Description: Necessary Errors by Caleb Crain ONE OF THE YEARS BEST BOOKS The Wall Street Journal • Slate • Kansas City Star • Flavorwire • Policy Mic • Buzzfeed"Necessary Errors is a very good novel, an enviably good one, and to read it is to relive all the anxieties and illusions and grand projects of ones own youth."—James Wood, The New YorkerThe exquisite debut novel by the author of Overthrow that brilliantly captures the lives and romances of young expatriates in newly democratic PragueIts October 1990. Jacob Putnam is young and full of ideas. Hes arrived a year too late to witness Czechoslovakias revolution, but he still hopes to find its spirit, somehow. He discovers a country at a crossroads between communism and capitalism, and a picturesque city overflowing with a vibrant, searching sense of possibility. As the men and women Jacob meets begin to fall in love with one another, no one turns out to be quite the same as the idea Jacob has of them—including Jacob himself.Necessary Errors is the long-awaited first novel from literary critic and journalist Caleb Crain. Shimmering and expansive, Crains prose richly captures the turbulent feelings and discoveries of youth as it stretches toward adulthood—the chance encounters that grow into lasting, unforgettable experiences and the surprises of our first ventures into a foreign world—and the treasure of living in Prague during an era of historic change. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Caleb Crain is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the Nation, the New York Times Magazine, the London Review of Books, n+1, the Paris Review Daily, and the New York Times Book Review. A graduate of Harvard and Columbia, he is the author of the critical work American Sympathy. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Review ONE OF THE YEARS BEST BOOKS • The Wall Street Journal • Slate • Kansas City Star • Flavorwire • Policy Mic • Buzzfeed • A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS CHOICE "Necessary Errors is a very good novel, an enviably good one, and to read it is to relive all the anxieties and illusions and grand projects of ones own youth."—James Wood, The New Yorker "Ferociously observed. . . . Were not through with narratives about the Getting of Wisdom, Americans Abroad, Coming of Age, Gay Coming of Age, New Lost Generations. Among such works, a new narrative will be measured against Caleb Crains fine book, which will endure as a powerful entry in the great fictional exploration of the meanings of liberation."—Norman Rush, The New York Review of Books "One of the remarkable things about [Crains] rather remarkable first novel, Necessary Errors, is the way he makes that thing — the experience of an idealistic young American abroad — feel newly revelatory and important. . . . He merely writes his characters and settings so well, with such precise attention to physical and psychological detail, that the reader feels introduced to a small world of people and places. . . . Necessary Errors aims to vividly and carefully reconstruct a lost time. . . . Necessary Errors seems exceptional among recent American novels in how smartly it turns over the economic metaphors in so much American thinking."—David Haglund, The New York Times "Evocative. . . . Necessary Errors so completely recaptures the smells and scenes and political conversations and above all the feelings of 1990-1991 Czechoslovakia that I began to actively worry that Mr. Crain was inserting new memories into my brain."—Matthew Welch, The Wall Street Journal "A new model for contemporary fiction. . . . It recalls the dreamy pacing of Henry James or Elizabeth Bowen."—Jane Hu, Slate "Post-Iron Curtain Prague is the resonant setting of Caleb Crains entertainingly digressive first novel . . . about a young expat coming into an understanding of what he believes and who he loves."—Vogue "Crain wonderfully evokes the novels setting in a few deft strokes. Hes a master of the thumbnail character sketch. . . . Line by line, the book is chock-full of masterly word choices and images. . . . On almost every page the reader is rewarded with gems. Necessary Errors heralds the fiction debut of a writer with intelligence and an engaging prose style. The book also serves as a document of a unique cultural moment that has vanished."—The New York Times Book Review "Caleb Crains debut novel is at times reminiscent of Jane Austen. . . . Necessary Errors is a slow, beautiful look at the process of assembly, destruction, and revision specific to coming of age. It captures the Herculean task of forging ones own definitions of success and authenticity. . . . Crains first novel is a subtle and magnificent look at a kind of freedom that young, thinking Americans cant find by staying at home."—Zeke Turner, Bookforum.com "A story of considerable power. . . . Throughout the novel, Crain is his own meta-critic, making literary analysis a convincing part of Jacobs narrative. . . . Crains mastery of this subtle kind of dramatic irony — in which we perceive truths that remain hidden from Jacob — is what gives the novel its cumulative emotional heft."