Keith Gessen Biography
Keith Gessen is an author, journalist, and literary translator from Russia. He is the co-founder and co-editor of the American literary magazine n+1, as well as an assistant journalism professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. The National Book Foundation named him a “5 under 35” honoree in 2008.
How old is Keith Gessen? – Age
He is 48 years old as of 9 January 2023. He was born in 1975 in Moscow, Russia. His real name is Konstantin Alexandrovich Gessen.
Keith Gessen Family – Education
He was born into a Jewish family in Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, and came to the United States with his parents and siblings in 1981. They settled in the Boston area, settling in Brighton, Brookline, and Newton. Gessen’s mother was a literary critic, while his father is a forensic computer scientist.
Masha Gessen, Daniel Gessen, and Philip Gessen are his siblings. Ruzya Solodovnik, his maternal grandmother, was a Soviet government censor of dispatches submitted by foreign correspondents such as Harrison Salisbury; Ester Goldberg Gessen, his paternal grandmother, was a translator for a foreign literary journal.
Gessen earned a B.A. in history and literature from Harvard University in 1998. He finished his M.F.A. in creative writing coursework at Syracuse University in 2004, but did not obtain a degree since he did not submit “a final original piece of fiction.” He eventually obtained the degree, according to his Columbia University faculty profile.
Keith Gessen Wife
Gessen is married to Emily Gould, a writer, and was previously married when he moved to New York City at the age of 22. He lived in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, in 2008.
Keith Gessen Net Worth
He has an estimated net worth of $5 Million.
Keith Gessen Books
Gessen has contributed to The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The Atlantic, and The New York Review of Books with articles about Russia. He was New York magazine’s regular book reviewer from 2004 to 2005. Gessen’s translation of Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl (Russian: Tchernobylskaia Molitva), an oral history of the Chernobyl nuclear tragedy, was released in 2005 by Dalkey Archive Publishing. Penguin released his translation of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Lady Who Tried to Murder Her Neighbor’s Baby: Horror Fairy Tales (with Anna Summers) in 2009.
Keith Gessen All the Sad Young Literary Men
Gessen’s debut novel, All the Sad Young Literary Guys, was released in April 2008 to mediocre reviews. Gessen’s novel revolves around the lives of three literary friends: Keith, a Harvard-educated writer living in New York City; Sam, who lives in Boston and is working on the “great Zionist epic”; and Mark, who is working on a history dissertation on the Mensheviks at Syracuse University. All the Sad Young Guys, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third collection of short tales, inspired the title. “Winter Dreams” and “The Rich Boy,” two of Fitzgerald’s most renowned stories about luxury and romance astonished by the chillier reality outside a university’s gates, are included in this anthology.
Keith Gessen Career
“In this debut work, there is much that is beautiful and intriguing, and tremendous promise,” wrote Joyce Carol Oates. Jonathan Franzen, a novelist, remarked of Gessen, “He writes in such a lovely manner. That appeals to me greatly.” According to New York Magazine, the work is “self-satisfied” and “boringly solipsistic.”
Gessen edited and published Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, a book on the 2008 financial crisis, in 2010. In 2011, he became active in the New York City Occupy Movement. He co-edited the Occupy! Gazette, a periodical funded by n+1 that reported on Occupy Wall Street.
Gessen was detained by New York City police on November 17, 2011, while covering and engaging in an Occupy demonstration at the New York Stock Exchange. He described his encounter in The New Yorker.
Gessen co-edited City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis in 2015, which Publishers Weekly rated a “Great Summer Read of 2015.” Gessen’s second novel, A Horrible Country, was released in 2018. It was serialized on BBC Radio 4 in March 2019. Gessen released Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, a non-fiction book on parenting his kid Raffi, in 2022.
