Playworld

Praise

“A wonderful, full-bodied, modern-yet-old-school novel that brings the New York City of the 1980s to vibrant life. Ross will make you laugh and break your heart. I haven’t felt this immersed in a work of fiction in a long time.”  —Harlan Coben, author of Think Twice

“A modern masterpiece, sharp and breathtaking and wise. Griffin, the young man at the center of this vivid bildungsroman, is someone you’d follow forward and backward and anywhere—across the sweaty mats of the high schoolwrestling team into a steamed-up car for a wildly sexy and heartbreakinglyhuman relationship with an older, married woman, and then into the glittering world of child acting. Remarkable.” —Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women

“It’s difficult to overpraise Playworld’s tragicomic scope, dazzling ambition,categorical brilliance. Ross writes so close to the bone that I winced while reading. And while young Griffin is brutalized and betrayed by the adults putting him through his sentimental education, Playworld is never hopeless. It instead reinforces our faith in art, that it can make and save a life. I have not read a book this weighty and soulful since I put it down, and I doubt I will again.” —Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter

“Playworld is the story not so much of a sentimental education as a plunge into the deep end of adulthood. Adam Ross has given us a masterful novel, one that deftly sets Griffin Hurt’s coming of age amid the rise of Reagan and the get-mine-first ethos that would come to characterize so much of American life in the coming decades. This novel is, in short, the world in full, and flat-out brilliant on every page.” —Ben Fountain, author of Devil Makes Three

“In this magnificent novel, Adam Ross pulls off a literary hat trick: Playworld is at once an elegy for a very particular time and place, an intimate portrait of one family that then sweeps the reader into a multitude of fascinating worlds, and a tour-de-force of a coming of age story with an unforgettable boy at its center. I loved it.” —Dani Shapiro, author of Signal Fires