Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. 2009A.D.) in a Large City

An idiosyncratic and elegant non-fiction narrative following a handful of young men in New York City, after the Wall Street crash of 2008, as they navigate through the ruins of money and power, in search of love and connection. Like Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's RANDOM FAMILY, Choire Sicha's brilliant, enigmatic first book is a nonfiction account that reads like a (sci-fi) novel. A voice from the future is piecing together life in a massive "city on the eastern coast of this country" from the vantage of John, a twentysomething, perpetually poor young man, and his circle of friends. It is a fable of money and sex in a city presided over by a Mayor (the richest man in town), who is running for an unprecedented third term, while a contagion quietly shakes the foundation of the world-as-it-was. The longtime-editor of Gawker and founding editor of The Awl, Sicha's style has become synonymous with hip, razor-sharp writing on the internet. His book raises the stakes while staying true to his tone: it is both a work of reportage and of internet-era historical pastiche, seamlessly weaving together first-person interviews and current events to present a surreal and sublime portrait of isolation, ambition, and attraction in New York City after the Wall Street crash of 2008.