The Long Corner
Description
"The Long Corner is a riveting read by an abundantly talented writer and storyteller."--Scott Burton, The Los Angele Review of Books
"Eerie and moving...compelling...An argument for the necessity of irony, risk and integrity in the production of art as in life."--Will Stephenson, The New York Times Books Review
"An enigmatic literary top that continues to spin after the last page...A triumph of sophisticated art."--Steven Kellman, Forward Reviews
"Scathing satire...readers will revel in the riotous upending of a self-absorbed personality."--Publishers Weekly
It is early 2017 in New York City, Donald Trump is President, and Solomon Fields, a young Jewish journalist-turned-advertising hack, finds himself disillusioned by the hollowness and conformity of American life and language. Once brimming with dreams and ideals instilled in him by his eternally bohemian grandmother, a survivor of the Holocaust who has dedicated her life to passion and pleasure, Sol now finds the senseless jargon he produces at work seeping into all aspects of the world around him.
Personal tragedy drives Sol to leave New York and accept an invitation to The Coded Garden, a strange artists' colony whose mysterious patron, Sebastian Light, seems to offer the very escape Sol desperately needs. But the longer he remains in the Garden, the more lines begin to blur--between reality and performance, sincerity and manipulation, art and life, beauty and emptiness--until Sol finds that he must question his past, his convictions, and his very sanity.
"Alexander Maksik is a sorcerer of the first order."--Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
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Person
Alexander Maksik is the author of You Deserve Nothing, a New York Times and IndieBound bestseller; A Marker to Measure Drift, which was a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a finalist for the William Saroyan Prize and Le Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, and the basis of the 2023 motion picture Drift; Shelter in Place, named one of the best books of the year by the Guardian and the San Francisco Chronicle; and The Long Corner, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and named one of the best books of the year by The Australian. Maksik is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and The Sewanee Review's Andrew Lytle Prize. His books have been translated into a dozen languages.