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LONER

Teddy Wayne

David Federman has never felt appreciated. One of the most painfully forgettable members of his New Jersey high school class—yet the only one accepted to Harvard—shy, witty David arrives in Cambridge fully expecting to embrace, and be welcomed by, a new tribe of like-minded peers. But at first, beyond the friendly advances of a plain-looking girl named Sara, his social status seems devastatingly unlikely to change.

Then he meets Veronica Morgan Wells. Instantly infatuated, struck by both her beauty and her brains, David falls feverishly in love with the woman he sees as a charismatic goddess. Determined to stop at nothing to win her attention and a coveted invite into her glamorous Upper East Side world, David begins compromising his own moral standards, tossing everything aside for this one, great chance at happiness. But neither Veronica nor David, it turns out, are exactly as they seem

A darkly comic and riveting portrayal of psychosexual obsession from one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation, Loner also turns the traditional campus novel on its head as it explores contemporary gender politics and class—and discovers just what we're capable of when our greatest enemies turn out to be ourselves.

Teddy Wayne is the recipient of the 2011 Whiting Writers' Award, the NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, as well as the 2011 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize runner-up. He was a finalist for the 2011 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He is a graduate of both Harvard University and Washington University in St. Louis, where he taught fiction and creative nonfiction writing. He is the author of two critically acclaimed novels: Kapitoil and The Love Song of Jonny Valentine. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Time, Esquire, McSweeney's, and The Wall Street Journal.
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Published 2016-09-01 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

Loner is not about bullying's bloody aftermath, or how Mental Health Services can do more to thwart shootings on school campuses. It's about men — in particular, white men of privilege — feeling entitled to women's bodies, and how that is heinous and psychopathic, and how these particular men are immune to remorse and repercussion The story barely qualifies as fiction, and it arrives on our shelves just in time. Read more...

LONER is a brave book that takes up the calling of literature to unsettle the reader into new understanding of the world. Wayne employs extraordinarily fine psychological brushwork to produce something rare in our desensitized era: a genuinely disturbing portrait, not just of a fundamentally unreliable narrator but of a culture that prizes class, achievement, and beauty over nourishing human connection. David Federman is one of the most authentically menacing characters to come around in a novel in a long time. There is no cartoon bogeyman here, only a chaser after that external proof of value that our pragmatic culture demands of eighteen-year-olds. Wayne holds a mirror up to an America in which self-esteem is paramount, parents enable inhumanity in the name of advancement, and unchecked ego combines with social failure to yield monstrous ends. It behooves us all to take a careful look in the mirror Wayne offers, because the monster depicted here is the one next door. The twists in the plot keep the reader's heart racing, even as the protagonist's blood runs cold. —Matthew Thomas, New York Times-bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves

Czech Republic: Euromedia

A tragicomic account of a young man with oodles of promise, trapped somewhere between self-awareness and total stupidity Wayne has created a uniquely terrifying and compelling protagonist for such a funny book Loner is a great, lethal little book. Read more...

With Loner, Teddy Wayne has written a masterclass on the privilege found in white male narcissism. David's story is difficult to read, but it's necessary. How else are we to be reminded of how badly the world needs empathy? Read more...