The Narcissism Of Small Differences

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A hilarious and poignant novel about growing up, buying in, selling out, and the death of irony.

Joe Keen and Ana Urbanek have been a couple for a long time, with all the requisite lulls and temptations, yet they remain unmarried and without children or a mortgage, as their Midwestern values (and parents) seem to require. Now on the cusp of forty, they are both working at jobs that they're not even sure they believe in anymore, but with significantly varying returns.

The Narcissism of Small Differencesis the story of Joe and Ana's life together, their relationship, their tribes, their work and passions, and their comic quest for a life that is their own and no one else's.

Michael Zaadorian discusses The Narcissism of Small Differences on LiteraryHub

'While everyone is trying so hard to act normal,The Narcissism of Small Differencesrevels in its own weirdness.' Ben Folds,New York Timesbest-selling author/singer-songwriter

Reviews

Zadoorian's comedy of contemporary manners resonates by virtue of its introspective characters and depictions of the small moments in life that, taken together, have great significance. Piquantly titled chapters ('Out Come the Freaks') provide additional comic snap. Zadoorian's subtle, timely story hits the mark.
--Publishers Weekly

Detroit in 2009 is depicted as a place whose glory days are behind it and whose future is uncertain. Ana and Joe are neither fortune-seeking gentrifiers nor grizzled veterans, and their need to find a specific place where they belong makes for some of this novel's most affecting moments...[This novel's] empathy and lived-in qualities are both appealing.
--Kirkus Reviews

[A] warm, surprisingly playful novel about middle-age crisis...Zadoorian's obvious affection for Detroit, along with his enthusiasm for his characters' pursuit of meaningful lives, makes this a very enjoyable read.
--Library Journal

Michael Zadoorian uses funky hometown of Ferndale as the backdrop of his latest novel.
--Stateside (Michigan Public Radio)

Zadoorian's comedy of manners gently and lovingly mocks and ridicules a generation that has grown up on irony...Zadoorian's writer's heart, however, is too true to reduce his characters to caricatures. At their cruelest and most smart-alecky, their creator never loses sight--nor does he allow his reader to lose sight--of their essential humanity and the tender vulnerability lying beneath the shiny surface.
--Books in Northport (Dog Ears Books blog)

The journey is classic Zadoorian, filled with lots of Detroit-iana, classic asides, and two heroes you can't help but root for.
--Boswell Book Company, staff pick by Daniel Goldin

In The Narcissism of Small Differences, Michael Zadoorian writes with smart, skewering accuracy about relationships and midlife, about the costs of irony and complacency, and about how change comes for all of us, whether we're ready for it or not. Zadoorian's humor does that rare thing: packs a punch even as it moves us to sympathy and emotional connection. With Detroit as his steady muse and memory palace, Zadoorian is a writer of consequence in full command of his gifts.
--Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife and Love and Ruin

For anyone who's ever asked themselves, 'Am I weird' Michael Zadoorian has the answer: 'Of course you are. That's the whole idea.' While everyone is trying so hard to act normal, The Narcissism of Small Differences revels in its own weirdness.
--Ben Folds, New York Times best-selling author/singer-songwriter

The Narcissism of Small Differences asks big questions and delivers big answers but not without wit, taste, and style. A snapshot of a modern relationship, all messiness included. There's nobody better than Michael Zadoorian at unearthing the beauty in ruins, the truth in jest, youth in aging. In a literary landscape where most are hell-bent on outplotting their peers, he has sculpted a thriller from everyday life. For this, it's my most cherished book of the year.
--Josh Malerman, author of Bird Box

Simmering beneath the humor and irony of this story is a poignant quest for meaning and authenticity in a postmodern world that supposedly holds all the answers. Michael Zadoorian is a deft, thoughtful, and intelligent writer who has deep compassion and understanding for the human condition, and his humility and humanity infuse every page. I loved this book.
--Michael Imperioli, author of The Perfume Burned His Eyes

Against the backdrop of a crumbling Detroit, Zadoorian's prose sparkles and shimmers, infusing this love ballad of a novel with humor and light. Zadoorian is a writer who hears music everywhere and in everything, a writer who turns the act of reading into something as lush as a concert, as intimate as a mixtape.
--Nickolas Butler, author of Shotgun Lovesongs

A masterful storyteller and prose stylist, Michael Zadoorian doesn't disappoint with The Narcissism of Small Differences, a smart, briskly paced novel set in 2009 Detroit about an aging hipster and his more responsible mate struggling to keep their relationship from veering down the same path as their crumbling, economically wrecked city.
--Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time

Michael Zadoorian writes his characters with wit, humor, and compassion--clearly, he loves them, and this warmth comes shining through.
--Mira T. Lee, author of Everything Here Is Beautiful

