“Diary of a Very Bad Year is a rarity: a book on modern finance that’s both extraordinarily thoughtful and enormously entertaining.”
— James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds 
“A great read. . . . HFM offers a brilliant financial professional’s view of the economic situation in real time, from September 2007, when problems in financial markets began to surface, until late summer 2009.”
— Booklist 
“n+1 is the rightful heir to Partisan Review and the New York Review of Books. It is rigorous, curious and provocative.” 
— Malcolm Gladwell 
A profoundly candid and captivating account of the economic crisis and subprime mortgage collapse, from an anonymous hedge fund manager, as told to the editors of New York literary magazine n+1.

Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager

Business & Money

Gessen, Keith

Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager

Business Culture

Harper-perennial

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.

All the Sad Young Literary Men

Literature & Fiction

United States

Penguin Publishing Group

Contemporary

William Heinemann, Ltd.

A TERRIBLE COUNTRY

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Penguin US

“A wise, mild and enviably lucid book about a chaotic scene.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times\n“Memoirs of fatherhood are rarely so honest or so blunt.” —Daniel Engber, The Atlantic\n“An instant classic.” —M. C. Mah, Romper\nNAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2022 BY LIT HUB & THE MILLIONS\nAn unsparing, loving account of fatherhood and the surprising, magical, and maddening first five years of a son’s life\n“I was not prepared to be a father—this much I knew.”\nKeith Gessen was nearing forty and hadn’t given much thought to the idea of being a father. He assumed he would have kids, but couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be a parent, or what kind of parent he would be. Then, one Tuesday night in early June, the distant idea of fatherhood came careening into view: Raffi was born, a child as real and complex and demanding of his parents’ energy as he was singularly magical.\nFatherhood is another country: a place where the old concerns are swept away, where the ordering of time is reconstituted, where days unfold according to a child’s needs. Whatever rulebooks once existed for this sort of thing seem irrelevant or outdated. Overnight, Gessen’s perception of his neighborhood changes: suddenly there are flocks of other parents and babies, playgrounds, and schools that span entire blocks. Raffi is enchanting, as well as terrifying, and like all parents, Gessen wants to do what is best for his child. But he has no idea what that is.\nWritten over the first five years of Raffi’s life, Raising Raffi examines the profound, overwhelming, often maddening experience of being a dad. Gessen traces how the practical decisions one must make each day intersect with some of the weightiest concerns of our age: What does it mean to choose a school in a segregated city? How do you instill in your child a sense of his heritage without passing on that history’s darker sides? Is parental anger normal, possibly useful, or is it inevitably authoritarian and destructive? How do you get your kid to play sports? And what do you do, in a pandemic, when the whole world seems to fall apart? By turns hilarious and poignant, Raising Raffi is a story of what it means to invent the world anew.

Raising Raffi: The First Five Years

Essays & Correspondence

VIKING

Struggling to focus on his graduate work while overcoming a broken heart, Mark repeatedly takes advantage of the library computer's access to free porn, while Sam endeavors to pen a Zionist epic in spite of his limited understanding of Judaism, and Seth pursues a relationship with a selfless woman who reminds him of his painful past. 25,000 first printing.

Viking Adult

A New York Times Editors' Choice Named a Best Book of 2018 by Bookforum, Nylon, Esquire, and Vulture "This artful and autumnal novel, published in high summer, is a gift to those who wish to receive it." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times "Hilarious, heartbreaking . . . A Terrible Country may be one of the best books you'll read this year." —Ann Levin, Associated Press "The funniest work of fiction I've read this year." —Christian Lorentzen, Vulture.com A literary triumph about Russia, family, love, and loyalty—the first novel in ten years from a founding editor of n+1 and author of All the Sad Young Literary Men When Andrei Kaplan’s older brother Dima insists that Andrei return to Moscow to care for their ailing grandmother, Andrei must take stock of his life in New York. His girlfriend has stopped returning his text messages. His dissertation adviser is dubious about his job prospects. It’s the summer of 2008, and his bank account is running dangerously low. Perhaps a few months in Moscow are just what he needs. So Andrei sublets his room in Brooklyn, packs up his hockey stuff, and moves into the apartment that Stalin himself had given his grandmother, a woman who has outlived her husband and most of her friends. She survived the dark days of communism and witnessed Russia’s violent capitalist transformation, during which she lost her beloved dacha. She welcomes Andrei into her home, even if she can’t always remember who he is. Andrei learns to navigate Putin’s Moscow, still the city of his birth, but with more expensive coffee. He looks after his elderly—but surprisingly sharp!—grandmother, finds a place to play hockey, a café to send emails, and eventually some friends, including a beautiful young activist named Yulia. Over the course of the year, his grandmother’s health declines and his feelings of dislocation from both Russia and America deepen. Andrei knows he must reckon with his future and make choices that will determine his life and fate. When he becomes entangled with a group of leftists, Andrei’s politics and his allegiances are tested, and he is forced to come to terms with the Russian society he was born into and the American one he has enjoyed since he was a kid. A wise, sensitive novel about Russia, exile, family, love, history and fate, A Terrible County asks what you owe the place you were born, and what it owes you. Writing with grace and humor, Keith Gessen gives us a brilliant and mature novel that is sure to mark him as one of the most talented novelists of his generation.

A Terrible Country: A Novel

Penguin??Books

A Terrible Country (Thorndike Press Large Print Bill's Bookshelf)

Humor & Satire

Thorndike Press Large Print

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 Seth, as they overthink their college years, underthink their love lives, and struggle on 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 and misstep in their circuitous paths through sex, love, betrayal, and the writing of books, All the Sad Young Literary Men radiates the comedic warmth and biting honesty that signals the arrival of a brave and trenchant new writer.

Blackstone Audiobooks

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Books by Gessen, Keith