Keith Gessen

Early life and education

Born Konstantin Alexandrovich Gessen , he was raised in a Jewish family in Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union. Gessen's mother was a literary critic, and his father is a computer scientist specializing in forensics. His maternal grandmother, Rosalia "Ruzya" Solodovnik, was a Soviet government censor of dispatches filed by foreign reporters; his paternal grandmother, Ester Goldberg, was a translator for a foreign literary magazine. They lived in Brookline and Newton, Massachusetts.

Gessen graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in history and literature in 1998. He did ultimately receive the degree. The Atlantic, and The New York Review of Books. In 2004–2005, he was the regular book critic for New York magazine.

In 2005, Dalkey Archive Press published Gessen's translation of Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl , an oral history of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. In 2009, Penguin published his translation (with Anna Summers) of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya's There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby.

Gessen's first novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, was published in April 2008 and received mixed reviews. Joyce Carol Oates wrote that "in this debut novel there is much that is charming and beguiling, and much promise." Jonathan Franzen said: "It's so delicious the way he writes." New York Magazine, on the other hand, called the novel "self-satisfied" and "boringly solipsistic."

In 2010, Gessen edited and introduced Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, a book about the 2008 financial crisis.

In 2011, he became involved in the Occupy movement in New York City. He co-edited the OCCUPY! Gazette, a newspaper reporting on Occupy Wall Street and sponsored by n+1. He wrote about this experience for The New Yorker.

In 2015, Gessen co-edited with Stephen Squibb City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis, which was named a "Best Summer Read" of 2015 by Publishers Weekly.

In 2018, Gessen's second novel, A Terrible Country, was published. In March 2019, it was serialized on BBC Radio 4.

Gessen wrote a non-fiction memoir about raising his son, titled Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, which was published in 2022.

Personal life Gessen is married to the writer Emily Gould and was previously married when he arrived in New York City at age 22. , he resided in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.