JCO Reviews Keith Gessen in the New York Review of Books
April 14, 2008 by Randy Souther
Joyce Carol Oates reviews Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men in the New York Review of Books: “Beginning with its risky yet playful title, All the Sad Young Literary Men is a rueful, undramatic, mordantly funny, and frequently poignant sequence of sketch-like stories loosely organized by chronology and place and the prevailing theme of youthful literary ideals vis-à-vis literary accomplishment. In its seriocomic depiction of post-adolescent ennui it will remind some readers of Indecision (2005), the first novel by Benjamin Kunkel, Keith Gessen’s co-editor at n+1; clearly, both young writers speak the same language, if not precisely the same dialect. Its cover art suggests a witty New Yorker cartoon: a small male figure at the very bottom of a page bearing on his back and shoulders an immense black tombstone of a book titled ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN.”
