QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town? ANSWER: You accept them all. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world. You can’t say yes–it would be too awkward–and you can’t say no–it would look like defeat. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Lambda Award, and the California Book Award Who says you can’t run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZEĪ San Francisco Chronicle Top Ten Book of 2017 There’s also something surprisingly refreshing about seeing ordinary middle-age taken seriously as a subject, and the “miracle” of having survived life’s “humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty.A struggling novelist travels the world to avoid an awkward wedding in this hilarious Pulitzer Prize-winning novel full of “arresting lyricism and beauty” ( The New York Times Book Review).

There’s nothing self-hating about the compassion with which he handles his haplessly loveable protagonist, nor the way in which he eventually rewards him either. Greer certainly takes his own advice with Less. But then he leaves to go find his wife! You have to do better. A man washes ashore on an island and has a gay affair for years.

If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were Republican. “But in your books, you make the characters suffer without reward.

“It’s our duty to show something beautiful from our world,” Finley lectures Less. His critically applauded debut, Kalipso, was a retelling of the Calypso myth featuring a doomed love affair between a Second World War soldier washed ashore in the South Pacific and the man who nurses him back to life, and his current work-in-progress is a walking tour of San Francisco, in which a footsore protagonist revisits the disappointments of his past. Less is a moderately successful novelist. When Greer’s novel begins, Arthur Less is recently single and about to turn 50. Originally published in America last year, Andrew Sean Greer’s bittersweet comic novel Less arrives in a UK edition complete with the accolade of having won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – pronounced “Pull-it-sir,” Greer’s hero Arthur Less’s one-time boyfriend Robert, an acclaimed poet, learns when he wins one, “not Pew-lit-sir.” “Turns out I’ve been pronouncing it wrong all these years,” says the shell-shocked wordsmith.

Less book pulitzer