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Book Cover for: A Precarious Man, Stefan Mattessich

A Precarious Man

Stefan Mattessich

Nick Moran is one of that hapless tribe you hear about on occasion: an English PhD who can't find a job. Even when he does, years later and after a second career as a hack Hollywood screenwriter falls apart, the department at a university in Auckland, New Zealand, turns out to be a hornet's nest of paranoia (think "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings"), arbitrary power, and guilt by association. When his consensual relationship with a student leads not just to scandal and public disgrace but a threat of prosecution for "human rights violations," he finds himself in a still more confounding limbo of uncertain identity and thwarted hope. His path out of despair takes him to New York, where he slips into another limbo of drugs and sex, and then to Paris, where he helps his best friend Haley, lost in her own shadows, back from an edge of madness.





Book Details

  • Publisher: Atopon Books
  • Publish Date: Dec 5th, 2023
  • Pages: 378
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 1.00in - 1.59lb
  • EAN: 9798986210469
  • Categories: LiteraryCity LifePsychological

About the Author

Mattessich, Stefan: - STEFAN MATTESSICH has written three novels: Point Guard, a coming-of-age story set on the Northern California coast of Mendocino; East Brother, a satire about gentrification in a fictional California beach town; and The Riverbed, about intelligent young people coming to understand the darker sides of the suburbia where they live. He went to Yale College and has a PhD in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he wrote a monograph on the fiction of Thomas Pynchon entitled Lines of Flight, published by Duke University Press. He has also written a wide variety of literary criticism and cultural theory. He teaches English at Santa Monica College and lives in Los Angeles.

Praise for this book

An often intriguing. . .tale about living on the edge of catastrophe.

--Kirkus Reviews