Martin Bauman: or, A Sure Thing

David Leavitt’s deliciously sharp novel is a multilayered dissection of literary and sexual mores in the get-ahead eighties, when outrageous success lay seductively within reach of any young writer ambitious enough to grab it. Martin Bauman — nineteen, talented, and insecure — is enrolled at a prestigious college and wins a place under the tutelage of the legendary Stanley Flint, a man who makes or breaks careers with the flick of a weary hand. An irresistibly entertaining epic, erotic, honest, and funny, Martin Bauman “draws one character so masterfully that this character will stick in the reader’s mind as strongly as Magwitch or Harry Lime” (Philadelphia Inquirer).