By: Daniel Torday
ISBN: 9781250191793
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Publication Date: 09/18/2018
Format: Other
My Rating: 4 Stars "Torday is a singular American writer with a big heart and a real love for the world. He has the rare gift for writing dynamic action scenes while being genuinely funny." —George Saunders Bluegrass musician, former journalist and editor, and now PhD in English, Mark Brumfeld has arrived at his thirties with significant debt and no steady prospects. His girlfriend Cassie—a punk bassist in an all-female band, who fled her Midwestern childhood for a new identity—finds work at a “new media” company. When Cassie refuses his marriage proposal, Mark leaves New York and returns to the basement of his childhood home in the Baltimore suburbs.
Desperate and humiliated, Mark begins to post a series of online video monologues that critique Baby Boomers and their powerful hold on the job market. But as his videos go viral, and while Cassie starts to build her career, Mark loses control of what he began—with consequences that ensnare them in a matter of national security.
Told through the perspectives of Mark, Cassie, and Mark’s mother, Julia, a child of the '60s whose life is more conventional than she ever imagined, Boomer1 is timely, suspenseful, and in every line alert to the siren song of endless opportunity that beckons and beguiles all of us.
A special thank you to #StMartinsPress and #NetGalley for an advanced reading copy #Boomer1. Review to follow.
Praise
"Torday is a singular American writer with a big heart and a real love for the world. He has the rare gift for writing dynamic action scenes while being genuinely funny." - George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo
"In this inventive, hilarious, and audacious book, Daniel Torday elucidates the deep ironies and ambivalences embedded in how we live now." - Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others and National Book Critics Circle Award winner
"Daniel Torday’s Boomer1 is a wild, wickedly funny, and deeply empathetic look at modern American culture and politics.” - Phil Klay, National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment
“Boomer1 channels the riotous insecurity and injustice of our contemporary America into a frightening, hilarious, and all-too-plausible societal bildungsroman. Edgy and humane, this novel is live music for our screened-off world.” - Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!
"Boomer1 is a doozy--a prescient, cathartic love letter to Gen X, a fond call to arms for Millennials. Daniel Torday has written this generational cusp with wisdom, style and sincerity." - Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Gold Fame Citrus
"Boomer1 is a dazzling new novel from one of America's premier writers." - Adam Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Orphan Master's Son
"Torday's gifts as a writer are brilliantly displayed...Stylishly written, cleverly observed, and boldly imagined." - Kirkus (starred review)
"Smart and culturally attuned." - Library Journal
"Torday (The Last Flight of Poxl West) constructs a hilarious story about generational conflict brought to a boiling point...Torday’s wry examination of those attempting to survive in post-recession America is particularly poignant." - Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Daniel Torday is the author of the novel THE LAST FLIGHT OF POXL WEST. New York Times chief critic Michiko Kakutani said the book "announces Torday's emergence as a writer deserving of attention," and in a cover review, The New York Times Book Review called the novel, “Expertly crafted... full of lyrical prose, superb Rothian sentences that glide over the page as smoothly as a Spitfire across a cloudless sky… utterly accomplished." Esquire Magazine called the book’s ending “the 149 best words published this year.” Torday's novella, THE SENSUALIST, won the 2012 National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction. His short stories and essays have appeared in Esquire, Tin House, Paris Review Daily and The Kenyon Review. He is the Director of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College. Read More
