Keith A. Gessen (born January 9, 1975) is a
Russian-born American novelist, journalist, and literary translator. He is co-founder and co-editor of American literary magazine ''
n+1'' and an assistant professor of journalism at the
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is located in Pulitzer Hall on the university's Morningside Heights campus in New York City.
Founded in 1912 by Joseph Pulitzer, Columbia Journalism School is one of the oldest journalism s ...
.
In 2008 he was named a "5 under 35" honoree by the
National Book Foundation
The National Book Foundation (NBF) is an American nonprofit organization established, "to raise the cultural appreciation of great writing in America". Established in 1989 by National Book Awards, Inc.,Edwin McDowell. "Book Notes: 'The Joy Luc ...
.
Early life and education
Born Konstantin Alexandrovich Gessen into a Jewish family in
Moscow,
Russian SFSR
The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Russian SFSR or RSFSR ( rus, Российская Советская Федеративная Социалистическая Республика, Rossíyskaya Sovétskaya Federatívnaya Soci ...
,
Soviet Union,
[Joanna Smith Rakoff. "Talking with Masha Gessen, '' Newsday'', January 2, 2005.] he and his parents and sibling moved to the United States in 1981. They settled in the
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- most p ...
area, living in
Brighton
Brighton () is a seaside resort and one of the two main areas of the City of Brighton and Hove in the county of East Sussex, England. It is located south of London.
Archaeological evidence of settlement in the area dates back to the Bronze A ...
,
Brookline
Brookline may refer to:
Places in the United States
* Brookline, Massachusetts, a town near Boston
* Brookline, Missouri
* Brookline, New Hampshire
* Brookline (Pittsburgh), a neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
* Brookline, Vermont
See ...
and
Newton, Massachusetts
Newton is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is approximately west of downtown Boston. Newton resembles a patchwork of thirteen villages, without a city center. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, the population of N ...
.
Gessen's mother was a literary critic and his father is a computer scientist now specializing in forensics. His siblings are
Masha Gessen
Masha Gessen (born 13 January 1967) is a Russian-American journalist, author, translator and activist who has been an outspoken critic of the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and the former president of the United States, Donald Trump.
Ge ...
, Daniel Gessen and Philip Gessen. His maternal grandmother, Ruzya Solodovnik, was a Soviet government censor of dispatches filed by foreign reporters such as
Harrison Salisbury
Harrison Evans Salisbury (November 14, 1908 – July 5, 1993), was an American journalist and the first regular '' New York Times'' correspondent in Moscow after World War II.
Biography
Salisbury was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He ...
; his paternal grandmother, Ester Goldberg Gessen, was a translator for a foreign literary magazine.
[
Gessen graduated from Harvard University with a ]B.A.
Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...
in history and literature in 1998. He completed the course-work for his M.F.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University in 2004 but did not initially receive a degree, having failed to submit "a final original work of fiction." According to his Columbia University faculty biography, he ultimately received the degree.
Career
Gessen has written about Russia for '' The New Yorker'', ''The London Review of Books
The ''London Review of Books'' (''LRB'') is a British literary magazine published twice monthly that features articles and essays on fiction and non-fiction subjects, which are usually structured as book reviews.
History
The ''London Review ...
'', '' The Atlantic'', and the ''New York Review of Books
New is an adjective referring to something recently made, discovered, or created.
New or NEW may refer to:
Music
* New, singer of K-pop group The Boyz
Albums and EPs
* ''New'' (album), by Paul McCartney, 2013
* ''New'' (EP), by Regurgitator, ...
''. In 2004–2005, he was the regular book critic for ''New York
New York most commonly refers to:
* New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York
* New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States
New York may also refer to:
Film and television
* ...
'' magazine. In 2005, Dalkey Archive Press published Gessen's translation of Svetlana Alexievich
Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich (born 31 May 1948) is a Belarusian investigative journalist, essayist and oral historian who writes in Russian. She was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suf ...
's ''Voices from Chernobyl'' (), an oral history of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster
The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the No. 4 nuclear reactor, reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Ukrainia ...
