As befits one more year of strident political discussion dominating public consciousness, political books sold well in the print sector in the first half of 2018. Macmillan, in particular, has seen its books perform well, with Michael Wolff’s tell-all Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Henry Holt) settling in as the year’s bestseller to date and James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership (Flatiron) making the #3 spot. Even political parodies did well: Chronicle Books’s crashed children’s title Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Presents a Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, written by Jill Twiss and illustrated by E.G. Keller, which details a fictional same-sex romance between U.S. Vice President Mike Pence’s pet rabbit and another rabbit named Wesley, came in at #6.
Jul 09, 2018
Otherwise, children’s literature and other adult nonfiction books dominated the top 10. A cookbook, Joanna Gaines’s Magnolia Table: A Collection of Recipes for Gathering, was the #2 bestseller in the year so far, and nonfiction books by Jordan Peterson and Jen Sincero placed at #7 and #10, respectively. Children’s authors Madeleine L’Engle, Dav Pilkey, and Dr. Seuss all saw books in the top 10, too. The only adult fiction title to hit the list, at #9, was James Patterson’s collaboration with former president Bill Clinton, The President Is Missing. Even fiction, it seems, can’t escape the clutches of politics.
Fire and Fury was also the top-selling title in e-books, according to lists compiled by both Barnes & Noble and Apple/iBooks (PW has opted to change to the iBooks and BN.com e-book lists, from Amazon, since the online retailer’s list now skews heavily to titles released by Amazon publishing units and also includes sales made through the Kindle Unlimited program). Comey’s book placed #8 on the iBooks list, but did not appear in the top 10 at B&N. On both lists, as is typical with e-books, fiction titles were more prominent than nonfiction, compared to print lists, with A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window placing at #2 on both lists, while novels by David Baldacci, Lisa Wingate, Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, and Kristin Hannah appeared on the top 10 of both e-book lists.
NPD BookScan Top 20 Print books, January 1–July 1, 2018
Apple/iBooks Top 10 e-books, January 1–June 30, 2018
BN.COM Top 10 e-books, January 1–June 30, 2018
A version of this article appeared in the 07/09/2018 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: The Bestselling Books of 2018 (So Far)
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When a former president writes a book, the world pays attention. When a former president writes a novel, things get really interesting.
Partnering with none other than James Patterson, one of the greatest thriller writers of all time, former president Bill Clinton has cowritten The President is Missing, in which the president of the United States disappears, shocking the world and setting in motion an unpredictable swirl of events. The book is full of the sort of details only a president would know.and considering its unique combination of an expert author and a man who knows all the inside scoop (he had access to the NSA and CIA for years, after all), we could not be more excited. Here are ten more incredible political thrillers you’ll want to read next.
House of Cards (House of Cards Series #1)
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House of Cards, by Michael Dobbs The Manchurian Candidate
The book that inspired the British TV show that in turn inspired Netflix’s very first original series, this is the story of Francis Urquhart, Chief Whip, a cynical, manipulative politician determined to become Prime Minister. He’s willing to use every secret he knows, every pressure point he can find, and every dirty trick in the book to secure his own rise to power—and in the process confirms just about every dark and terrible thing you thought you knew about politics. Dobbs drew on his extensive real-life experience in British politics for the books, and the result is an electrifying vision of how exceedingly violent governing can be behind closed doors.
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The Manchurian Candidate, by Richard Condon The Constant Gardener
Condon’s 1959 novel is a paranoid classic, born at the beginning of the Cold War, that continues to influence people today (the fact that Homeland has a similar concept is a testament to the evergreen nature of the device). Soldiers captured during the Korean War are tortured and brainwashed, and one, Shaw, is programmed to fall into a hypnotic state when he sees his trigger—the Queen of Diamonds during a game of solitaire. He’s programmed to forget his orders once he regains consciousness, and thus is the perfect hidden assassin, who can pass any interrogation or test. His own ruthless, power-hungry mother is his KGB handler, and relays orders to assassinate the president in order to secure the office for the vice president, who will order martial law and request emergency powers as a puppet of the Soviets. It’s creepy, tense, and still shockingly modern—and in a bizarre real-life twist, some believe author Condon subtly cribbed from Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, number 8 on this list.
