The Future Won't Be Long

(Paperback, Main)

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It's the tail-end of 1986 and Baby is the freshest-faced, starriest-eyed young homo in all of New York City, straight off the bus from closeted backwoods Wisconsin. Adeline is his rich-art-school-kid saviour with a bizarre transatlantic drawl and a spare bed.

The Future Won't Be Long follows Baby and Adeline as they cling to each other for dear life through a decade of mad, bad New York life punctuated by the deaths of Warhol, Basquiat and Wojnarowicz and the forcible gentrification of the East Village. While Adeline develops into the artist she never really expected to become, Baby falls into a twilight zone of clubbing, ketamine and late-capitalistic sexual excess. As he struggles to find his way out again, Baby will test the strength of a friendship that had seemed unbreakable.

Riotously funny, provocative but tender, The Future Won't Be Long is a sprawling, ecstatic elegy to New York, and to the friendships that have the power to change - and save - our lives.

'A punky, heartbreaking and hilarious epic on America going nowhere, going crazy, going bad. It's brilliant' Dorthe Nors, author of Mirror, Shoulder, Signal

Reviews

Jarett Kobek captures the cultural climate of New York c. 1986-1996 with a breathtaking, polymath accuracy -- Chris Kraus
Jarett Kobek's druggy, sexy, filthy fictional tour of New York City at the twilight of the 20th century is a nostalgic prequel to his gale-force satire I Hate The Internet, one of last year's best novels ... this wonderful novel shows Kobek can do old-school plot without dialling down the fizzing voltage of his distinctively ranty style -- Anthony Cummins * Metro *
This is New York in the late 80s and early 90s: a city of club kids, drag queens, artists and junkies; the urban laboratory where identities are being reinvented for the new millennium ... a novel that not only dissects with consummate skill the cultural life of fin-de-sicle New York, but finds there the early symptoms of our contemporary malignancy -- James Purdon * Observer *
A festival of wit and, finally, wisdom -- Brian Martin * Spectator *
The Great New York City Novel has been loudly attempted and proclaimed so many times, one is tempted to assume it simply couldn't exist. Yet, with piercing intelligence, vitality, hilarity, and a rather startling sweetness, Jarett Kobek has done it. Staggering. -- Matthew Specktor
New York, like the future, isn't what it used to be - which is why Jarett Kobek lives in California and writes like a dream. His new novel is a marvel of wit, grit, and deep city memory. -- Joshua Cohen
Kobek crafts an electric tale, and the wilds of New York City during this intense time period provide a gritty, undeniably magnetic context. * Booklist *
The Future Won't Be Long arrives with the lightning-strike clarity that usually comes on the dance floor at 4am when the chaos of the world makes beautiful and profound sense ... a novel so evocative of time and place that you'll be pretty certain you were there. -- Ivy Pochoda, author of 'Visitation Street'
Reviews for I Hate the Internet 'This succinct, surprising, infinitely self-knowing book is the Infinite Jest of the Twitter age ... it's vicious. It's a hoot. * The Times *

Author Bio

Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. He is the author of ATTA, published by Semiotext(e), and I Hate the Internet, published by Serpent's Tail.