out the door. Sam had other problems, maybe, or anyway the world did. Enter “misery” or “illness” or “plague” and what you saw was pages upon pages. Palestine. Sharon-Arafat. “Occupation.” Put things in quotes and you narrowed the search, and yet, “Instructions for making a bomb to kill a Jew,” or, “Directions to the nearest village ...
