Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Episode 124: Weird Era feat. Andrew Martin
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Episode 124: Weird Era feat. Andrew Martin
About Andrew Martin:
Andrew Martin is the author of the novel Early Work, a New York Times Notable book of 2018, and the story collection Cool for America, longlisted for the 2020 Story Prize. His essays and stories have appeared frequently in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper's, as well as in The Yale Review, The Atlantic, McSweeney's, The Times Book Review and elsewhere. He teaches in Brooklyn and New Hampshire, and lives in New York City with his family.
About Down Time
Without Cassandra, Aaron would probably be dead. Fortunately, she won’t leave him—despite the drinking, flirting, solipsism, armchair socialism, overspending, infidelity, catastrophic depression, and disparate but increasingly frequent spells of drug- and booze-addled debauchery. Unfortunately, she might be reaching the end of her rope.
Cass and Aaron, like the other neurotic, ambivalent intellectuals in their orbit, are getting older. There’s Malcolm, with his own alcoholism and marginally more successful writing career; his partner, Violet, a doctor with little patience for both; Antonia, a teaching fellow whose book about ecocide may get her tenure at a prestigious university near Harvard Square—yes, that one. When Sam, a charming trust-fund punk at the center of this loose network, dies suddenly, and a global pandemic takes hold, all five must contend with the lives they’ve made: their desires and disappointments, habits and hang-ups, pathologies and addictions, and the possibilities of making art and being good as the earth whirls to its end.
Down Time marks the delightful return of Andrew Martin, the author of the pitch-perfect slacker classics Early Work and Cool for America. Compulsively readable and contagiously intelligent, this is a wryly comic social novel of settling down, selling out, growing up, and getting out that turns a terribly funny and hyper-literate eye on our most desperately guarded ambitions: to love and be loved, to know and be known, to stay sane, if only just.
View all episodes
By Weird Era
4.4
77 ratings
About Andrew Martin:
Andrew Martin is the author of the novel Early Work, a New York Times Notable book of 2018, and the story collection Cool for America, longlisted for the 2020 Story Prize. His essays and stories have appeared frequently in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper's, as well as in The Yale Review, The Atlantic, McSweeney's, The Times Book Review and elsewhere. He teaches in Brooklyn and New Hampshire, and lives in New York City with his family.
About Down Time
Without Cassandra, Aaron would probably be dead. Fortunately, she won’t leave him—despite the drinking, flirting, solipsism, armchair socialism, overspending, infidelity, catastrophic depression, and disparate but increasingly frequent spells of drug- and booze-addled debauchery. Unfortunately, she might be reaching the end of her rope.
Cass and Aaron, like the other neurotic, ambivalent intellectuals in their orbit, are getting older. There’s Malcolm, with his own alcoholism and marginally more successful writing career; his partner, Violet, a doctor with little patience for both; Antonia, a teaching fellow whose book about ecocide may get her tenure at a prestigious university near Harvard Square—yes, that one. When Sam, a charming trust-fund punk at the center of this loose network, dies suddenly, and a global pandemic takes hold, all five must contend with the lives they’ve made: their desires and disappointments, habits and hang-ups, pathologies and addictions, and the possibilities of making art and being good as the earth whirls to its end.
Down Time marks the delightful return of Andrew Martin, the author of the pitch-perfect slacker classics Early Work and Cool for America. Compulsively readable and contagiously intelligent, this is a wryly comic social novel of settling down, selling out, growing up, and getting out that turns a terribly funny and hyper-literate eye on our most desperately guarded ambitions: to love and be loved, to know and be known, to stay sane, if only just.
More shows like Weird Era
View all
This American Life
90,998 Listeners
Ask Penguin
147 Listeners
Bookends with Mattea Roach
247 Listeners
Otherppl with Brad Listi
533 Listeners
Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry
473 Listeners
On the Media
9,229 Listeners
The Gray Area with Sean Illing
10,736 Listeners
Death, Sex & Money
7,712 Listeners
The New Yorker: The Writer's Voice - New Fiction from The New Yorker
2,123 Listeners
Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso
1,474 Listeners
Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel
14,896 Listeners
City Arts & Lectures
395 Listeners
Culture Gabfest
444 Listeners
Critics at Large | The New Yorker
653 Listeners
Fashion Neurosis with Bella Freud
269 Listeners