Keith Gessen

Keith Gessen
Born	Konstantin Alexandrovich Gessen (1975-01-09) January 9, 1975 Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Occupation	Editor writer academic
Education	Harvard University (BA) Syracuse University (MFA)
Relatives	M. Gessen (sibling)

Keith Gessen (born January 9, 1975) is a Russian-born American novelist, journalist, and literary translator. He is co-founder and co-editor of American literary magazine n+1 and an assistant professor of journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In 2008 he was named a "5 under 35" honoree by the National Book Foundation.

Early life and education

Born Konstantin Alexandrovich Gessen (Russian: Константи́н Алекса́ндрович Ге́ссен), he was raised in a Jewish family in Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union. Gessen's mother was a literary critic and his father is a computer scientist now specializing in forensics. His maternal grandmother, Rosalia (Ruzya) Solodovnik, was a Soviet government censor of dispatches filed by foreign reporters such as Harrison Salisbury; his paternal grandmother, Ester Goldberg, was a translator for a foreign literary magazine. In 1981, his family moved to the United States, settling in the Boston area. They lived in Brighton, Brookline and Newton, Massachusetts.

Gessen graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in history and literature in 1998. He completed the course-work for his M.F.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University in 2004 but did not initially receive a degree, having failed to submit "a final original work of fiction." According to his Columbia University faculty biography, he ultimately received the degree.

Career

Gessen with Russian novelist Ludmilla Petrushevskaya in 2009

Gessen has written about Russia for The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The Atlantic, and the New York Review of Books. In 2004–2005, he was the regular book critic for New York magazine. In 2005, Dalkey Archive Press published Gessen's translation of Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl (Russian: Tchernobylskaia Molitva), an oral history of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. In 2009, Penguin published his translation (with Anna Summers) of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales.

Gessen's first novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, was published in April 2008 and received mixed reviews. Joyce Carol Oates wrote that "in this debut novel there is much that is charming and beguiling, and much promise". The novelist Jonathan Franzen has said of Gessen, "It's so delicious the way he writes. I like it a lot." New York Magazine, on the other hand, called the novel "self-satisfied" and "boringly solipsistic".

In 2010, Gessen edited and introduced Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, a book about the financial crisis. In 2011, he became involved in the Occupy Movement in New York City. He co-edited the OCCUPY! Gazette, a newspaper reporting on Occupy Wall Street and sponsored by n+1. On November 17, 2011, Gessen was arrested by the New York City police while covering and participating in an Occupy protest at the New York Stock Exchange. He wrote about his experience for The New Yorker.

In 2015, Gessen co-edited City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis, which was named a "Best Summer Read of 2015" by Publishers Weekly.

In 2018, Gessen's second novel, A Terrible Country, was published. In March 2019, it was serialized on BBC Radio 4.

Gessen wrote a non-fiction memoir about raising his son Raffi, titled Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, which was published in 2022.

Personal life

Gessen is married to the writer Emily Gould and was previously married when he arrived in New York City at age 22. As of 2008, he resided in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. He has three siblings, Daniel, Philip, and Masha.

Further reading

Critical studies and reviews of Gessen's work

External links

• New York Inquirer 2006 interview with Gessen about n+1
• Young Manhattanite 2008 interview with Gessen
• New York Times profile of Gessen, April 27, 2008
• "Here’s Why the Cookie Crumbled" Dwight Garner, The New York Times, July 13, 2010