The Year of Endless Sorrows

New York City, the early 1990s: the recession is in full swing and young people are squatting in abandoned buildings in the East Village while the homeless riot in Tompkins Square Park. The Internet is not part of daily life; the term "dot-com" has yet to be coined; and people's financial bubbles are burst for an entirely different set of reasons. What can all this mean for a young Midwestern man flush with promise, toiling at a thankless, poverty-wage job in corporate America, and hard at work on his first novel about acute knee pain and the end of the world?

With The Year of Endless Sorrows, acclaimed playwright and finalist for the 2003 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing Adam Rapp brings readers a hilarious picaresque reminiscent of Nick Hornby, Douglas Copeland, and Rick Moody at their best—a chronicle of the joys of love, the horrors of sex, the burden of roommates, and the rude discovery that despite your best efforts, life may not unfold as you had once planned.

New York City, the early 1990s: the recession is in full swing and young people are squatting in abandoned buildings in the East Village while the homeless riot in Tompkins Square Park. The Internet is not part of daily life; the term "dot-com" has yet to be coined; and people's financial bubbles are burst for an entirely different set of reasons. What can all this mean for a young Midwestern man flush with promise, toiling at a thankless, poverty-wage job in corporate America, and hard at work on his first novel about acute knee pain and the end of the world?

With The Year of Endless Sorrows, acclaimed playwright and finalist for the 2003 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing Adam Rapp brings readers a hilarious picaresque reminiscent of Nick Hornby, Douglas Copeland, and Rick Moody at their best—a chronicle of the joys of love, the horrors of sex, the burden of roommates, and the rude discovery that despite your best efforts, life may not unfold as you had once planned.

Publishers Weekly

It's the early '90s, and an unnamed Midwestern aspiring writer, recently graduated, moves into an East Village apartment with three roommates: his actor younger brother, Feick (promptly swept out of his life by artistic success); his best friend, Glenwood (a skinny, self-loathing Columbia Business School student); and Burton Loach, a vagrant type just as happy to watch the fan blades as TV. The narrator's superiors at Van Von Donnell Publishing (where he has a pittance-paying, bottom-rung job) are waspy, shallow, depraved, and smugly articulate. In short chapters, YA novelist (Under the Wolf, Under the Dog) and playwright (Red Light Winter) Rapp lets the office satire rip, particularly of the boss with a predilection for farting (who takes a shine to him as prospective son-in-law material) and the children's book illustrator who delivers personalized erotic portraits on napkins to co-workers. In between novel writing, calls home to his frenzied mother and attractions to Ivy League office girls (as well as the physically flawless but destructive boss's daughter), he falls for aspiring actress Basha, a Polish emigre he has seen twice on the subway platform before running into her a third fateful time. This sweet, stagy bildungsroman never departs familiar territory, but it has lots of winning set pieces. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Adam Rapp is the author of numerous plays, most notably Nocturne (Faber, 2002), and Red Light Winter (Faber, 2006), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as six novels for young adults. He lives in New York.