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Keith Gessen

Biography

Keith Gessen

Keith Gessen is the author of A TERRIBLE COUNTRY, ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN and a founding editor of n+1. He is the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator or co-translator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and a work of oral history, Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich’s VOICES FROM CHERNOBYL. A contributor to The New Yorker and The London Review of Books, Gessen teaches journalism at Columbia and lives in New York with his wife and sons.

Keith Gessen

Books by Keith Gessen

by Keith Gessen - Fiction

Andrei Kaplan leaves New York to care for his ailing grandmother in Moscow. He learns to navigate Putin’s Moscow, still the city of his birth, but with more expensive coffee. Over the course of the year, his grandmother’s health declines, and his feelings of dislocation from both Russia and America deepen. Andrei knows he must reckon with his future and make choices that will determine his life and fate. When he becomes entangled with a group of leftists, Andrei’s politics and his allegiances are tested, and he is forced to come to terms with the Russian society he was born into and the American one he has enjoyed since he was a kid.