Apartment

About this book

A New York Times Editors Choice Longlisted for the 2020 Simpson / Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize One of Vogue.coms Best Books of 2020 So Far One of Elles Best Books of 2020 So Far Named A Most-Anticipated Book by The New York Times Vogue The Boston Globe Salon The Millions Inside Hook and Vol. 1 Brooklyn In 1996 the unnamed narrator of Teddy Waynes Apartment is attending the MFA writing program at Columbia on his fathers dime and living in an illegal sublet of a rent-stabilized apartment. Feeling guilty about his good fortune he offers his spare bedroom--rent-free--to Billy a talented charismatic classmate from the Midwest eking out a hand-to-mouth existence in Manhattan. The narrators rapport with Billy develops into the friendship hes never had due to a lifetime of holding people at arms length hovering at the periphery feeling fundamentally defective. But their living arrangement not to mention their radically different upbringings breeds tensions neither man could predict. Interrogating the origins of our contemporary political divide and its ties to masculinity and class Apartment is a gutting portrait of one of New Yorks many lost disconnected souls by a writer with an uncommon aptitude for embodying them.