Name: All the Sad Young Literary Men
Rating: 2.5 (4 reviews)
ISBN: 9781407006680

Keith Gessen

A charming yet scathing portrait of young adulthood at the opening of the twenty-first century, All the Sad Young Literary Men charts the lives of Sam, Mark, and Keith, as they overthink their college years, underthink their love lives, and struggle through the encouragement of the women who love and despise them to find a semblance of maturity, responsibility, and even literary fame. At every turn, at each character's misstep, this assured debut radiates with comedic warmth and biting honesty and signals the arrival of a brave and trenchant new writer.

All the Sad Young Literary Men

All the sad young literary men

Gavin

Ivy League Arts boys fail at life, cut coupons, measure themselves ironically against Lenin – 

  At the same time, Mark had not been with a woman in many months. What would Lenin have done? Lenin would have called Mark’s hesitation a social-democratic scruple. It’s pretty clear what Lenin would have done.
 
- ‘Blech’, I hear you say. But it flows so smoothly that it’s hard to hold its tragic treatment of untragic subjects against it. 

It follows real life quite closely – we see [Al Gore]’s daughter at college, and a cartoon [Chomsky] –Lomaski in his office was sweaty, skinny, ill-preserved, drinking tea after tea so that his teeth seemed to yellow while Sam watched. 

There are gauche jpegs of Hegel, Lincoln, Gore inserted in the text, in an equivocal Safran Foer way. Meh. 

The women – i.e. the boys’ ideas of the women – are the fixation: they set the structure and timbre and volume of everything else. I think I am hard on it because I might have written it in a different life. Clever, but. (Extra half point for an unclichéd Palestine chapter.)

alina s

DNF - can’t believe my boy Keith wrote this garbage

Dennis Jacob Rosenfeld

Gessen's acclaimed debut offers a charming yet scathing portrait of young adulthood in the 21st 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.

Ellen Chisa

A charming yet scathing portrait of young adulthood at the opening of the twenty-first century, All the Sad Young Literary Men charts the lives of Sam, Mark, and Keith, as they overthink their college years, underthink their love lives, and struggle through the encouragement of the women who love and despise them to find a semblance of maturity, responsibility, and even literary fame.Heartbroken in his university town, Mark tries to focus his attention on his graduate work concerning Russian revolt, only to be lured again and again to the free pornography on the library computers. Sam binds himself to the task of crafting "the first great Zionist epic" even though he speaks no Hebrew, has never visited Israel, and is not a practicing Jew. Keith, thwarted by inherited notions of greatness and memories of his broken family, finds solace in the arms of the selfless woman who most reminds him of his past.At every turn, at each character's misstep, All the Sad Young Literary Men radiates with comedic warmth and biting honesty and signals the arrival of a brave and trenchant new writer.

All the Sad Young Literary Men

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