The Year of Endless Sorrows
From "one of the more daring young stylists working today" (Time Out New York) comes a novel of New York in the early '90s and one man's brutally funny coming of age.
New York City, the early 1990s: the recession is in full swing and young people are squatting in abandoned buildings in the East Village while the homeless riot in Tompkins Square Park. The Internet is not part of daily life; the term "dot-com" has yet to be coined; and people's financial bubbles are burst for an entirely different set of reasons. What can all this mean for a young Midwestern man flush with promise, toiling at a thankless, poverty-wage job in corporate America, and hard at work on his first novel about acute knee pain and the end of the world?
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Adam Rapp is the author of numerous plays, most notably Nocturne (Faber, 2002), and Red Light Winter (Faber, 2006), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as six novels for young adults. He lives in New York.
"Adam Rapp's The Year Of Endless Sorrows is an ultra vivid excruciatingly precise buildingsroman--a time capsule of a young man's evolution--a young man not entirely unlike Rapp himself. It is a story of roommates, and family and desire and the quest for meaning and definition while all the time bumping up against the ennui that is perhaps just the sensation of being alive and the daily absurd irony that is city life." --A.M. Homes
"Adam is passionate and energetic, he works hard and he's really mad about stuff, in his life and in his world. This is what fuels him. His poetic voice and his vision are all at the service of this driving determination to say what he has seen and felt. He never stops working, never stops listening, never stops. I'm not sure he sleeps. He may actually be two or three people, taking turns being him . . . I do not know how he does it. He is the single most prolific writer I know. You'd have to go back to Mozart to find somebody like Adam. And Mozart, actually, would be a good person to compare him to. Both playful, both angry, both geniuses, both capable of great beauty and great fury, neither a man to be messed with." --Marsha Norman "I love Adam's writing. His ironic bohemianism totally captures the scruff and tang of the great unwashed struggling literati. If Joyce Carol Oates and Charles Bukowski had a kid, he would be Adam Rapp." --Eric Bogosian "Rapp . . . is a gifted storyteller. He makes demands on his audience, and he rewards its close attention with depth and elegance." --John Lahr, The New Yorker
