Keith Gessen Explained

Keith Gessen
Birth Name:Konstantin Alexandrovich Gessen
Birth Date:9 January 1975
Birth Place:Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Nationality:American
Education:
Relatives:Masha Gessen (sibling)

Keith A. Gessen (born January 9, 1975)[1] [2] 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.[3] In 2008 he was named a "5 under 35" honoree by the National Book Foundation.

Early life and education

Born Konstantin Alexandrovich Gessen (Russian: Константи́н Алекса́ндрович Ге́ссен|translit=) into a Jewish family in Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union,[4] he and his parents and sibling moved to the United States in 1981. They settled in the Boston area, living in Brighton, Brookline and Newton, Massachusetts.

Gessen's mother was a literary critic[5] and his father is a computer scientist now specializing in forensics.[6] His siblings are Masha Gessen, 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; his paternal grandmother, Ester Goldberg Gessen, was a translator for a foreign literary magazine.[4]

Gessen graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. 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."[7] 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 Atlantic, and the New York Review of Books.[8] In 2004–2005, he was the regular book critic for New York magazine. In 2005, Dalkey Archive Press published Gessen's translation of Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl, an oral history of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. In 2009, Penguin 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, was published in April 2008 and received mixed reviews. Joyce Carol Oates wrote that "in this debut novel there is much that is charming and beguiling, and much promise".[9] The novelist Jonathan Franzen has said of Gessen, "It's so delicious the way he writes. I like it a lot."[10] New York Magazine, on the other hand, called the novel "self-satisfied" and "boringly solipsistic".[11]

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.[12] In 2011, he became involved in the Occupy Movement in New York City. He co-edited the OCCUPY! Gazette, a newspaper reporting on Occupy Wall Street and sponsored by n+1.[13] On November 17, 2011, Gessen was arrested by the New York City police while covering and participating in an Occupy protest at the New York Stock Exchange.[14] He wrote about his experience for The New Yorker.[15]

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.[16]

In 2018, Gessen's second novel, A Terrible Country, was published. In March 2019, it was serialized on BBC Radio 4.[17]

Gessen wrote a non-fiction memoir about raising his son Raffi, titled Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, which was published in 2022.[18]

Personal life

Gessen is married to the writer Emily Gould[19] and was previously married when he arrived in New York City at age 22.[20], he resided in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

Bibliography

Novels

Non-fiction

Translations

Critical studies and reviews of Gessen's work

Raising Raffi

External links

Notes and References

  1. U.S. Public Records Index Vol 1 & 2 (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.), 2010.
  2. Web site: AGNI Online: Right of Return by Keith Gessen. www.bu.edu. 2017-11-16.
  3. Web site: Keith Gessen School of Journalism. journalism.columbia.edu. en. 2017-11-16.
  4. Joanna Smith Rakoff. "Talking with Masha Gessen, Newsday, January 2, 2005.
  5. http://bigthink.com/ideas/1175 Keith Gessen on Rediscovering Russia, "Big Think"
  6. Gabriel Sanders, "Faces Forward: Author Tells Tale of Her Grandmothers' Survival", Forward, December 10, 2004
  7. News: A Literary Critic Drops His Ax and Picks Up His Pen. The New York Times. Dave. Itzkoff. April 27, 2008. May 7, 2010.
  8. Web site: Wickett . Dan . Interview with Keith Gessen . Emerging Writers' Forum . March 6, 2005 . June 27, 2007 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20070612204527/http://www.breaktech.net/EmergingWritersForum/View_Interview.aspx?id=143 . June 12, 2007 .
  9. News: Youth!. Oates. Joyce Carol. 2008-05-01. The New York Review of Books. 2017-11-16. 0028-7504.
  10. News: No Surprises at National Book Awards; Jonathan Franzen Talks About Being 48. Neyfakh. Leon. 2007-11-15. Observer. 2017-11-16. en-US.
  11. Web site: Is This Book Worth Getting?. NYMag.com. 2017-11-16.
  12. D. Garner, Here’s Why the Cookie Crumbled. July 13, 2010.
  13. News: Occupy and Space. 2012-01-05. n+1. 2017-11-16. en-US.
  14. News: Editors of new Verso book Occupy! arrested today at N17 protest. Versobooks.com. 2017-11-16.
  15. Central Booking. Gessen. Keith. 2011-11-28. The New Yorker. 2017-11-16. 0028-792X.
  16. News: Best Summer Books, 2015 Publishers Weekly. PublishersWeekly.com. 2017-11-16.
  17. A Terrible Country. A Terrible Country. Writer: Keith Gessen; Reader: Trevor White; Abridged by: Jill Waters and Isobel Creed; Produced by Jill Waters . BBC. BBC Radio 4. 11 March 2019. 15 March 2019 .
  18. News: Garner . Dwight . 'Raising Raffi,' a Father's Lucid Book About a Chaotic Scene . 7 June 2022 . The New York Times . 6 June 2022.
  19. News: Overstepping the bounds: how blogger Emily Gould has been oversharing. Hicklin. Aaron. 2014-12-14. The Observer. 2017-11-16. en-GB. 0029-7712.
  20. News: Love and other indoor sports. Norris. Sarah. June 27 - July 3, 2008. Downtown Express. 2017-11-16. Community Media LLC. 7. 21. Born in Russia, [Gessen] grew up in Massachusetts, attended Harvard, and then moved to New York at age 22 with a wife, from whom he is now divorced..
  21. Available on website only.
  22. Online version is titled "How Stalin became Stalinist".
  23. Online version is titled "A Ukrainian novel looks between the lines of war".
  24. Online version is titled "Liberals, radicals, and the making of a literary masterpiece".

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