The Long Corner - by Alexander Maksik (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"The Long Corner is a riveting read by an abundantly talented writer and storyteller."--Scott Burton, The Los Angele Review of Books

"Eerie and moving...compelling...An argument for the necessity of irony, risk and integrity in the production of art as in life."--Will Stephenson, The New York Times Books Review

"An enigmatic literary top that continues to spin after the last page...A triumph of sophisticated art."--Steven Kellman, Forward Reviews

"Scathing satire...readers will revel in the riotous upending of a self-absorbed personality."--Publishers Weekly

It is early 2017 in New York City, Donald Trump is President, and Solomon Fields, a young Jewish journalist-turned-advertising hack, finds himself disillusioned by the hollowness and conformity of American life and language. Once brimming with dreams and ideals instilled in him by his eternally bohemian grandmother, a survivor of the Holocaust who has dedicated her life to passion and pleasure, Sol now finds the senseless jargon he produces at work seeping into all aspects of the world around him.

Personal tragedy drives Sol to leave New York and accept an invitation to The Coded Garden, a strange artists' colony whose mysterious patron, Sebastian Light, seems to offer the very escape Sol desperately needs. But the longer he remains in the Garden, the more lines begin to blur--between reality and performance, sincerity and manipulation, art and life, beauty and emptiness--until Sol finds that he must question his past, his convictions, and his very sanity.

"Alexander Maksik is a sorcerer of the first order."--Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

Review Quotes

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A Best Book of the Year - The Australian
A Best Book of the Year - Artnet

"Eerie and moving...compelling...finally an argument for the necessity of irony, risk and integrity in the production of art as in life."--The New York Times Book Review

"[A]n enigmatic literary top that continues to spin after the last page...a triumph of sophisticated art."--The Forward

"Alexander Maksik is one of the most talented and versatile novelists of his generation...If the thought of Trump 2024 gives you pause, the best novel about Trumpism has already been written...The Long Corner, set largely in a writers' colony on a tropical island, is a grim fable about the ways power can co-opt culture and even warp our sense of reality."--The Australian

"The Long Corner is a riveting read by an abundantly talented writer and storyteller."--Los Angeles Review of Books

"The novel is at turns comical, insightful, and unsettling, skewering the snobbery and cultishness of the art world while reconsidering the value of so-called creative genius--and the power of those who claim to foster it."--Artnet

" [Mak-sik] keeps read-ers guess-ing...it could be any-thing from an extrav-a-gant sum-mer camp to the Island of Dr. More-au; there are moments when it could eas-i-ly turn into Jon-estown, or The Blair Witch Project, or Fan-ta-sy Island, or sim-ply a kib-butz. This ambi-gu-i-ty makes the nar-ra-tive par-tic-u-lar-ly com-pelling; it's a hard book to put down."--Jewish Book Council

"Alexander Maksik, an inveterate stylist of the first order, is forever walking a line between cynicism and hope, all of it playing out at the level of language, his consistent preoccupation...it's the pitch perfect movement of his sentences that distinguishes The Long Corner, just as they did in earlier novels...Maksik does the slow, difficult work of creating atmosphere with a style all his own, conjuring up a world that's simultaneously obsessed with beauty and unerringly suspicious of all things beautiful. It's that balance between the cynical and the hopeful. The stylist and the true believer."--Literary Hub

" [A] scathing satire...readers will revel in the riotous upending of a self-absorbed personality."--Publishers Weekly

"The Long Corner may be the world's weirdest page-turner. The narrator's incandescent intimacy with his grandmother, his preposterous encounters with artists (and "artists," and money, ) and the bleakness of his Late Capitalist Manhattan existence unspool in Maksik's seductive novel--as propulsive as it is surreal."--Ariel Levy, author of The Rules Do Not Apply

"Masterful. Rarely does a novel so perfectly and delightfully encapsulate the madness of the time in which it is written."--Elliot Ackerman, author of Red Dress in Black and White

"The Long Corner is a sharp, witty and utterly engrossing novel about culture, kitsch, cynicism, and all the ways we corrupt what is most important to us. I laughed out loud, I couldn't get enough of the characters, and I couldn't put it down."--Phil Klay, author of Redeployment, Missionaries and winner of the National Book Award

"Both touching and comedic...even when it is hilarious, the stakes are significant: The Long Corner confronts the orthodoxy of authenticity as it dismantles questions about the creative act."--Matthew Barney, artist

"Maksik updates Fowles' The Magus for the era of wellness, wealth and cultural impoverishment -- a strange and haunting fable."--Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies and winner of the Pulitzer Prize

"The Long Corner is such a pleasurable novel that you almost don't notice how unsettling it is. It is a wonderfully written, probing book about power, passions, legacies and ways of seeing. Page by page The Long Corner asks us--with the deep resonance of all unfettered art--what one of Maksik's brilliant characters calls the 'most popular question in New York City' What do you do?"--Jonathan Lee, author of High Dive and The Great Mistake

"I really loved The Long Corner--it is funny, honest and self-aware as it tried to figure out how to make and think about art, where it belongs, and how to fight for it in this ridiculous world."--Lauren Elkin, writer and translator