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Published Feb 2020
208 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
From the award-winning author of Loner and The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, a powerful novel about loneliness and friendship, gender and sexuality, and the political schisms that dominate our times.
In 1996, the unnamed narrator of Teddy Wayne's Apartment is attending the MFA writing program at Columbia on his father's dime and living in an illegal sublet of a rent-stabilized apartment. Feeling guilty about his good fortune, he offers his spare bedroom--rent-free--to Billy, a talented, charismatic classmate from the Midwest eking out a hand-to-mouth existence in Manhattan.
The narrator's rapport with Billy develops into the friendship he's never had due to a lifetime of holding people at arm's length, hovering at the periphery, feeling "fundamentally defective." But their living arrangement, not to mention their radically different upbringings, breeds tensions neither man could predict. Interrogating the origins of our contemporary political divide and its ties to masculinity and class, Apartment is a gutting portrait of one of New York's many lost, disconnected souls by a writer with an uncommon aptitude for embodying them.
"Wayne's latest foray into the dark minds of lonely young men follows the rise and fall of a friendship between two aspiring fiction writers on opposite sides of a vast cultural divide...A near-anthropological study of male insecurity." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Wayne excels at creating a narrator both observant of his surroundings and deluded about his own feelings. Underneath the straightforward story, readers will find a careful meditation on class and power." - Publishers Weekly
"Wayne emphasizes the gap between social isolation and an intense internal life, and uses the contrast to explore contemporary cultural anxieties in tenderly close focus." - Booklist
"In Apartment, class, ambition, and New York real estate are the components in one mortal's struggle to know the world and its surprises about who is outsmarting what. A terrific piece of work." - Joan Silber, author of Improvement
"Apartment is a piercing investigation of male intimacy, privilege, and literary ambition that's as witty and insightful as it is heartrending. I couldn't look away." - Julie Buntin, author of Marlena
"Apartment is full of keenly observed, stinging insights that compound in intensity long after the initial read." - Ling Ma, author of Severance
This information about Apartment was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
photo: Kate Greathead
Teddy Wayne is the author of Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, and Kapitoil. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers' Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, the PEN/Bingham Prize, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times, and McSweeney's.
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