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From the acclaimed author of the "wild, gorgeous" (San Francisco Chronicle) Marlena comes a novel about a young woman looking for a father and finding herself—a vivid, uncompromising exploration of sex, money, power, and art.
The right book at the right time can change your life.
Will Miles is trapped. Trapped in tiny Greening, Michigan, where a toxic high school rumor has turned her into a social exile. Trapped in the predictable routines of her mother, and under the unrelenting gaze of her mother's increasingly sinister boyfriend. But when Will stumbles across the early poems of Nathaniel Fellow, a famous writer forty years her senior who also grew up in Greening, she feels she's found a kindred spirit. A passing comment from her mother only adds to Will's fascination: Is Nathaniel the father she's never known?
Will orchestrates a plan to track Nathaniel down, following in his footsteps to New York City, where she learns he's not the answer to her past, not the way she imagined. But their meeting sparks a complicated, consuming relationship that gives Will sidelong access to a world she's only ever imagined: of writers and intellectuals, a financial safety net, and, most intoxicatingly, a glimpse into her own potential. But who is Nathaniel Fellow, off the page? And what will shaping her life to suit his cost her? When a torrent of information about his past threatens not just her life with Nathaniel, but the story she tells herself about him, Will is faced with a choice that will change everything.
A gripping novel about ambition, parents, and children, and all the ways women still pay for men's mistakes, Famous Men traces one woman's journey to the truth of where she comes from, what she's capable of, and how she might start again.
"[Buntin's] language is superb; for all Will's self-assuredness, the precarity of her situation, tied so inextricably to Nathaniel, is rendered in such exacting and heartrending detail as to make the reader's teeth ache...A searing, brilliant novel about power, and stories, and who gets to tell them." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Buntin intimately captures a young woman's leap into adulthood and its concurrent, commonplace cruelties. Her gutsy, nuanced, and bravura take on the #MeToo novel remarkably portrays the queasy churn of our modern reckonings within one woman and the world at large, online and in life. As Will harnesses her own narrative, readers grasp along with her the audacity inherent in every story women tell about women, beginning with the idea they're worth telling at all. Hers is a thrill to read and think about." —Booklist (starred review)
"Haunting and knife-bright, Famous Men renders womanhood with unsettling clarity and reckons with the absolute ache of becoming." —Kiley Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Such a Fun Age
"Famous Men is the story of a young woman who wants to remake herself in the mold of her idol—a story of sex, art, ambition, and compromise that is both deeply discomfiting and unbelievably compelling. Even as it holds a magnifying mirror up to our flaws, we cannot—we do not want to—look away." —Julia Phillips, bestselling author of Disappearing Earth
This information about Famous Men 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.
Julie Buntin's debut novel, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, released in ten territories worldwide, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen outlets, including The Washington Post, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews. She is the co-editor of Notes to New Mothers, a collection of dispatches from postpartum life by sixty writers and artists. Previously, Buntin was an editor and director of writing programs at Catapult. Now, she writes and teaches in Ann Arbor, where she is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.
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