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The Constant Gardener, by John le Carré
You might think of le Carré as a writer of espionage novels, but politics encompasses espionage and crime as well as law-making and foreign policy. His novels are as much about the secret tension between ruling and governing, and the crimes committed in the name of patriotism and realpolitik, as they are about skulduggery and moles. In The Constant Gardener, an unremarkable man with a remarkable wife is jolted out of a mediocre political career when his spouse is killed, and he determines to find out why she was murdered, and by whom. For the first time in his life he’s willing to take chances—and if there’s one thing the secretive world of politics can’t stand, it’s people who have nothing to lose. The end result is a pitch-perfect thriller.
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The Day of the Jackal
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The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth The Hunt for Red October
The Cold War politics of this classic thriller are long gone, but Forsyth’s novel (winner of the 1972 Edgar Award for Best Novel) still carries the punch of a meticulously researched story set in a very real world. It’s a novel of agonizing anticipation: first, as we follow the slow, careful preparations and planning of the titular Jackal, hired to assassinate the President of France; then, as we follow along with the equally painstaking detective work of the man charged with identifying the Jackal as time runs out. The twin stories of detective and assassin remain separate right up until the moment the Jackal takes his shot, and it’s this element of cat-and-mouse between a devious killer and a brilliant agent—plus the elevated stakes of global politics—that make this a book that still resonates today. Forsyth was working in Paris when he wrote it, and used that firsthand knowledge to choose his setting. In fact, rumor has it the assassin’s sniping spot can still be located—with the precise view described in the text.
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The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy Parallax View
Clancy’s breakout novel is set at the hot height of the Cold War, but it remains a classic political thriller because it perfectly combines thrilling spycraft, visceral action, an insider’s view of behind-closed-doors political maneuvering, and global stakes. Clancy’s expert grasp of each of these aspects makes this story of a rogue Soviet submarine captain planning to steal the experimental sub he’s been assigned to and defect to the West—and the young CIA analyst, Jack Ryan, who tries desperately to convince everyone from the president down that this isn’t the Soviet Union starting World War III—just about the Platonic ideal of a political thriller. Rumor is Clancy’s grasp of top-secret technology rattled the FBI enough that they paid him a visit, and anyone who reads the book will believe it.
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The Parallax View, by Loren Singer Absolute Power
Singer’s 1970 novel, which was adapted into a film starring Warren Beatty that’s become a cult favorite, is delightfully terrifying. A journalist witnesses the assassination of a president, and years later discovers that the other people who were eye witnesses to the event are being killed off in mysterious ways. His investigation leads him to the Parallax Corporation, which trains political assassins as part of a massive conspiracy to control the world—a conspiracy that truly goes all the way to the top. The book’s plot is complex, but the sense that everything is not right with the world, that things are happening beyond our control or comprehension is, sadly, as applicable today as it was back then. Any time we lose faith in our leaders and entertain the notion that the country has been bamboozled on a national scale, this book should be pulled off the shelf and rediscovered.
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Absolute Power, by David Baldacci I, Claudius
Baldacci’s audacious 1996 novel pivots off a salacious moment wherein a professional thief, having broken into the luxurious home of a billionaire, stumbles onto a two-way mirror giving him a view of the billionaire’s wife and the President of the United States having a affair. The sex turns rough, and the President’s Secret Service detail bursts in and kills the woman. The thief just barely manages to escape, but the Secret Service pins the murder on him, and a game of cat and mouse ensues as the president and his team try to cover up the truth. While conceived during the go-go Clinton years, this is another evergreen political thriller that combines a thriller plot with a plausible look at what authority decoupled from responsibility might look like.
