A frighteningly prescient novel of today’s America—one man’s story of a racially charged real estate experiment in Detroit, Michigan.
“You get in the habit of living a certain kind of life, you keep going in a certain direction, but most of the pressure on you is just momentum. As soon as you stop the momentum goes away. It’s easier than people think to walk out on things, I mean things like cities, leases, relationships and jobs.”
Greg Marnier, Marny to his friends, leaves a job he doesn’t much like and moves to Detroit, Michigan in 2009, where an old friend has a big idea about real estate and the revitalization of a once great American city. Once there, he gets involved in a fist-fight between two of his friends, a racially charged trial, an act of vigilante justice, a love affair with a local high school teacher, and a game of three-on-three basketball with the President—not to mention the money-soaked real estate project itself, cut out of 600 acres of emaciated Detroit. Marny’s billionaire buddy from Yale, Robert James, calls his project “the Groupon model for gentrification,” others call it “New Jamestown,” and Marny calls it home— until Robert James asks him to leave. This is the story of what went wrong.
You Don’t Have to Live Like This is the breakout novel from the “fabulously real” (Guardian) voice of the only American included in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Using the framework of our present reality, Benjamin Markovits blurs the line between the fictional and the fact-based, and captures an invisible current threaded throughout American politics, economics, and society that is waiting to explode.

You Don't Have to Live Like This: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Markovits, Benjamin

United States

Harper

YOU DONT HAVE TO LIVE LIKE

Perennial

In print for the first time in the United States, acclaimed novelist Benjamin Markovits’s Playing Days is a mostly autobiographical narrative concerning the author’s season playing minor league professional basketball in Germany and the love affair with another player’s estranged wife that ushers him into adulthood.
Growing up in Texas, Ben experienced basketball as a mostly solitary pursuit, one he gave up after riding the bench in high school. But as his college classmates prepare for the real world, Ben is seized by an idea. All he needs is a video camera, an empty court, and his mother’s German citizenship.
Improbably, he lands a roster spot on a lower division pro team in Landshut, forty-five minutes outside of Munich. It’s Ben’s first taste of competition in years, not to mention his first job. And like most jobs, it’s defined by repetition, boredom, and gossip. There’s Charlie, the trash-talking mercenary from Chicago; the coach, Herr Henkel, a recently retired player anxious to justify his paycheck; and Karl (based on the author’s real life relationship with Dirk Nowitski), a gangly teenage prodigy flashing the raw talent that will make him an NBA star. As a group of men learn how to navigate one another, Ben falls in love with the young mother of a teammate’s child, and begins an affair that will change his life.
Wry, poignant, and tenderly observed, Playing Days is an evocative meditation on the joys of youth, the triumphs and terrors of post-college life, and one of the best books ever written about what basketball can mean to an American man.

Playing Days: A Novel

Dramas & Plays

Harper-perennial

Award-winning adult author Benjamin Markovits delivers a poignant coming-of-age middle grade story that will give comfort to anyone feeling like a small fish in a Texas-size sea. Perfect for fans of Kevin Henkes, Rebecca Stead, and Kate DiCamillo.
Twelve-year-old Ben is a shy, quiet kid. His life isn’t perfect, but he feels at home in his New York City apartment. Then his dad takes a job in London, and everything changes.
His parents separate, and Ben’s mom moves them back to her hometown of Austin, Texas. Ben’s simple life is suddenly complicated. He misses his apartment, his best friend, Jake, and his dad. 
Then he meets Mabley, who becomes a bright spot to Ben’s day. But when his mom starts working at his new school and making friends with his teacher, Ben finds himself at the center of all the problems the adults around him can’t resolve—and even some of his own. That includes joining the school’s basketball team, where Mabley’s best friend is the star player.
After being pushed around, looking for his place, Ben will have to learn how to stand his ground.

Home Games

Children's Books

Activities, Crafts & Games

Harpercollins

A book in which everyone gets happier in the course of the changing seasons of a single year. In prose that shimmers with emotional insight and precise observation, Benjamin Markovits unlocks the souls of three teachers and a student at a wealthy private school in Riverdale, New York. For all of them, fathers and fatherhood exert a gravitational pull. Biology teacher Amy Bostick has always adored her all- American dad, but now she pulls away as she falls in love with a rich alum. Another biology teacher, Howard Peasbody, finds fatherhood thrust upon him when he discovers that a fling seventeen years before has produced a daughter, Francesca, the best friend of one of his students. English teacher Stuart Englander yearns powerfully for the children his marriage won't deliver him, leading him into awkward intimacy with his student Rachel Kranz, who, independent of her teachers' dramas, is moving closer to her own father as he dies. Shockingly beautiful and melancholy by turns, this novel is a triumph―full of satisfactions of the kind that only great literary fiction can provide.

