Keith Gessen

The New York Times ran an incendiary letter over the weekend, written by a 17-year-old from Birmingham, Ala., named Alec Niedenthal, who wanted to tell the editors of the Sunday Book Review that the future of literature belongs to him. Mr. Niedenthal, who graduated from high school last week and is preparing to attend the New College of Florida, used dramatic language to express this idea. This made him sound like a passionate, big-brained visionary.

"You've heard it straight from the tropical mouth of a teenager who is entirely conscientious of the metamorphoses in ideas, principles (or lack thereof) and influences being undergone right under your collective noses," Mr. Niedenthal wrote in his letter. "The next Great American Novel will come not from Pynchon, Wallace, DeLillo (he’s already had his turn anyway) or any other of your literary heroes."

He went on: "It will spring from the iMac-fettered keyboards of the young, challenging, Facebook-and-MySpace-addled minds that you have so hastily jettisoned as literary jetsam, from those who see and comprehend, still to the delirious ignorance of the villainous Powers That Be, incalculable brands of grade-A terror being perpetrated unabashedly both by those whom we trust and those whom we loathe."

Mr. Niedenthal's rhetoric has not gone unnoticed: In the days since his letter appeared, he has received e-mails from editors at Grove/Atlantic and HarperCollins interested in seeing his work. (His father has also expressed his interest.)

Media Mob thought we should get familiar now, before he gets any more famous. Below, excerpts from our Q&A with the sad young literary man.

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Back in January, The Observer (okay, well, not the whole staff, just this reporter) profiled comedian and blogger whipping-boy David Cross. At the time, Mr. Cross had been caught up in a nasty spat with his so-called fans over his decision to take a role in Alvin and the Chipmunks. ("He's digging his own grave, professionally," wrote one of the more restrained commenters.)

"People genuinely don't like me," Mr. Cross told The Observer. "They find me arrogant and abrasive." Well, not everyone, it seems.  read more »

ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN
By Keith Gessen
Viking, 242 pages, $24.95

The hazy golden specter of F. Scott Fitzgerald looms over all first novels by young white male Ivy League graduates, but it looms especially large over this one, by Keith Gessen, a limpid-eyed, sensual-mouthed founding editor of the intellectual journal n+1.

It’s there in the title, of course, and in Mr. Gessen’s brittle romanticizing of New York City, though the chic neighborhoods have shifted since the Jazz Age (“Oh god—what would it take to live in such a place?” one character thinks, perambulating among the gleaming muscleds of Chelsea. “What reserves of strength? What reserves of cash?”) It’s there in the titular young men’s melancholy enthusiasm for booze (“I was still drinking too much and giving up on people too quickly” confides one sozzled sophomore), and in their ambivalent pursuit of tempestuous, flighty women who “italicized things” and wear navel rings.  read more »