A bold novel about ambition, grief, creativity, beauty, and existential emptiness that retraces the arc of American life and culture in the first decades of the 21st century.
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—and most disturbingly, into the art that his beloved grandmother taught him to revere.
A personal tragedy drives Sol to leave New York and accept an invitation to The Coded Garden, an artists’ colony on a tropical island, whose mysterious patron, Sebastian Light, seems to offer the very escape Sol desperately needs. But the longer he remains in the Garden, the more Light comes to resemble Trump himself, and the games he plays with Sol become more dangerous. Slowly lines begin to blur—between reality and performance, sincerity and manipulation, art and life, beauty and emptiness—until Sol finds that he must question everything: his past, his convictions, and his very sanity.
“Alexander Maksik is a sorcerer of the first order."—Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
Genre: Literary Fiction
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—and most disturbingly, into the art that his beloved grandmother taught him to revere.
A personal tragedy drives Sol to leave New York and accept an invitation to The Coded Garden, an artists’ colony on a tropical island, whose mysterious patron, Sebastian Light, seems to offer the very escape Sol desperately needs. But the longer he remains in the Garden, the more Light comes to resemble Trump himself, and the games he plays with Sol become more dangerous. Slowly lines begin to blur—between reality and performance, sincerity and manipulation, art and life, beauty and emptiness—until Sol finds that he must question everything: his past, his convictions, and his very sanity.
“Alexander Maksik is a sorcerer of the first order."—Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"Rarely does a novel so perfectly and delightfully encapsulate the madness of the time in which it is written. Maksik is masterful." - Elliot Ackerman
"Maksik updates Fowles' The Magus for the era of wellness, wealth and cultural impoverishment--a strange and haunting fable." - Ayad Akhtar
"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
"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
"Maksik updates Fowles' The Magus for the era of wellness, wealth and cultural impoverishment--a strange and haunting fable." - Ayad Akhtar
"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
"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
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