Lesser Ruins - by Mark Haber (Paperback)

About the Book

"Bereft after the death of his ailing wife, a retired professor has resumed his life's work -- a book that will stand as a towering cathedral to Michel de Montaigne, reframing the inventor of the essay for the modern age. The challenge is the litany of intrusions that bar his way -- from memories of his past to the nattering of smartphones to his son's relentless desire to make an electronic dance album. As he sifts through the contents of his desk, his thoughts pulsing and receding in a haze of caffeine and grief, ghosts and grievances spill out across the page. From the community college where he toiled in vain to an artists' colony in the Berkshires, from the endless pleasures of coffee to the finer points of Holocaust art, the professor's memories churn with sculptors, poets, painters, and inventors, all obsessed with escaping both mediocrity and themselves. Laced with humor as acrid as it is absurd, Lesser Ruins is a spiraling, raging meditation on ambition, grief, and humanity's ecstatic, agonizing search for meaning through art"--

Book Synopsis

From the author of Reinhardt's Garden and Saint Sebastian's Abyss comes a breathless new novel of delirious obsession.

Bereft after the death of his ailing wife, a retired professor has resumed his life's work--a book that will stand as a towering cathedral to Michel de Montaigne, reframing the inventor of the essay for the modern age. The challenge is the litany of intrusions that bar his way--from memories of his past to the nattering of smartphones to his son's relentless desire to make an electronic dance album.

As he sifts through the contents of his desk, his thoughts pulsing and receding in a haze of caffeine, ghosts and grievances spill out across the page. From the community college where he toiled in vain to an artists' colony in the Berkshires, from the endless pleasures of coffee to the finer points of Holocaust art, the professor's memories churn with sculptors, poets, painters, and inventors, all obsessed with escaping both mediocrity and themselves.

Laced with humor as acrid as it is absurd, Lesser Ruins is a spiraling meditation on ambition, grief, and humanity's ecstatic, agonizing search for meaning through art.

Review Quotes

Praise for Lesser Ruins

Shortlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize, United States and Canada
A Washington Post Notable Book of 2024
A New York Public Library Best Book of 2024
A Literary Hub Favorite Book of 2024
An Electric Literature Best Book of Fall 2024, According to Indie Booksellers
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2024

"Haber is one of the most rigorous and serious--and anachronistic--novelists working today." --Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

"Haber's novel is fluent and compelling, often rhapsodic, with a cumulative power to its repetitions." --Hal Jensen, Times Literary Supplement

"One of the most daring and rewarding American novels in years." --Brian Castleberry, Literary Hub

"Lesser Ruins feels like a literary analogue--taking us as it does down rabbit holes, a twisting tour of an overloaded mind." --Daniel Marc Janes, The Spectator

"An inventive meditation on grief and art." --Kirkus Reviews

"Sharp . . . invigorating. Readers will enjoy this digressive project." --Publishers Weekly

"Lesser Ruins is a near perfect document of what it is to procrastinate, spun out in Haber's signature absurdist, looping, intellectually ecstatic style." --Emily Temple, Literary Hub

"The characters deepen, grow and come alive on the page, and momentum builds to a moving and effective conclusion." --Michelle Nelson, The Denver Post

"The novel's jumps in register from grandiose to trivial, from historic to contingent and from irascible to inconsolable are frequent and affecting. There's a deep comic strain to the book but also a tragic one." --Dan Friedman, Forward

"Lushly, frenetically, yet clearly written, [Haber's] novels deal with melancholy and madness, betrayal and loss, despair and grief, all while containing loads of humor and humanity." --The Mookse and the Gripes

"What begins as a comic exploration of academic fixation swiftly becomes heart-wrenching. The result is a breathless literary experience that touches the narrator's roving mind to the reader's own." --Chiara Naomi Kaufman, Necessary Fiction

"The desire for a life of focus, for more "coherence" than "incoherence" feels like a characteristically contemporary yearning. It only makes sense that Lesser Ruins has caught up." --Bekah Waalkes, Dirt

"This book is a work of art . . . not only hysterical but incredibly moving, to the last page." --Fernando A. Flores, author of Tears of the Trufflepig

"Written with emotional force but also with great restraint and unremitting integrity, Lesser Ruins is the most ambitious addition yet in Mark Haber's brilliant Bernhardian project." --Martin Riker, author of The Guest Lecture

"Lesser Ruins is a transcendent rumination, a study of, among other things, literature, obsession, and the mind. For all its breathlessness, a silence settled around me as I read it." --Amina Cain, author of A Horse at Night: On Writing

"Haber transforms the private idiosyncrasies of grief into a novel of great vitality . . . I relished the complexity and understated humor of this impeccably constructed and wondrous novel." --Idra Novey, author of Take What You Need

"Lesser Ruins is a masterwork of a novel, as expansive as it is discerning, ironic, and extraordinarily sensitive." --Mandy-Suzanne Wong, author of The Box

About the Author

Mark Haber was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Florida. His debut novel, Reinhardt's Garden (2019, Coffee House Press), was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His second novel, Saint Sebastian's Abyss (2022, Coffee House Press), was named a best book of 2022 by the New York Public Library, Literary Hub, and Publishers Weekly. Mark's fiction has appeared in Guernica, Southwest Review, and Air/Light, among others. Mark lives in Minneapolis.