. In 2009, Penguin
Penguins ( order Sphenisciformes , family
Family (from la, familia) is a group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or affinity (by marriage or other relationship). The purpose of the family is to maintain t ...
published his translation (with Anna Summers) of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's ''There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales''.
Gessen's first novel, ''All the Sad Young Literary Men
''All the Sad Young Literary Men'' is the debut novel of Keith Gessen, the founder of the journal ''n+1''. It was published by Viking in April, 2008.
Plot
Gessen's novel centers around the stories of three literary-minded friends: Keith, a Harvar ...
'', was published in April 2008 and received mixed reviews. Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels '' Bla ...
wrote that "in this debut novel there is much that is charming and beguiling, and much promise". The novelist Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Earl Franzen (born August 17, 1959) is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel ''The Corrections'', a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Pri ...
has said of Gessen, "It's so delicious the way he writes. I like it a lot." ''New York Magazine'', on the other hand, called the novel "self-satisfied" and "boringly solipsistic
Solipsism (; ) is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and ...
".
In 2010, Gessen edited and introduced ''Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager'', a book about the financial crisis
A financial crisis is any of a broad variety of situations in which some financial assets suddenly lose a large part of their nominal value. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many financial crises were associated with banking panics, and man ...
. In 2011, he became involved in the Occupy Movement
The Occupy movement was an international populist socio-political movement that expressed opposition to social and economic inequality and to the perceived lack of "real democracy" around the world. It aimed primarily to advance social and econo ...
in New York City. He co-edited the ''OCCUPY! Gazette'', a newspaper reporting on Occupy Wall Street
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was a protest movement against economic inequality and the influence of money in politics that began in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Wall Street financial district, in September 2011. It gave rise to the ...
and sponsored by '' n+1''. On November 17, 2011, Gessen was arrested by the New York City police
The New York City Police Department (NYPD), officially the City of New York Police Department, established on May 23, 1845, is the primary municipal law enforcement agency within the New York City, City of New York, the largest and one of ...
while covering and participating in an Occupy protest at the New York Stock Exchange.
He wrote about his experience for '' The New Yorker''.
In 2015, Gessen co-edited ''City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis'', which was named a "Best Summer Read of 2015" by ''Publishers Weekly
''Publishers Weekly'' (''PW'') is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents. Published continuously since 1872, it has carried the tagline, "The International News Magazine of ...
''.
In 2018, Gessen's second novel, ''A Terrible Country'', was published. In March 2019, it was serialized on BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC that replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. It broadcasts a wide variety of Talk radio, spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history fro ...
.
Geffen wrote a non-fiction memoir about raising his son Raffi, titled ''Raising Raffi: The First Five Years'' which was published in 2022.
Personal life
Gessen is married to the writer Emily Gould
Emily Gould (born October 13, 1981) is an American author, novelist and blogger who worked as an editor at ''Gawker''. She has written several short stories and novels and is the co-owner, with fellow writer Ruth Curry, of the independent e-bo ...
and was previously married when he arrived in New York City at age 22. , he resided in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn
Clinton Hill is a neighborhood in north-central Brooklyn, a borough of New York City. It is bordered by the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to the north, Williamsburg to the northeast, Classon Avenue and Bedford–Stuyv ...
.
Bibliography
Novels
*
*
Non-fiction
*
*
*
* [Online version is titled "How Stalin became Stalinist".]
Translations
*
*
*
References
External links
''New York Inquirer'' 2006 interview with Gessen about ''n+1''
April 27, 2008
Dwight Garner, '' The New York Times'', July 13, 2010
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gessen, Keith
American magazine editors
Living people
Soviet emigrants to the United States
Harvard College alumni
Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts alumni
1975 births
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
People from Brookline, Massachusetts
Writers from Newton, Massachusetts
Writers from Brooklyn
21st-century American novelists
American male novelists
Jewish American writers
21st-century American male writers
Novelists from New York (state)
Novelists from Massachusetts
The New Yorker people
21st-century American non-fiction writers
American male non-fiction writers
21st-century American Jews