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I, Claudius, by Robert Graves The Lions of Lucerne (Scot Harvath Series #1)
A historical novel? True, but also a razor-sharp story of political maneuvering in ancient Rome that involves not just murder and conspiracy, but also leverage, fake news, real policy, and power brokers. Claudius, who survives the violent reign of his nephew Caligula because he’s old and stammers—making everyone assume he’s no threat—is proclaimed emperor after Caligula’s well-deserved assassination, then proves to be smarter than anyone suspected. What makes this and its sequel, Claudius the God, so amazing is that Claudius—despite his intelligence and desire to be a “good” emperor with the ultimate goal of re-establishing the republic—is terribly flawed, continuously abusing his power in the most selfish of ways.
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Lions of Lucerne, by Brad Thor The Ghost Writer
Thor’s first Scott Harvath novel opens with a bang: former Navy SEAL and current Secret Service agent Harvath is overseeing the president’s security detail in Park City, Utah, when a brazen attack leaves thirty other agents dead—and the president kidnapped. Harvath, disgraced and confused, goes on a one-man mission to piece together what happened and why, while the United States dithers and hesitates to meet the kidnappers’ demands, resulting in a presidential finger being mailed to the White House. While a bit more oriented towards the thriller side of things, that doesn’t mean Thor lacks a fine touch when it comes to the political side, which he renders in an equally exciting manner, leading to an explosive ending that’s not to be missed.
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The Ghost Writer, by Robert Harris
Harris’ novel is a master class in tension. Former British Prime Minister Adam Lang is very late in turning his memoir in to his publisher—in part because his long-time collaborator and assistant has died in a terrible accident. To get the book back on schedule, a professional ghostwriter is hired to complete the manuscript. The ghostwriter struggles to figure out what’s true and what’s not so true in Lang’s notes, and then stumbles on evidence that implies the dead collaborator was actually murdered. As Lang is charged with war crimes, the stakes and the tension keep rising and the ghostwriter—appropriately never named—finds himself ensnared in the very dirty world of power and politics. Fictionrecommended by Joshua Cohen
Interview by Thea Lenarduzzi
Through the writing of political novels, writers might hope to speak against their time, says the American author Joshua Cohen. Here he selects five books in which the protagonist undergoes a political education.
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Joshua Cohen
Joshua Cohen is the author of nine books, including the novels Book of Numbers(2015) and, mostly recently, Moving Kings. In 2017, Granta Magazine included him on its decennial list of the Best Young American Writers. He was born in 1980 in Atlantic City and lives in New York City.
Part of me thinks that all novels are, to a degree, political novels, consciously or otherwise; but one of the major distinctions to make is between novels that are political, in the sense of having a message that the author wants to impart, and novels that are political because they’re showing the effects of the structures on the individual, the experience of politics.
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I’m not sure that I’d agree with you, that all novels are political. But I am convinced that, nowadays, to read a novel is political. Especially so if the novel you’re reading is in hardcopy. And you paid for it. At a bookstore. Staffed by humans. As for there being different approaches to what we call the political novel, sure, OK—though I have to say that, to my mind, these approaches have as much to do with the writer as with the reader. What I mean is, writers write to impart one meaning, but then readers read and derive another. They ‘analyse’ or ‘identify’ a certain politics behind—inside?—the prose. I’m not certain how constructive this deconstruction is, but then of course I’d be uncertain: I mean, show me a novelist who doesn’t think that his or her intentions must be respected by the reader, and I’ll show you . . . someone very, very sad.
I’m not interested in propaganda. What I am interested in, when it comes to the politics of the novel, is the revival of that old debate, realism v. naturalism, which I always took to mean the distinction between writing about the-ways-in-which-a-character-experiences-something and writing about the-ways-in-which-a-character-has-been-conditioned-to-experience-something. I find the tension between those two approaches enlivening.
So, what kind of political novels have you chosen today?
These are all novels in which characters discover politics, or politics discover them. Most of the characters—the protagonists—don’t begin the novel as ‘political creatures.’ Some don’t even end the novels as ‘political creatures.’ But the arc they all experience is one between innocence and disabuse.