—The Boston Globe "Dreamy." —Vanity Fair "Crain nicely captures the feel of two societies perched on the edge of becoming vastly more open—gay culture and the former Eastern Bloc—but where he really shines is in capturing the subtle, omnipresent disorientation of the expat experience."—New York magazine "[A] smart, pensive novel. . . . Crain has a sharp ear for dialogue."—Hephzibah Anderson, BloombergBusinessweek "An endearing and thoughtful look at the expatriate experience."—Marie Claire "Theres so much to like here that youll want to take it slow. . . . Henry James, but gay and in 90s Czechoslovakia."—Kevin Nguyen, Grantland "With its characters earnest longing for self-definition, the comedy and sorrow of their falling in love with the wrong people and the number of scenes set in bars, the novel certainly evokes a Sun Also Rises vibe. But Crains long, elegant sentences, meandering metaphors and omniscient point of view also owe a debt to Henry James. . . . Reading the novel feels like meeting up with friends. . . . One of the books best qualities is that evocation of what its like to live abroad. . . . Crain has a knack for making drama out of everyday life. . . . Crain does a fantastic job of immersing the reader in the setting, capturing both Pragues physical details and its atmosphere. He handles the characters with equal depth and heart. They feel simultaneously realistic and storylike."—The Kansas City Star "A sparkling first novel by the literary critic Caleb Crain about youth, ambition, and self-invention in early-90s Prague."—Harpers Bazaar "Despite the novels looming socio-political backdrop—the parting Iron Curtain and the Velvet Revolution—its story is mesmerizingly personal. . . . Like The Sun Also Rises, this book centers on the psychological events of each well-crafted character."—Lauren Christensen, VanityFair.com "Crain brings sharp insight and graceful writing to this portrait of the upheavals of youth played out in a country undergoing a historical turning."—Page-Turner, NewYorker.com "Elegant and intellectually robust. . . . Like Prague itself, Jacob will have to remake himself eventually, and Crain makes that need feel essential and bittersweet."—Mark Athitakis, Newsday "Crain reinvents the novel of the innocent abroad in his well-wrought debut."—Publishers Weekly "Crain (American Sympathy) continues his ascendant career with this fully realized debut novel, which delights and surprises with every paragraph. Fans of Ben Lerners Leaving the Atocha Station will find themselves similarly enchanted here."—Library Journal "A long-awaited debut by one of the brightest literary and journalistic minds today, Caleb Crains novel, Necessary Errors, chronicles a young mans experience in Czechoslovakia following the Velvet Revolution. Hes missed the bonfires, but the flames havent completely died out, and the morning-after light is the right intensity to survey the cultural landscape."—The Daily Beast"A compelling and heartfelt story that captures both the boundless enthusiasm and naïveté of youth."—Booklist "Crains stately, wry, and generous first novel breaks the mold. . . . The adventures of American Jacob Putnam in Czechoslovakia right after the Iron Curtains fall recall Henry James as much as they do Ben Lerner."—Garth Risk Hallberg, The Millions "Ive long admired Caleb Crains writing, and Necessary Errors is a tender, immersive, insightful novel. Its author builds with affection a world large and small--of early-nineties Prague, gay nightlife, the hardships of laundry, the penumbra of post-Soviet capitalism, beer versus tea, intense ex-pat friendships, a hamster who lives in a pot, and the hopeful stages of love."—Chad Harbach, author of The Art of Fielding "This novel sounds like nothing else happening now in American fiction. Its a tale of erotic awakening that contains--more like encodes--an attempt to read an historical moment, the nineties, when it seemed to many people that history was over. It has shades of Young Werther blowing through it. And shades of Young Törless. But also something other thats quiet and powerful and its own."—John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead "In its rich and elaborate depictions of a time and a life, of character and growth and pain, and in its psychological curiosity and emotional rigor, Necessary Errors is a rarity—a brave, humane, dignified novel of eros and youth in the shadow of history."—Donald Antrim, author of The Verificationist and The Afterlife "It is rare, and most welcome, to read a first novel with as much elegance, intelligence, humor, and tenderness as Necessary Errors. It is also rare to read any novel that creates this much beauty with such a light but sure touch. An exquisite debut."