Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the wo...
Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world.
QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?
ANSWER: You accept them all.
What would possibly go wrong? Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there is his last.
Because, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, Less is, above all, a love story.
A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author The New York Times has hailed as "inspired, lyrical," "elegiac," "ingenious," as well as "too sappy by half," Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.
Andrew Sean Greer (born 1970) is an American novelist and short story writer.
He is the bestselling author of The Story of a Marriage, which The New York Times has called an “inspired, lyrical novel,” and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named one of the best books of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and received a California Book Award.
Andrew Sean Greer (born 1970) is an American novelist and short story writer.
He is the bestselling author of The Story of a Marriage, which The New York Times has called an “inspired, lyrical novel,” and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named one of the best books of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and received a California Book Award.
The child of two scientists, Greer studied writing with Robert Coover and Edmund White at Brown University, where he was the commencement speaker at his own graduation, where his unrehearsed remarks, critiquing Brown's admissions policies, caused a semi-riot. After years in New York working as a chauffeur, theater tech, television extra and unsuccessful writer, he moved to Missoula, Montana, where he received his Master of Fine Arts from The University of Montana, from where he soon moved to Seattle and two years later to San Francisco where he now lives. He is currently a fellow at the New York Public Library Cullman Center. He is an identical twin.
While in San Francisco, he began to publish in magazines before releasing a collection of his stories, How It Was for Me. His stories have appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, The New Yorker and other national publications, and have been anthologized most recently in The Book of Other People, and The PEN/ O. Henry Prize Stories 2009. His first novel, The Path of Minor Planets, was published in 2001.
It’s that they’ve survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here. (查看原文)
If a band stays together twenty years, it’s a miracle. If a comedy duo stays together twenty years, they’re triumph. Is this night a failure because it will end in an hour? I’d the sun a failure because it’s going to end in a billion years? No, it’s the fucking sun. Why does a marriage not count? (查看原文)
When that final sentence appeared, I was like Arthur Less after five years of reading In Search of Lost Time, deprived of the joy of savoring the last few paragraphs. The book carries an interesting f...When that final sentence appeared, I was like Arthur Less after five years of reading In Search of Lost Time, deprived of the joy of savoring the last few paragraphs. The book carries an interesting form, natural humor and great depth.
Mesmerized by the true beauty of that kiss, & forever grateful for that unexpected light, at home, awaiting him.(展开)
I really like the tone of this novel. On the one hand, It was told in a direct and detailed way that as a reader, I could depict the scense with flesh in my mind. On the other hand, despite the closeness, all the emotions in the story are still slightly det...
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When Robert won the prize, it came to him, at that very moment, that the prononciation per se was not /pju/ for the first syllable of the famous literary award plitzer. And he sighed to his lover Arthur Less, "Prizes are not love. Because people who never m...
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安德鲁·西恩·格利尔 作者
liechtenstein
Jimmy47
吃货精神
3 有用 易枕风 2018-10-04 21:59:27
When that final sentence appeared, I was like Arthur Less after five years of reading In Search of Lost Time, deprived of the joy of savoring the last few paragraphs. The book carries an interesting f... When that final sentence appeared, I was like Arthur Less after five years of reading In Search of Lost Time, deprived of the joy of savoring the last few paragraphs. The book carries an interesting form, natural humor and great depth. Mesmerized by the true beauty of that kiss, & forever grateful for that unexpected light, at home, awaiting him. (展开)
1 有用 腐尔萌斯 2023-01-29 21:13:38 加拿大
艺基回忆录。追求美腿和年轻应该是全世界的0共有的目标吧……某几章（私心20年情侣离婚那段，很潇洒）写的真的不错，但通篇看下来有（基佬版）玛丽苏“全世界都爱我这50岁白莲花”的嫌疑……（然后发现我看英文书的速度甚至比日语都慢😢
1 有用 摩诘 2019-11-04 08:01:48
"Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit."
1 有用 安远 2019-06-22 16:05:19
Any narrator would be jealous of this possible love
3 有用 Jacintta H 2018-07-24 08:52:16
I love this book!