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Christian Dittus
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APARTMENT

Teddy Wayne

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 a friendship he's never had over 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.

Teddy Wayne is the author of Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, and Kapitoil. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers' Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, the PEN/Bingham Prize, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times, and McSweeney's.
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Published 2020-02-01 by Bloomsbury

Comments

“The rare page-turner that always maintains its dignity as a moving portrait of loneliness and longing.” ?Joshua Ferris “Apartment is full of keenly observed, stinging insights that compound in intensity long after the initial read. Yet it's so immersive and enjoyable that you won't notice getting cut.” —Ling Ma

Quote Blurb

Korea: Elle Lit.;

Foreign licence Client

"Wayne captures the nuances of this dynamic—a musky cocktail of intimacy and rage and unspoken mutual resentment—with draftsmanlike precision, and when the breaking point comes, as, of course, it does, it leaves one feeling vaguely ill, in the best way possible. A near-anthropological study of male insecurity." (starred review)

Review Kirkus Reviews

“Take[s] on masculinity and class struggles with precision and verve.” —The Boston Globe “One of New York City's most ephemeral glories—the illegally subleased, rent-stabilized apartment—provides the base for this novel, which delves into how shared space can make for a powerful, if imperfect, bond between men.” ?Vogue “A deftly composed novel its ideas about masculinity, gender, and class will rattle around your mind for ages.” ?Elle “Subtle, fascinating...Wayne excels at creating a narrator both observant of his surroundings and deluded about his own feelings...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

Review Praise