—Stacey DErasmo, author of The Sky Below and A Seahorse Year "Caleb Crains beautiful novel is a real feat of memory and invention, which captures the feeling of being young, sensitive, and vaguely but intensely ambitious better than anything I know in recent fiction. Everything in Necessary Errors feels both transitory and indelible, and isnt that the way?"—Benjamin Kunkel, author of Indecision "Caleb Crain has written a novel of surpassing intelligence and unexpected beauty about a young Americans year in post-Communist Prague -- and about how we find, and construct, the story of our lives. His great achievement is to make the unfolding of Jacob Putnams newfound sexual freedom resonate with the unfolding of Czechs new historical freedoms, so these separate arcs seem of a piece. His precision of description, whether of architecture or emotional weather, is enviable; his dialogue both playful and profound. It is rare to read a book of this length and feel that every sentence mattered, rarer still to finish a novel of such intellectual depth and be so moved."—Amy Waldman, author of The Submission "As someone who is often unduly nostalgic about having been in her twenties during the 1990s (though not for as good a reason as having been in Prague during the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution), this novel triggered something like a sense memory. Caleb Crain is remarkable at capturing that time in life when ambition and longing are at once all-consuming and all over the map. I winced in self-recognition more than once -- and marveled at the authors insights more often than that."—Meghan Daum, author of My Misspent Youth and Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House "Caleb Crain describes a young mans and a countrys first tastes of freedom with a lucid and matter-of-fact intelligence. Necessary Errors offers an invaluable record of Prague at the beginning of the 1990s in a style that places it among the great novels of Americans abroad. Its The Ambassadors for the generation that came of age with the downfall of the Soviet Union."—Marco Roth, author of The Scientists "I dont know that Ive ever read a novel that gets down, the way this one does, how it felt to be an American and a gay man at the end of the Cold War--so exiled from the country you grew up in that you go abroad to make a new world. Caleb Crains Necessary Errors is an adventure of the head and heart. His hero, Jacob, turns to the cafes, bedrooms, and libraries of newly free Eastern Europe, an American in search of a European Bildungsroman, in search of love and possibility both."—Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh "Youth and innocence--remember them? Caleb Crains Necessary Errors stabs the heart with the story of Jacob Putnams sentimental education in Prague, and reminds us that to be young is to live abroad in a fallen empire where the talk goes on all night, the dumplings are sliced thick, and blue jeans are rare and too expensive. Pick this novel up and you wont forget it."—Benjamin Anastas, author of Too Good to Be True "A coming-of-age story set against a unique and foreign backdrop, Necessary Errors is a poignant work of fiction grounded in history."—The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Review Quote ONE OF THE YEARS BEST BOOKS The Wall Street Journal * Slate * Kansas City Star * Flavorwire * Policy Mic * Buzzfeed Discussion Question for Reading Group Guide INTRODUCTION Set in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Caleb Crains extraordinary debut novel explores the lives and loves of a group of expatriate friends teaching English in Prague. At the center of the group is Jacob Putnam (the hero of Crains novella Sweet Grafton ), freshly graduated from Harvard and just coming out as a gay man. Jacob has traveled to Prague to teach and to give himself a year to develop as a writer before returning to America and the adult responsibilities that await him there. It is a transitional period not just for Jacob and his friends but for the Czech Republic itself, as it shifts from Communism to capitalism and from authoritarian rule to greater political, social, and sexual freedom. Though he has plenty of time to write, Jacob is not writing. Hes still feeling the sting of his rejection by Daniel, a man he had fallen for back in Boston. Hes uncertain about how to come out to his straight friends at the language school but determined to take advantage of the new possibilities in Prague and to explore his own emerging identity as a gay man. Early in the novel, Jacob falls in love with Lubos, a handsome Czech engaged in a somewhat mysterious business partnership. The romance ends in disappointment, and Jacob feels that hes learned a painful lesson, which he takes to heart and vows not to repeat, about his own relative innocence in a country that is morally and economically in flux as its people adjust to a new set of rules and expectations. In many ways, Necessary Errors follows the contours of the traditional bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, tracing the growth from youth to adulthood, innocence to experience, confusion and