In both Moving Kings and Book of Numbers Driving while_______ will substantially alter one?s judgement when behind the wheel.. your protagonists start out rather disconnected from their political context.
That’s true. Both of those novels centre around characters who have no sense of themselves as having lived political lives: they are unaware of their own conditions, and so they are unaware of the conditions their existences inflict on others. Slowly, however, events unfold that provide their political education. They come to consciousness, in a sense. I’ve always thought of this as the contemporary version of the process of the Bildungsroman, or the Kunstlerroman: after generations of stories about young people coming of age, after generations of stories about young people becoming artists, now we have the story of the young person coming into ideological consciousness, or, if you prefer, the story of the young person getting ‘woke,’ and then craving, to one degree or another, the ability to sleep again.
How would you plot the course to awakening of your protagonists David King, Yoav and Uri?
Yoav and Uri are 21 years old, just out of their compulsory service in the Israeli Defense Forces. They’ve never before been out of Israel. They have only the vaguest notions of how Israelis, or Jews for that matter, are perceived, or misperceived, abroad. Also, they’ve always just been confined to their families: to their military family, to their family-family. They’ve always just followed the orders of their officers and parents. They notice all this, of course, only after decamping for America—only after they’ve made a break and got distance.
Whereas for David King, his awakening comes much later in life, and actually follows divorce and the breakdown of his own family.
David King is a businessman. He has no time for politics—that’s what he tells himself. Politics, in his mind, is just a gentile (in the sense of non-Jewish), publicly acceptable way of thieving for your living, of robbing the general citizenry to support yourself, or your family, tribe, or class. His daughter disagrees—his daughter loathes and condemns him, but still relies on him financially. Which, in turns, lets David ignore her critique. He seeks, then, an alternate family, and so brings Yoav and Uri over to work for him. He invites them, and so politics, into his home.
Nostromo
Let’s talk about your first choice: Nostromo (1904). I like how Conrad seems to have this above-it-all gaze, taking in the workings of everything on the fictional island of Costaguana. Neither side offers fix-it-all solutions; badness exists, to a degree, on both, or all, sides, so there’s no absolute opposition between good and bad and no revolution leads to a bettering of circumstances on the island. Is it consciousness of that that constitutes awakening here?
I don’t think Conrad is interested in asserting any type of moral equivalency—I don’t think he believes the exploited and the exploiters have equal moral claims. Instead, what Conrad cares about is individuality—the possibility or impossibility of a world of individuals—and how each of them, each of us, might be trapped, or might resist being trapped, in the positions and circumstances into which we were born. This, in Nostromo, is best dramatized in the person of Charles Gould: is the mine his birthright? From there, it’s a very direct line to asking the question: To what degree are birthrights delusions, or self-invented?
Again, an awakening as stepping up or away from the unit you were born into–but obviously, as with Yoav and Uri, it’s not enough to leave your motherland. So what does that stepping up entail for Conrad?
For Conrad, especially in Nostromo, it’s a question of personal ennoblement, of honour. So many of his characters have conflicting loyalties and are always trying to negotiate between them. Conrad is especially engaged with the ways in which people fail, or feel as if they have failed, the standards that were set for them. So, for him, “stepping up” as you put it, usually takes the form of a “stepping down,” a betrayal—not least of notions of Empire, or of duty.
Do you think his focus on the individual defining himself, making himself the best he can be, as opposed to his birth–and nationality, and class, and so on–defining him, derives from Conrad’s own status as a kind of transnational drifter?
Sure. He was the displaced son of a Polish patriot who hated the Russians and spoke French and wrote in English. This, for him, is what the sea did. His style is ship style: when you work and live on a ship, it doesn’t matter where you’re from, or where your shipmates are from. The only thing that matters is that they can do their jobs, and that you can do your job. You’re forced to become mutually reliant, for survival. At sea, or on Conrad’s sea, problems of origin fall away or become translated into problems of individual talent and character. The sea, in Conrad’s imaginary, becomes a democracy, a meritocracy, of survival. This, at least, is the “governance” that his Europeans aspire to and are tried by. This is Conrad’s European way of understanding the “natives,” not by appropriating them culturally, but by enlisting and rallying them in a campaign against the elements, a campaign against the pitilessness of Nature.