It's been a while since I've read a book that nailed the mind-set of a generation like Michael Zadoorian has in The Narcissism of Small Differences. His study of an ordinary couple navigating a culture where nothing matters, to discover something that really does, is remarkable.
--Luke Sullivan, author of Hey Whipple, Squeeze This

'You shut up and went to work because people were counting on you, ' writes Michael Zadoorian in The Narcissism of Small Differences. This is perhaps the best description ever of the Detroit attitude, exemplified by protagonists Joe and Ana, a couple at the crossroads, utterly compelling as they try to move up--and stay together--in the world's most blue-collar city. Zadoorian's glittering prose will often make you laugh, but it's his gusto and unfailing eye that pull at your heart in this fantastic novel.
--Scott Lasser, author of Say Nice Things About Detroit

When you have spent a life living apart from the mainstream, carving out a niche of artful individualism, it's good to find that you are not alone after all. Michael Zadoorian's The Narcissism of Small Differences shows you that there are kindred souls in all the cities of the world who struggle with the same failures and successes. It's like discovering your family.
--Sven Kirsten, author of The Book of Tiki

The Narcissism of Small Differences is at once an intimate portrait of contemporary Detroit, a comedy of manners in modern marriage, and an honest depiction of the difficult choices--professional, creative, economic--many of us make while under the vise grip of late capitalism. The novel proposes that, while stuck in the craw of late empire, the very least we can do is keep an open heart. I laughed and winced equally in recognition. Michael Zadoorian is to Detroit what Stuart Dybek is to Chicago: a seer, even when the seeing hurts.
--Sally Franson, author of A Lady's Guide to Selling Out

Critical praise for Beautiful Music:

Danny Yzemski tunes out a dysfunctional family with Frank Zappa and Iggy Pop, shaking his countercultural fist at The Man in this eight-track flashback of a novel set in 1970s Detroit.
--O, the Oprah Magazine, included in Summer Reading Picks/One of 'O's Top Books of Summer

Beautiful Music is a sweet and endearing coming-of-age tale measured in album tracks.
--Wall Street Journal

For Danny, cracking the seal on a fresh piece of wax and dissecting cover art and liner notes are acts of nigh religious experience that unveil to him a community of fellow rockers across Detroit...It's in these small moments--a lonely boy experiencing premature nostalgia--that Zadoorian shines.
--Washington Post

Beautiful Music has been named a 2019 Michigan Notable Book

Adult Fiction Winner for the 2018 Great Lakes Great Reads program

One of McLean & Eakin's Favorite Michigan Books of 2018

One of the Voice news Michigan Bestsellers for 2018 in Fiction

Garnering a litany of regional awards from the likes of Voice, McLean & Eakin, and the 2018 Great Lakes Great Reads program, Michael Zadoorian's senior novel Beautiful Music tells of one young Detroiter's transformation through music during a time of political turmoil. Laden with details of the city, the novel is uniquely Detroit. (Some of the bands the protagonist, Danny, listens to are local legends MC5 and Iggy Pop.)
--Detroit Metro Times, included in the Michigan summer 2019 reading list

His third novel--Beautiful Music, about a radio-loving teen's transformation through music during the early '70s in Detroit...[is] rich with Detroit details (Korvette's, Bill Bonds, Iggy Pop), [and] follows Danny through racial tensions at high school, his changing body and his imploding family life.
--Detroit Free Press

[Zadoorian's] new novel speaks of death, race, music and youth in a voice that has been compared to Nick Hornby and Tobias Wolff. It is set in 1970's Detroit at the cusp of punk, and centers around high school loner and music fanatic Danny Yzemski. One to look forward to for fans of rock music and sad, funny writing.
--Cleveland Plain Dealer

Zadoorian takes us back to Detroit in the 1970s, which was still throbbing from the 1967 rebellion, and was in the throes of the energy crisis and the sexual revolution. Protagonist Danny Yzemski finds that growing up in such times can be...complicated. But

Author Bio

MICHAEL ZADOORIAN is the critically praised author of Beautiful Music, as well as The Leisure Seeker--the basis for the 2018 Sony Pictures Classics film starring Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland. Zadoorian is a recipient of a Kresge Artist Fellowship in the Literary Arts, the Columbia University Anahid Literary Award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, the GLIBA Great Lakes Great Reads award, and a Michigan Notable Book Award. His other books are Second Hand: A Novel, and the story collection The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit. His work has appeared in the Literary Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, American Short Fiction, Witness, Great Lakes Review, North American Review, Detroit Noir, and the Huffington Post. A lifelong resident of the Detroit area, he lives with his wife in a 1937 bungalow filled with cats and objects that used to be in the houses of other people.