From the acclaimed author of the “wild, gorgeous” ( Will Miles is trapped. Trapped in tiny Greening, Michigan, where a toxic high school rumor has turned her into a social exile. Trapped in the predictable routines of her mother, and under the unrelenting gaze of her mother’s increasingly sinister boyfriend.;But when Will stumbles across the early poems of Nathaniel Fellow, a famous writer forty years her senior who also grew up in Greening, she feels she’s found a kindred spirit. A passing comment from her mother only adds to Will’s fascination: Is Nathaniel the father she''s never known? Will orchestrates a plan to track Nathaniel down, following in his footsteps to New York City, where she learns he''s not the answer to her past, not the way she imagined. But their meeting sparks a complicated, consuming relationship that gives Will sidelong access to a world she’s only ever imagined: of writers and intellectuals, a financial safety net, and, most intoxicatingly, a glimpse into her own potential. But who is Nathaniel Fellow, off the page? And what will shaping her life to suit his cost her? When a torrent of information about his past threatens not just her life with Nathaniel, but the story she tells herself about him, Will is faced with a choice that will change everything.; A gripping novel about ambition, parents, and children, and all the ways women still pay for men’s mistakes, <Famous Men< traces one woman’s journey to the truth of where she comes from, what she’s capable of, and how she might start again.

Autorentext

Julie Buntin's debut novel, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, released in ten territories worldwide, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen outlets, including The Washington Post, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews. She is the co-editor of Notes to New Mothers, a collection of dispatches from postpartum life by sixty writers and artists. Previously, Buntin was an editor and director of writing programs at Catapult. Now, she writes and teaches in Ann Arbor, where she is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.

Klappentext

From the acclaimed author of Marlena comes a vivid, uncompromising novel about a young woman looking for a father and finding herself.

“Julie Buntin understands the complexity of morality, declining easy answers to difficult questions about art and ethics as well as sex and desire. I tore through it.”—Rumaan Alam, author of Entitlement and Leave the World Behind

“Haunting and knife-bright . . . Famous Men renders womanhood with unsettling clarity.”—Kiley Reid, author of Come and Get It and Such a Fun Age

The right book at the right time can change your life.

Will Miles is trapped. Trapped in tiny Greening, Michigan, where a toxic high school rumor has turned her into a social exile. Trapped in the predictable routines of her mother, and under the unrelenting gaze of her mother’s increasingly sinister boyfriend. But when Will stumbles across the early poems of Nathaniel Fellow, a famous writer forty years her senior who also grew up in Greening, she feels she’s found a kindred spirit. A passing comment from her mother only adds to Will’s fascination: Is Nathaniel the father she's never known?

Will orchestrates a plan to track Nathaniel down, following in his footsteps to New York City, where she learns he's not the answer to her past, not the way she imagined. But their meeting sparks a complicated, consuming relationship that gives Will sidelong access to a world she’s only ever imagined: of writers and intellectuals, a financial safety net, and, most intoxicatingly, a glimpse into her own potential. But who is Nathaniel Fellow, off the page? And what will shaping her life to suit his cost her? When a torrent of information about his past threatens not just her life with Nathaniel, but the story she tells herself about him, Will is faced with a choice that will change everything.

A gripping novel about ambition, parents and children, and all the ways women still pay for men’s mistakes, Famous Men traces one woman’s journey to the truth of where she comes from, what she’s capable of, and how she might start again.

Leseprobe
I

A Fact

He doesn’t remember me, but I know who he is. The biographer and I met at a party Nathaniel took me to about a year after I arrived in New York, a literary fundraiser at one of those apartments where the elevator opens right into the living room. “Wilhelmina, this good man wants to write about me,” Nathaniel said. “Your assignment tonight is to persuade him of a better idea.”

A tray of miniature hamburgers floated by, and the biographer grabbed one and ate it looking down at my feet. He was squarely middle-aged, with a saddish face and damp-looking skin that suggested an indoor life. He followed us from the bar to the bookshelves and back again as Nathaniel drifted through the crowd greeting people. Nathaniel, as I recall, was kind but distracted, and probably irritated by how I hovered at his elbow, laughing a beat late at every joke. I was too new to that scene to talk to anyone without them addressing me first. And who would? I was, what, twenty-four, conspicuously younger than every other guest. For months, I’d wanted Nathaniel to bring me along to one of his obligations, as he called them—but when I got there, I found it sterile and frightening. All those long-haired women with their stylish glasses, the men, like the biographer, looking at me in that furtive, knowing way, like I was something—a dollar bill, or a pen—Nathaniel might drop for them to pick up.

“I’m going to do it, you know,” the biographer said, grabbing another tiny hamburger. “Write that book.” On the mantel above the fireplace—a fireplace, in a penthouse!—the hosts grinned from a photo, bookended by Bill and Hillary Clinton.

“The definitive biography! Get in line,” I said, taking a sip of wine. I’d never heard anything from anyone about a biography, but amplifying Nathaniel’s importance seemed a key task in my vague job description, along with maintaining the orderliness of his sock drawer and always being available for a daytime trip to the movie theater.

“To think he wanted to be an actor,” the biographer said. “Can you imagine?” Nathaniel was already a few steps away, making a quarter he kept in his suit pocket for this purpose appear and disappear behind an elderly woman’s ear.

“Nathaniel as an actor?” I said. “Of course I can.”

“I mean a world where he never wrote his books.”

In those early days I could be disarmed by the performative fandom of Nathaniel’s readers. They were contributing to a different conversation, a secret one about influence and loyalty and status that underpinned the one happening on the surface. I hadn’t learned to hear it yet. “No, I can’t,” I agreed. And wasn’t it true? Nathaniel’s books had made this world for me. They’d been the doorway, and now here I was, on the inside.

At the time of the party, the biographer had not yet written a single biography. I had written many poems, but not yet anything Nathaniel liked. Nathaniel had written six collections of poetry, two screenplays, four literary novels, one essay collection. A book of food writing; a pocket-sized collection of aphoristic wisdoms about the weather that sold better than all the poetry books combined. A bestselling memoir that had been adapted into a movie; a gritty, out-of-character romance that had been adapted into …