Famous Men cover art

Famous Men

A Novel
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Famous Men

By: Julie Buntin
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About this listen

 From the acclaimed author of the “wild, gorgeous” (San Francisco Chronicle) Marlena comes a novel about a young woman looking for a father and finding herself—a vivid, uncompromising exploration of sex, money, power, and art.

The right book at the right time can change your life.

Will Miles is trapped. Trapped in tiny Greening, Michigan, where a toxic high school rumor has turned her into a social exile. Trapped in the predictable routines of her mother, and under the unrelenting gaze of her mother’s increasingly sinister boyfriend. But when Will stumbles across the early poems of Nathaniel Fellow, a famous writer forty years her senior who also grew up in Greening, she feels she’s found a kindred spirit. A passing comment from her mother only adds to Will’s fascination: Is Nathaniel the father she's never known?

Will orchestrates a plan to track Nathaniel down, following in his footsteps to New York City, where she learns he's not the answer to her past, not the way she imagined. But their meeting sparks a complicated, consuming relationship that gives Will sidelong access to a world she’s only ever imagined: of writers and intellectuals, a financial safety net, and, most intoxicatingly, a glimpse into her own potential. But who is Nathaniel Fellow, off the page? And what will shaping her life to suit his cost her? When a torrent of information about his past threatens not just her life with Nathaniel, but the story she tells herself about him, Will is faced with a choice that will change everything.

A gripping novel about ambition, parents, and children, and all the ways women still pay for men’s mistakes, Famous Men traces one woman’s journey to the truth of where she comes from, what she’s capable of, and how she might start again. Coming of Age Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction

Critic reviews

“Haunting and knife-bright, Famous Men renders womanhood with unsettling clarity and reckons with the absolute ache of becoming.”—Kiley Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Such a Fun Age

“Famous Men is the story of a young woman who wants to remake herself in the mold of her idol—a story of sex, art, ambition, and compromise that is both deeply discomfiting and unbelievably compelling. Even as it holds a magnifying mirror up to our flaws, we cannot—we do not want to—look away.”—Julia Phillips, bestselling author of Disappearing Earth

“Compassionate, bracing, and wise, this is an unforgettable portrait of one of those radiant chapters in a young person’s life that leave a mark forever.”—Marie-Helene Bertino, author of Beautyland

“Famous Men reveals the art monster in all of us and affirms Julie Buntin’s place among the essential writers of her generation.”—Peter Ho Davies, author of A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself
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