Last Resort
A New York Times Editor’s Pick
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Last Resort
Narrated by:
Noah Michael Levine
Buy Now for £14.35
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Narrated by:
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Noah Michael Levine
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By:
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Andrew Lipstein
About this listen
Named a Top 10 Book of the Year by Slate
A New York Times Editors' Choice
Shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
'Talent is rare, which is why I let out a big yippee reading Andrew Lipstein's Last Resort... Excellent'
THE TIMES
'You won't read a more brilliantly executed literary romp this year'
GUARDIAN
'A funny, fast-paced literary satire'
DAILY TELEGRAPH
'Incredibly entertaining'
NEW YORK TIMES, Editor's Choice
'If Less by Andrew Sean Greer left a hole in your life, good news: Last Resort will fill it'
MEG MASON
'Caleb Horowitz is exactly the kind of character I love to hate'
CLAIRE FULLER
Caleb Horowitz is twenty-seven, and his wildest dreams are about to come true. His manuscript has caught the attention of the literary agent, who offers him fame, fortune and a taste of the literary life. He can't wait for his book to be shopped around to every editor in New York, except one: Avi Dietsch, a college rival and the novel's 'inspiration.'
When Avi gets his hands on the manuscript, he sees nothing but theft - and opportunity. And so Caleb is forced to make a Faustian bargain, one that tests his theories of success, ambition and the limits of art.
Critic reviews
Cowardly, avaricious, annoying, territorial, deceitful, opportunistic: there aren't enough shady adjectives in the dictionary to describe the narrator of Andrew Lipstein's Last Resort. What fun! Last Resort is about a novelist who has stolen the plot of his best-selling book from a story relayed to him by an acquaintance. Now, if you read last year's The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz, you'll notice that this novel has a similar, uh, plot as that one... They are both thrillers about, of all things, intellectual property. Korelitz's book was tighter and darker. Lipstein's is funnier. Both are incredibly entertaining... If Lipstein had written a less cunning book, he might have contrasted Caleb with a character who represented artistic purity, whatever that is. But everyone here sits somewhere on the grifter spectrum, including the real people (Avi, doomed woman, repressed married couple) upon whom Caleb's characters are based... In addition to a blithe streak, Caleb has a cruel streak, a petty streak and an intemperate streak, and Lipstein milks the comedy of these traits almost as well as Kingsley Amis did in Lucky Jim.
If you've ever wondered where writers get their ideas from, Last Resort is wicked fun. If you're a writer, Last Resort is heartburn in print. Splayed across these pages is the dark terror that lurks within any creative person's breast: the embarrassing facts that might demolish the glorious claims made in the name of literary invention... A deliciously absurd comedy about literary fame.
Lipstein gleefully scrutinizes the nature of success in an industry that runs as much on vanity as on financial gain... The book's command of contemporary-hipster details is wincingly precise.
Talent is rare, which is why I let out a big yippee reading Andrew Lipstein's Last Resort, one of a trio of excellent new first novels by men... Lipstein doesn't just blast chunks out of the inflated artifice of New York's literary scene, he turns his fire on the city at large too, or at least its hipster quarters, all "friendly, progressive, organic, recyclable"... There is something in Lipstein's novel that is specific to new male novelists - their conscious sensitivity about writing sex. Lipstein takes this head on. In Last Resort the novel-within-the-novel is slated online for its "male gaze". This is culturally astute (it's an accusation any man runs the risk of when he puts pen to paper, especially post #MeToo) and a smart way for Lipstein to say: I get it.
You won't read a more brilliantly executed literary romp this year... An unsparing satire of a generation of millennials who fear that their lives lack gravitas and emotional depth
A funny, fast-paced literary satire.
A novel of post-collegiate literary ambition, slippery storytelling, and a perfectly Pninian ending.
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