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Keith Gessen

Keith Gessen was born in Moscow in 1975 and came to the United States with his family when he was six years old. He is a co-founder of the literary magazine n+1 and the author of the novels All the Sad Young Literary Men and A Terrible Country. He has written about Russia for the London Review of Books, n+1, the Nation, the New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine, and has translated or co-translated several books from Russian, including Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, and It's No Good by Kirill Medvedev. He is also the editor of the n+1 books What We Should Have Known, Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, and City by City. He lives in New York with his wife, the author and publisher Emily Gould, and their son, Raphy, who likes squishy candy.


“Honestly,” he says, “I judge writers on how they write queries. If you’re a good writer, you’re a good writer.” And if not, then not.”
Keith Gessen
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“One changes, as a writer, fairly quickly; what you wrote six months or a year ago might not sound right anymore.”
Keith Gessen
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“She had such control of tone, in her text messages, she was the Edith Wharton of text messaging.”
Keith Gessen
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