LAST RESORT

A young writer bases his novel on a friend’s life and must deal with the fallout.

Caleb Horowitz, a 27-year-old Brooklynite, works for a financial services startup, but he believes he’s on the verge of another life: that of a famous novelist. He’s just been offered representation by one of the biggest agents in New York, and he’s about to sell his book. His family and friends think it’s a novel he wrote during a sabbatical from the city in Gainesville, Florida, but Caleb knows the truth: He failed to write something “publishable” in Gainesville and instead took a chaotic cross-country trip searching for the next stage of his life. Crashing with a college friend named Avi, Caleb stumbled across that next stage by accident when Avi told him a wild story, a version of which he’d turned into a sketch of a story himself, and Caleb decided to appropriate it. Caleb rented a room, holed up, and feverishly finished a novel based on Avi’s narrative. Afterward, he returned to New York, took a job at the startup, and worked on finding an agent; what he doesn’t realize is that, in the intervening months, Avi also moved there and has started a new job himself…as an editorial assistant at a big New York publisher. When the manuscript comes across Avi’s desk, Caleb is forced to strike a deal that throws into sharp relief some thorny dilemmas about art, ethics, and what being a writer really means. Lipstein wittily captures all the savagery of the publishing industry, from Goodreads reviews to awkward author photos. But for all the metafictional layers here, at its heart this is a surprisingly traditional, almost Dickensian, story about the vagaries of fate.

For anyone who can’t look away from a juicy literary scandal.