The Foundation Pit
The notion of individuals working together for the advancement of the group is central to your next book: The Foundation Pit (completed in 1930; published in 1987) by Andrei Platonov.
Platonov’s novel concerns the destruction of a Russian village or town and the digging of a foundation pit for a vast communist housing-block that the reader slowly realises will be the size of, or just will be, the world. The men who dig this hole are myriad: from true communist believers to convicts. And sometimes the convicts are the truest believers.
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And, again, about these individuals’ realisation that they might want to, and yet probably can’t, break free from the mould that they have been set in.
To be clear, many of Platonov’s characters believe in communism, but their belief comes through a misapprehension of communism. To many of them, communism has become, or originally was, a religion: something like an early Christianity, something like a pre-Christian Christianity of Edenic charity and provision. Platonov’s pit-diggers are convinced of the brotherhood of man. In their innocence, they are convinced and so convicted.
He works in so much individual psychological detail—each dawning of consciousness is different; each man experiences and is shaped by the labour of digging the pit differently even though they are, notionally, all aiming to build the same structure. So, yes, basically, it’s the world…
Many of Platonov’s characters regard communism as this abstract moral principle—a principle of equality. But then each of them—from worker to engineer—defines this equality differently. This, of course, is where the conflict comes in. What is a perfect world? How many simultaneous perfect worlds can there be? In Platonov, this notion of the perfectible is related to, or emerges from, language. Because the perfectible can only exist in language: it can only ever be just a word.
Is that what Joseph Brodsky was getting at when he diagnosed Platonov’s suspicion of language and narrative, of meaning itself?
What Brodsky said was this: “Woe to the people into whose language Andrei Platonov can be translated”? It was Brodsky’s notion that any language that can bear Platonov’s meanings is already degraded—in other words, it has already been manipulated and used for purposes of political obfuscation.
The Cleft
Let’s talk about The Cleft (2007), Doris Lessing’s final novel…
I remember, you don’t like this book. Why?
It’s a while since I read it, but I remember struggling. I’m not the kind of person who needs human characters, or any characters at all even, or plot, for that matter—but I do remember finding it a bit of a grind. I never felt very involved, I suppose. What do you see in it?
It’s always been one of my dreams to make a text that appeals to an authority beyond myself—an authority greater than myself. If I write a book and my name is the name on the cover: it’s my fault. I’m to blame. I’m responsible. But what about all those texts that I grew up reading—all those texts that were, in many cases, poorly written, though that was OK, that was acceptable, because those texts were written by God, or at least I was told that they were? I’m thinking about my experiences of reading the Romans, the Greeks, the Sumerians—reading things that are millennia old, and how it’s the age itself that imparts their authority.
“We become inured to the world in which we’re raised. The monstrous can come to seem the natural”
The fact that these texts have survived, and have been commented on, and interpreted, for generations: this gives them a certain aura. I’ve always been interested in this aura, or in pursuing the aesthetics of this aura as a way to dissociate myself from my books—as a way to evade responsibility for them. In other words, I’ve always hoped to write a text that read like it was ‘found.’ And this is what Lessing succeeded in doing with The Cleft, which has all the authority of a ‘found text,’ without any trickery. She doesn’t say ‘this was found in a bottle washed up on a beach,’ or ‘this manuscript was dug up in my backyard.’ She just writes, and what follows doesn’t reads like a novel but like a fragment. There’s the sense that its flaws are the flaws of transmission: there are mistranscriptions, there are lacunae.
It also picks up on what you were saying before about not belonging, not being rooted in one side, one country, one culture or another, because an ancient found text pre-dates most of those distinctions. In the case of most ancient religious texts, they almost belong everywhere.
