"The Long Corner" with Alexander Maksik

Alexander Maksik joins us to discuss his new novel, The Long Corner, 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 2017 in New York City and Solomon Fields, a young 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 bohemian grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who has dedicated her adult life to passion and pleasure, Sol now finds the senseless jargon he produces at work seeping into all aspects of the world around him. 

Loss and disenchantment drive Sol to leave New York and accept an invitation to The Coded Garden, an artists’ colony located 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 Sebastian Light comes to seem the very embodiment of his age’s worst impulses. 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. 

This event will be live streamed, but will not be available to watch later.

Alexander Maksik is the author of 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. His latest novel is The Long Corner (Europa, 2022). 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.