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
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Teddy Wayne is the author of six novels and a winner of a Whiting Writers' Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker and a former columnist for the New York Times, he has taught at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.
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