The Long Corner

by Alexander Maksik

Overview

“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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609459390
Publisher:	Europa Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/05/2023
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Alexander Maksik is the author of three previous novels: You Deserve Nothing (Europa, 2011), a New York Times and IndieBound bestseller; A Marker to Measure Drift, which was a New York Times Notable Book; and Shelter in Place (Europa, 2016), named one of the best books of the year by the Guardian and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and the Andrew Lytle Prize, as well as fellowships from the Truman Capote Literary Trust and the Corporation of Yaddo.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Long Corner

“Par­tic­u­lar­ly com­pelling; The Long Corner is a hard book to put down.”—Jewish Book Council

“Alexander Maksik is an inveterate stylist of the first order…In his latest novel, The Long Corner, it’s the language of art that has Maksik’s attention: its deterioration under the pressures of commercialism, survival, escapism, so-called wellness, and the strains between generations and their expectations for what the things they created in their youth might and should achieve.”—Dwyer Murphy, Dallas Morning News

“I really loved The Long Corner—it is funny, honest, and self-aware as it tries to figure out how to make and think about art.”—Lauren Elkin, writer and translator

“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, winner of the Pulitzer Prize 

“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 Missionaries and winner of the National Book Award

“Rarely does a novel so perfectly and delightfully encapsulate the madness of the time in which it is written. Maksik is masterful.”—Elliot Ackerman, author of Red Dress in Black and White

“Alexander Maksik is one of the most talented and versatile novelists of his generation…The Long Corner sees a disenchanted writer from New York invited to an artist’s colony on a tropical island. What seems at first like an idyll from the politics of Trump’s America turns into its own kind of nightmare.”—Geordie Williamson, The Australian

“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

“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

“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 Female Chauvinist Pigs and The Rules Do Not Apply

“My little English major heart fluttered all the way through this one. It had me yelling across the apartment to my partner as mysteries were uncovered, characters were betrayed, edens set on fire. Perfect for a deep-thinking book club, I guarantee you won’t be able to keep your thoughts to yourself.”—Little Village Magazine

From the Publisher

2022-05-25
A young man wrestles with his artistic soul at the retreat of an enigmatic art patron.

In 2017, as he reaches his mid-30s, writer Solomon Fields has abandoned a promising journalistic career for the financial security of a spirit-crushing job in the advertising industry and a relationship with a young woman named Charity whose life is bound up in the striving of materialist culture. He also feels trapped between the clashing worldviews of his maternal grandmother, Lina, a Holocaust survivor and advocate for seizing the pleasures of life and art, as she did after fleeing Berlin for New York City in 1940, and his mother, Charlotte, a Marxist-turned-conservative and passionate defender of Israel. At the invitation of a woman named Plume, he travels to a tropical island where her employer, the mysterious Sebastian Light, has created a haven for artists he calls The Coded Garden. When Sol arrives, he meets people with names like Crystalline and Siddhartha, at first observing and then participating in the retreat’s curious rituals, including one bacchanalian evening in a sweat lodge, all the while fending off persistent questions by the residents about whether he intends to write about them. There are recurring conversations about the meaning of art and frequent flashbacks to moments in Sol’s relationship with Lina, one that’s much closer than his with Charlotte. Though the questions Maksik raises are provocative ones, the novel too often has a static feel as Sol struggles to solve the riddle of whether Light is a sincere patron of aspiring artists, a pretentious charlatan, or something much more sinister. While the portrait of Sol’s colorful and outspoken grandmother is vibrant and entertaining, Light and his acolytes in The Coded Garden too often feel more like devices for advancing competing arguments than fully realized fictional characters.

The spark of a story about the challenges of a creative life fails to catch flame.

Kirkus Reviews