uncertainty to greater self-knowledge and purpose. But Crains inward, strongly atmospheric novel eschews a conventional plot and instead lets the lush, impressionistic writing carry the reader along. The book unfolds in episodes that never have the overly tidy feel of serving a schematic purpose, reflecting instead the messiness of life as it actually happens. Jacob and his friends gather at pubs, art galleries, and parties where they have lively, witty, and at times combative conversations about politics, art, literature, and life; they live cheaply, drink copiously, fall in and out of love with each other, and feel an anticipatory nostalgia for deepening friendships they know must soon end. The real magic of Necessary Errors lies in Crains exquisite prose, his pitch-perfect ear for smart dialogue, and the subtlety of observation and self-observation that runs throughout the book. Indeed, Jacobs tracking of his and others shifting emotional states attains a fineness of perception rarely equaled. Of Jacobs relationship with Milo, for example, the narrator observes: "When Milo was around, he wasnt able to hear himself anymore. He was only able to hear what he had to say to Milo. That was the problem with other people; that was the problem with just living your life. He ought to have written a second novel during the time hed spent in Prague." But Jacobs self-reflection goes several steps further: "He was awfully grand, even in misery, wasnt he. He was feeling the sort of frustration whose pettiness inclines ones better self to wish to dismiss it, if it were possible to" (p. 428). That better self-or the desire to become that better self-gradually emerges over the course of the novel, and passages like this one make clear that Jacob is honing his art even when not actively writing. Vividly evoking both the external realities of post-Communist Prague and the inner life of a young gay writer finding his way, Necessary Errors announces the arrival of a remarkably distinctive voice in contemporary American fiction. ABOUT CALEB CRAIN Caleb Crain is a contributor to the New Yorker , the New York Review of Books , the Nation , the New York Times Magazine , the London Review of Books , n+1 , the Paris Review Daily , and the New York Times Book Review . A graduate of Harvard and Columbia, he is the author of the critical work American Sympathy . He lives in Brooklyn, New York. A CONVERSATION WITH CALEB CRAIN Necessary Errors feels like an autobiographical novel? To what extent, and in what ways, does it draw on your own experience? I spent about a year in Prague two dozen years ago, and the novel draws on my memories, but its fiction nonetheless. In The Confidence-Man , Melville says that fiction is supposed to "present another world, yet one to which we feel the tie," and I think thats a good way of putting it. A novel should remind a reader of the real world but not be that world. This is your first full-length novel and a fairly long one. How challenging was it to move from essays, blog posts, reviews, and your novella Sweet Grafton to this longer form? What was the most enjoyable aspect of writing Necessary Errors ? Writing nonfiction feels to me a little bit like putting on a show. I take notes backstage for a while, and then I put on my straw boater, tuck my cane under my arm, and raise the curtain. Im aware of the fact of the performance. With fiction Im much less aware of it. The most that Im aware of is trying to get out of my own way. Im conscious of making an effort to give myself the time, energy, and peace of mind that I need, but I find it hard to talk about much more than that. It was indeed a shift to try to write something so much longer. I felt very happy about Sweet Grafton when I finished it, but I soon discovered, to my chagrin, that its extremely difficult to get a novella published. A novella is too long for most magazines and too short to stand on its own as a book, and I was very lucky that the literary journal n+1 was willing to publish it. When I started Necessary Errors , I didnt want to repeat the mistake, but I wasnt sure Id be able to control the length any better than I had with Sweet Grafton . Fortunately I happened to read Sybille Bedfords novel A Legacy around the time I was considering this problem, and I realized, "Oh, if you write a few novellas, and they share characters, lo and behold, youve got a novel." I realized I had three stories to tell about Prague, and I was off. The Vysehrad section of Necessary Errors begins with an epigraph from Henry James, who also wrote about innocents abroad. You and James share a remarkable subtlety of perception. Has he been a major influence on your work? What other writers have been most important for you? Its kind of you to say so, and probably dangerous for me to hear it. When I wrote Sweet Grafton , I was very taken with a set of mid-twentieth-century novels that are told mostly in dialogue: James Schuylers Alfred and Guinevere , Henry Greens Loving , and Ivy Compton-Burnetts