Literary Birthday – 9 January – Keith Gessen

Happy Birthday, Keith Gessen, born 9 January 1975.

Keith Gessen Quotes

1. One changes, as a writer, fairly quickly; what you wrote six months or a year ago might not sound right anymore.
2. She had such control of tone, in her text messages, she was the Edith Wharton of text messaging.
3. I judge writers on how they write queries. If you’re a good writer, you’re a good writer.
4. He was getting to be a certain age, he thought. It was the age when his never-to-be-written masterpieces had begun to outweigh the masterpieces he was still going to write.
5. And so in addition to lots of reading, the life of an editor involves constantly trying to get others to read as well.

Keith Gessen is a Russian-born American novelist and journalist. He is a co-editor of n+1, a thrice-yearly magazine of literature, politics, and culture based in New York City. He is the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men. Gessen’s second novel, A Terrible Country, was serialized on BBC Radio 4. His memoir about raising his son, Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, was published in 2022.

Source for image: David Shankbone, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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