The Future Won't Be Long

Praise for The Future Won’t Be Long

“A swirling, name-dropping, drug-fueled, hypersaturated whirlwind of a novel set against the New York City of the 1980s and '90s, Kobek’s latest is a gritty coming-of-age story with quiet heart. . . . An ode to a city—and an era—long gone.” 
—Kirkus Reviews

“Ambitious. . . . Kobek crafts an electric tale, and the wilds of New York City during this intense time period provide a gritty, undeniably magnetic context.” 
—Booklist

“Set primarily in Manhattan in the tumultuous decade spanning the years 1986 to 1996, the picaresque novel refracts the coming of age of its two main characters through their alternating narrative viewpoints and the events and personalities that defined the city at that time. . . . Kobek (I Hate the Internet) has a great eye for detail, and his descriptions of his characters’ peregrinations through New York’s neighborhoods and nightlife read with the authenticity of genuine experience. Punctuated with gentle humor and awash with genuine fondness for its characters, this novel breezes giddily through the disorder and shifting landscape of their lives, bearing out Baby’s contention that ‘Good or ill, there’s always change coming.’”
—Publishers Weekly

“New York, like the future, isn’t what it used to be—which is why Jarett Kobek lives in California and writes like a dream. His new novel is a marvel of wit, grit, and deep city memory—perfect for any reader in search of a Horatio Alger into toilet sex and ketamine.” 
—Joshua Cohen, author of The Book of Numbers and Moving Kings

“The Future Won’t Be Long arrives with the lightning strike clarity that usually comes on the dance floor at 4am when the chaos of the world makes beautiful and profound sense. Kobek brilliantly gathers the best and worst of club land, the grit and grime of the East Village and the art and aspirations of its inhabitants and delivers a novel so evocative of time and place that you’ll be pretty certain you were there.”
—Ivy Pochoda, author of Visitation Street

“Jarett Kobek’s writing is both groundbreaking and skyrocketing. The Future Won’t Be Long is a punky, heartbreaking and hilarious epic on America going nowhere, going crazy, going bad. Read this book. It's brilliant.”  
—Dorthe Nors, author of the Man Booker International Prize Finalist Mirror, Shoulder, Signal 
 
“The Great New York City Novel has been loudly attempted and proclaimed so many times, one is tempted to assume it simply couldn’t exist. Yet, with piercing intelligence, vitality, hilarity, and a rather startling sweetness, Jarett Kobek has done it. The Future Won’t Be Long is staggering, exhilarating, and the single best portrait of Lower Manhattan achieved since American Psycho.”
—Matthew Specktor, author of American Dream Machine

Praise for Jarett Kobek’s I Hate the Internet

“A grainy political and cultural rant, a sustained shriek about power and morality in a new global era. It’s a glimpse at a lively mind at full boil. . . . [An] entertaining novel of ideas . . . This book has soul as well as nerve. It suggests that, as the author writes, ‘the whole world was on a script of loss and people only received their pages moments before they read their lines.’”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“I just got an early copy of [Kobek’s] newest, I Hate the Internet, and devoured it—he’s as riotous as Houellebecq, and you don’t need a translator, only fireproof gloves for turning the pages.”
—Jonathan Lethem, The Scofield

“This is a relentless, cruel, hilariously inflamed satire of a loop of economic mystification and the reemergence of the credibility of the notion of Original Sin in the technological utopia of the present-day Bay Area and the world being remade in its image.”
—Greil Marcus, Pitchfork