The Book of Getting Even by Benjamin Taylor
Tales Out of School by Benjamin Taylor , faculty, the MFA in Creative Writing at The New School.
Steerforth Press, 2009
From the Publisher:
Winner, 2nd Place, 2009 Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction
Finalist, 2009 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction
“Gabriel Geismar, the embattled protagonist of Taylor’s excellent second novel … has “a furious craving for other, nobler origins.” In college, he meets Marghie and Danny Hundert, whose famous physicist father is one of his heroes, and adopts the family as his own. The book explores the tortured and often misguided process by which children attempt to define themselves in relation to their parents (one iteration of the “getting even” of the title), a process from which Danny and Marghie, as Gabriel slowly discovers, are not exempt. Taylor captures their quests for identity in pitch-perfect dialogue and lengthy meditative passages; his elegant plotting feels at once deliberate and improvised.”
— The New Yorker”