THE TURNING OF THE WORLD

Set in the Peruvian city of Cuzco, this novel chronicles the unsentimental education of a young American student whose pretense of innocence abroad does not survive his encounter with the real world.

Things get off to a shaky start for Jack Martell when he arrives in Cuzco for a six-week academic summer program: his plane from Lima to Cuzco almost crashes; he suffers from a debilitating bout of altitude sickness; and before the program has even gotten under way, he manages to alienate both its head and most of his fellow students, none of whom he can understand all that well because his Spanish is far from fluent. None of this would be impossible to rebound from, but unfortunately for Jack, he soon chooses the path of least resistance and falls in with a group of English-speaking foreigners in Cuzco who seem to be much more welcoming than the people at the escuela – until they’re not… Slyly satirical, sharply observed, and reminiscent of the fiction of Benjamin Kunkel, Tao Lin, and Ben Lerner, THE TURNING OF THE WORLD is a brilliant, utterly contemporary Bildungsroman as well as a novel about the precarious position America finds itself in as the certainties – moral and otherwise – of the late 20th century give way to the uncertainties of the 21st. James W. Fuerst was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, graduated cum laude from Princeton University, received an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School and earned his MA and PhD at Harvard University. He is the author of the YA/crossover novel HUGE (Three Rivers Press) and lives in Brooklyn.