Lessing’s version especially, because hers tells of an island of women—an entire female society based on an island—that is suddenly “disrupted” by the introduction of a new species: males. No men have ever existed before, and then, out of nowhere, one man appears, bringing sex with him, and so bringing chaos. It’s a creation myth, created out of creation myths.
The Union Jack
Let’s have your fourth book The Union Jack by Imre Kertész (first published in 1991; published in translation by Tim Wilkinson in 2010). When you were talking at the very beginning about your interest in awakenings, this was the first book that sprung to mind–it’s quite explicitly about that, set during the Hungarian revolution of 1956.
This is one of the most beautiful short novels, or novellas, ever written. And only one thing ever happens: Kertész’s narrator looks out a window and sees a jeep go by flying the Union Jack. That’s it. But just the sight of this flag, and the context of the sighting, reminds Kertész that there’s an outside world: a world beyond Hungary, a world of freedom.
The rest of Kertész’s oeuvre is worth discussing too, if we can–even though, pending more great efforts from Melville House and Tim Wilkinson, a chunk of it remains unavailable in English.
He was one of the few, the very few, great writers who came through the Nazi death camps who wrote beyond the camps: who transposed the camps onto other structures. He once wrote that he was happiest in the camps, and he wasn’t being perverse, or he wasn’t only being perverse. What he meant was that, as a child in Hungary, all he knew were the camps, and so the rare moments that was able to sit in a field or have a fleeting conversation with a friend, became exceptionally joyous, exceptionally precious.
We all become inured to the world in which we’re raised: this was Kertész’s point. The monstrous can come to seem, and too often does come to seem, the natural.
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
Tell us about your final book, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal (1964; in English, in 1995).
A phenomenal book. A literal translation of the Czech title would be: Advanced Dancing Lessons for the Elderly. It consists of a single sentence: a monologue being delivered to a gang of women sunbathing topless—and perhaps also bottomless—behind a church. The subject of the monologue is nothing less than the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
How is that brought to bear on what we were talking about before, how an individual can, or should, be?
The narrator, who is and isn’t Hrabal, is concerned with elegance: not with decadence, but with elegance—in literature, painting, music, but especially in fashion. He is especially taken with army uniforms: soldiers, to his mind, should always be well-dressed. And there was no better-dressed army than Austria-Hungary’s.
It becomes apparent, after a bit, that the narrator is drunk, and that his endless sermonizing is just drunk-talk: a harangue at the end of the bar. Hrbal himself was always intoxicated with intoxication as a literary, and political, principle: the notion that to live in this world you have to in some way numb your sensibilities. His characters essentially enter a pub under the monarchy and drink the pub dry. They emerge only to find that they’ve boozed their way through history: they’ve missed Nazism and communism, and they now have to stumble home, which is, of course, an imaginary ‘home’—an imaginary past—through the gaudy solicitations of the free-market.
Hrabal’s characters drink so as not to be harmed by others. They prefer to harm themselves.
Speaking of monologues, do you think there’s enough talking going on these days? Is the political novel is good shape?
I’m not sure. I don’t know whether it would be a good thing for the political novel to be in good shape, or a bad thing for it to be in good shape, or a good thing for it to be in bad shape, or a bad thing for it to be in bad shape. I think if there’s any lesson to be taken from my choice of books here, it’s this: the political must be founded in the individual. These writers, these characters, cannot be reduced to any one specific camp, or any one specific ideology: they resist this reduction and, in fact, would regard this reduction as a mechanism of oppression.
That said, it’s the novelist’s tendency to refuse to agree with anyone: to agree is to be destroyed. Novelists must insist on their own words—it’s only by doing so that they can hope to speak against their time.
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Joshua Cohen
Joshua Cohen is the author of nine books, including the novels Book of Numbers(2015) and, mostly recently, Moving Kings. In 2017, Granta Magazine included him on its decennial list of the Best Young American Writers. He was born in 1980 in Atlantic City and lives in New York City.
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