Boomer: A Novel

✍ Scribed by Daniel Torday

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 248 KB
• Edition: First edition
• Category: Fiction
• City: Baltimore (Md.), Maryland--Baltimore.
• ISBN: 1250191807

✦ Synopsis

"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.

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Review

One of The Millions’ Most Anticipated Books of 2018

Vulture.com’s Best New Books of Fall 2018

One of Entertainment Weekly 's 20 Books to Read in September

Philadelphia Inquirer ’s Best Books of the Fall
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"Wry...Reads as contemporary satire with Shakespearean echoes." -_ The New York Times_

"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
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"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
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_"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
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** "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 postrecession America is particularly poignant." - Publishers Weekly
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** "Boomer1 is a sharp, bright and often amusing snapshot of this unwieldy economic moment." -Wall Street Journal
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** "Torday’s writing is funny and insightful. He adeptly captures the current zeitgeist, where a tree that falls but is not captured on Instagram doesn’t make a sound." - The Nebraska Journal Star
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** "Refreshingly (if at times devastatingly) uncanny, funny, and clever." - The Millions
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** "Wry, humorous, ironic, and, at the same time, empathetic." - Authors 'Round the South

"Torday hit[s] the nail smack on the head."- San Francisco Chronicle
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** "Torday has some of the witty, neoteric, alternative-now chops of Don DeLillo...[his] narrative moves like a Clapton solo, fast and sinuous and haunting. And his black-humor story unfolds as naturally as a rainstorm." - Memphis Flyer
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** "Dialogue is stellar, and humor dances through everything like a countermelody." - Washington Independent Review of Books

About the Author

DANIEL TORDAY is a two-time National Jewish Book Award recipient and winner of the 2017 Sami Rohr Choice Award for The Last Flight of Poxl West. Torday's work has appeared in The New York Times, NPR, The Paris Review Daily, Esquire, and Tin House, and has been honored in both the Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays series. He is the Director of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College.

✦ Subjects

Maryland -- Baltimore