JARETT KOBEK READS FROM HIS NOVEL THE FUTURE WON'T BE LONG WITH JAMES ST. JAMES

Skylight Books Podcast Series

Jarett Kobek published his first novel, I Hate the Internet, last year with a small indie publisher and it immediately took on cult status. Kobek received a rave review from Dwight Garner in The New York Times, who described the novel “as a glimpse at a lively mind at full boil.” Jonathan Lethem declared Kobek “as riotous as Houellebecq,” and Bret Easton Ellis was photographed reading it in bed. Viking is thrilled to be publishing Kobek’s brilliant and epic follow-up novel, The Future Won't Be Long, a provocative, ecstatic story of friendship, sex, art, and ambition in the twilight days of New York City’s East Village (1986-1996).

The Future Won't Be Long centers on Adeline—featured years later in I Hate the Internet—a wealthy art student in New York City who chances upon a young man from the Midwest known only as Baby in a shady East Village squat. The two begin a fiery friendship which propels them through a decade of New York life punctuated by the deaths of Warhol, Basquiat, Wojnarowicz, by the Tompkins Square Park riots, and by the rise of club kid culture. Adeline is fiercely protective of Baby, but he soon takes over his own education. Once just a kid off the bus from Wisconsin, Baby soon finds himself at the center of the club kid social scene, cavorting with Michael Alig and James St. James at The Tunnel, Limelight, and Alig’s infamous “Outlaw Party” at a midtown McDonald’s. As Adeline and Baby both develop into the artists they never expected to become, Kobek pays tribute to the last gasps of the gritty, drug-fueled scene of the East Village as gentrifiers begin to trickle in. Kobek, himself a graduate of NYU, writes with a native’s sensitivity to New York, especially about those who come here with hope and those who come to escape their pasts. Riotously funny and wise, The Future Won't Be Long is a euphoric, propulsive novel coursing with a rare vitality, an elegy to New York and to the relationships that have the power to change—and save—our lives.

Jarett Kobek is a Turkish American writer living in California. He is the author of the novel I Hate the Internet (2016) and the novella Atta (2011)

James St. James who was once dubbed a "celebutante" by Newsweek magazine, now leads a quiet, sedate existence in Los Angeles, far from the madness that he writes about.

Event date: Thursday, August 17, 2017 - 7:30pm