Fathers and Daughters: A Novel

Literary

W.W.Norton

A psychological thriller of passionate attachment and emotional cruelty, involving a love triangle between Lord Byron, his half-sister, and his wife. To dissolve a dreadfully mistaken union between two formidable egos: surely it should only take "a quiet adjustment"? Inspired by the actual biography of Lord Byron―the greatest literary figure and most notorious sex symbol of his age―Benjamin Markovits reimagines Byron's marriage to the capable, intellectual, and tormented Annabella and the scandal that broke open their lives and riveted the world around them: Byron's incestuous relationship with his impetuous half-sister, Gus. Their very different understandings of love and obligation lead them all―and the reader―headlong to a devastating conclusion.Acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic for his memorable prose and acute sense of character, Markovits here sets a new standard for the literary historical novel. A Quiet Adjustment is at once immersed in its period, an homage to Byron and his work, and a thoroughly modern fiction in the psychologically incisive vein of Ian McEwan and Colm Tóibín.

A Quiet Adjustment: A Novel

W.W.Norton&Company

A love affair based on a case of mistaken identity, set in an impeccable re-creation of nineteenth-century London. Lord Byron was the greatest writer and most notorious, scandalous lover of his age―an irresistible attraction for a sheltered, bookish, and passionate young woman like Eliza Esmond. Eliza believes she's met Byron on the doorstep of his publisher, and that her dreams have come true when he arranges to meet her in secret. But what if the man she believes to be Byron is someone else―a look-alike named John Polidori, who once toured Europe as Byron's doctor? And if Polidori is the true author of a wildly successful book everyone believes to have been written by Byron, who is the real imposter? Stylish, subtle, and seductive, Imposture is about ambition, fantasy, the power of artistic greatness, and the consequences of celebrity―by a gifted novelist of true talent. Reading group guide available.

Imposture: A Novel

Romance

“A first-rate example of a literary historical novel.”―Regan Upshaw, San Francisco Chronicle In his “Byron trilogy,” Benjamin Markovits lovingly reinvents the nineteenth-century novel, true to its perfect prose, penetrating insight, and simmering passions. Inspired by the actual biography of Lord Byron―the greatest literary figure and most notorious sex symbol of his age―Markovits re¬imagines Byron’s marriage to the capable, intellectual, and tormented Annabella and the scandal that broke open their lives and riveted the world around them: Byron’s incestuous relationship with his impetuous half-sister, Gus. Their very different understandings of love and one’s obligations to society lead them all―and the reader―headlong to a devastating conclusion.

The last piece of a literary puzzle falls into place in the final novel of Benjamin Markovits’s Byron trilogy. When his former colleague Peter Sullivan dies, Ben Markovits inherits unpublished manuscripts about the life of Lord Byron―including the novels Imposture and A Quiet Adjustment. Ben’s own literary career is in the doldrums, and he tries to revive it by publishing and writing about his dead friend, whose reimagining of Byron’s lost memoirs―titled Childish Loves―may provide a key to Sullivan’s own life and tarnished reputation. Acting as a literary sleuth, Ben sorts through boxes of Sullivan’s writing; reads between the lines of his scandalous, Byron- inspired stories; meets with the Society for the Publication of the Dead; and tracks down people from Peter’s past in an effort to untangle rumor from reality. In the process, he crafts a masterful story-within-a-story that turns on uncomfortable questions about childhood and sexual awakening, innocence and attraction, while exploring the lives of three very different writers and their brushes with success and failure in both literature and life.

Childish Loves: A Novel

Either Side of Winter

Contemporary

Faber&Faber

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Markovits, Benjamin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Markovits, Benjamin

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Markovits, Benjamin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

You Don't Have to Live Like This: A Novel

YOU DONT HAVE TO LIVE LIKE

Playing Days: A Novel

Home Games

Fathers and Daughters: A Novel

A Quiet Adjustment: A Novel

Imposture: A Novel

A Quiet Adjustment: A Novel

Childish Loves: A Novel

Either Side of Winter