Pre-Owned Lesser Ruins Binding: Paperback

From the author ofReinhardt's GardenandSaint Sebastian's Abysscomes a breathless new novel of delirious obsession. 

Bereft after the death of his ailing wife, a retired professor has resumed his life's work—a book that will stand as a towering cathedral to Michel de Montaigne, reframing the inventor of the essay for the modern age. The challenge is the litany of intrusions that bar his way—from memories of his past to the nattering of smartphones to his son's relentless desire to make an electronic dance album.

As he sifts through the contents of his desk, his thoughts pulsing and receding in a haze of caffeine, ghosts and grievances spill out across the page. From the community college where he toiled in vain to an artists' colony in the Berkshires, from the endless pleasures of coffee to the finer points of Holocaust art, the professor's memories churn with sculptors, poets, painters, and inventors, all obsessed with escaping both mediocrity and themselves.

Laced with humor as acrid as it is absurd,Lesser Ruinsis a spiraling meditation on ambition, grief, and humanity's ecstatic, agonizing search for meaning through art.

Past Praise:

Praise forSaint Sebastian’s Abyss

The New York Times Book Review, “Editor’s Choice”
New York Public Library, “Best Books of 2022”
May Indie Next List
Publishers Weekly, “Summer Reads 2022”
Literary Hub, “Favorite Books of 2022”

“[A] sparkling comic novel. . . . Every few pages Haber, the author of one other novel and a story collection, throws in a gem. . . . Schmidt is one of Haber’s keenest inventions.”—Jackson Arn,The New York Times

“In sinuous, recursive sentences infused with equal parts reverence and venom, Ha