A House and Its Head , among others. When I started Necessary Errors , I still had those books in mind as models, though I was under the impression that Id be borrowing more this time out from Christopher Isherwood-the way Isherwood turns his historical self into a character, which he can see from the outside as well as remember from the inside. Once I started writing, I noticed that I really enjoyed describing the way Jacob perceived things, even when his perceptions got a little involuted and especially when they were mistaken. I suppose those are the parts that sound Jamesian. I have to ask a nuts-and-bolt question. How come there are quote marks around some lines of dialogue and dashes in front of others? I wanted to distinguish between words spoken in English and words spoken in another language but translated into English. Words inside quotation marks are what a character literally said. If a line of dialogue is introduced by a dash, the character said it in another language and the narrator has translated it into English for the readers convenience. Tensions rise during a scene where Jacob uses a game of buying and selling things as a language lesson for the children hes tutoring. Did you intend this passage to read as a kind of parable of how capitalism changes the way people relate to each other and to their possessions? Hmm. I think I intended for the reader to be aware that Jacob is wondering whether his experience has that kind of meaning. There are parallels in the book between Jacobs identity crisis and the one that the Czechs around him seem to be going through. I think Im hoping that the reader will see the parallels and also see through them, as it were. Jacob is somewhere between childhood and adulthood, and the Czechs are somewhere between communism and capitalism, but it isnt quite as simple as dependency on the one hand and independence on the other. Capitalism isnt developmentally inevitable after communism, the way that adulthood is after childhood. In fact, the next stage in Czechoslovakias economic life turned out to be something not quite as benevolent as the capitalism were familiar with here in America (even allowing for the fact that not everyone thinks of American capitalism as benevolent). Nor is adulthood itself all its cracked up to be, if youre a young person who wants to grow up to be an artist. The psychologist Erik Erikson came up with the term "psychosocial moratorium" to describe the state of fending off for as long as one can the social definitions and conventional expectations that come with adulthood. The nontechnical name for the state is "bohemia." Were you influenced by Czech novels? Not quite as much as I thought I would be. Ive learned a great deal from Czech writ Excerpt from Book According to the pages on Eastern Europe that he had torn from a guide to gay life abroad purchased in Boston--burying the rest of the book at the bottom of a garbage bag full of food scraps soon after, so that no one would inadvertently come upon its advertisements for massage parlors and bath houses--there were two gay bars in Prague, and the one not described as "rough" was to be found in a street one block long near the foot of Wenceslas Square. After his last class on Friday, he made pancakes and ate them with a can of boruvky , which he had spotted in the window of a store near school, and which he thought were blueberries, since they looked and tasted like them. (They were bilberries, he discovered years later, when he had a better dictionary.) He showered, brushed the blue off his teeth, and slipped his Penguin Typee , a book he had brought with him from Boston intact, into the pocket of his raincoat. It was a long tram ride to the subway. The tram was nearly empty. Most residents of the outlying neighborhood where he lived stayed home on a Friday night. He looked out the window idly. The tram ran through a manufacturing district, and for a mile or so there was nothing to see but low, gray, concrete-covered walls and long vertical sheets of corrugated metal ineffectually undermined by weeds. Intermittently, a wall gave way to a fence, and then a gate, through whose iron bars one could see the tall front of a factory. STANDARDS AND QUALITY FOR EVERYONE EVERYWHERE, read a slogan over the door of one of the factories. Further on, the tram ran past a housing development--a group of dirty white concrete high-rises, called panel Details ISBN014312241X Author Caleb Crain Language English Year 2013 ISBN-10 014312241X ISBN-13 9780143122418 Format Paperback Short Title NECESSARY ERRORS Media Book DEWEY FIC Pages 480 Publication Date 2013-08-06 Subtitle A Novel Place of Publication New York, NY Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2013-08-06 NZ Release Date 2013-08-06 US Release Date 2013-08-06 UK Release Date 2013-08-06 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Imprint Penguin USA Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:76279257;
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