A novel by Mark Haber
October 8, 2024 5 x 7.75 296 pages 9781566897198
From the author of Reinhardt's Garden and Saint Sebastian's Abyss comes a breathless new novel of delirious obsession.
Bereft after the death of his ailing wife, a retired professor has resumed his life's worka 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 wayfrom 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 Ruins is a spiraling meditation on ambition, grief, and humanity's ecstatic, agonizing search for meaning through art.
About the Author
Mark Haber was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Florida. His debut novel, Reinhardts Garden (2019, Coffee House Press), was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His second novel, Saint Sebastians Abyss (2022, Coffee House Press), was named a best book of 2022 by the New York Public Library and Literary Hub. Mark's fiction has appeared in Guernica, Southwest Review, and Air/Light, among others. Mark lives in Minneapolis.
Praise forLesser Ruins
Shortlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize, United States and Canada
A Washington PostNotable Book of 2024
A New York Public Library Best Book of 2024
A Literary Hub Favorite Book of 2024
An ElectricLiterature Best Book of Fall 2024, According to Indie Booksellers
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2024
"Lesser Ruins mounts decisive proof that Haber is one of the most rigorous and seriousand anachronisticnovelists working today."Becca Rothfeld,The Washington Post
"Habers novel is fluent and compelling, often rhapsodic, with a cumulative power to its repetitions." Hal Jensen, Times Literary Supplement
One of the most daring and rewarding American novels in years. Brian Castleberry, Literary Hub
Lesser Ruins feels like a literary analoguetaking us as it does down rabbit holes, a twisting tour of an overloaded mind. Daniel Marc Janes, The Spectator
An inventive meditation on grief and art. Kirkus Reviews
Sharp invigorating. Readers will enjoy this digressive project. Publishers Weekly
"Lesser Ruins is a near perfect document of what it is to procrastinate, spun out in Habers signature absurdist, looping, intellectually ecstatic style."Emily Temple,Literary Hub
The characters deepen, grow and come alive on the page, and momentum builds to a moving and effective conclusion. Michelle Nelson, The Denver Post
"The novels jumps in register from grandiose to trivial, from historic to contingent and from irascible to inconsolable are frequent and affecting. Theres a deep comic strain to the book but also a tragic one."Dan Friedman, Forward
Lushly, frenetically, yet clearly written, [Habers] novels deal with melancholy and madness, betrayal and loss, despair and grief, all while containing loads of humor and humanity.The Mookse and the Gripes
What begins as a comic exploration of academic fixation swiftly becomes heart-wrenching. The result is a breathless literary experience that touches the narrators roving mind to the readers own. Chiara Naomi Kaufman, Necessary Fiction
The desire for a life of focus, for more coherence than incoherence feels like a characteristically contemporary yearning. It only makes sense that Lesser Ruins has caught up. Bekah Waalkes, Dirt
Lesser Ruins is a transcendent rumination, a study of, among other things, literature, obsession, and the mind. For all its breathlessness, a silence settled around me as I read it. Amina Cain, author of A Horse at Night: On Writing
Written with emotional force but also with great restraint and unremitting integrity, Lesser Ruins is the most ambitious addition yet in Mark Haber's brilliant Bernhardian project. Martin Riker, author of The Guest Lecture
This book is a work of art . . . not only hysterical but incredibly moving, to the last page. Fernando A. Flores, author of Tears of the Trufflepig
In Lesser Ruins, Haber transforms the private idiosyncrasies of grief into a novel of great vitality. Haber has a tremendous talent for revealing the forms of self-sabotage particular to academia but also forms of it found everywhere, the lesser ruins that humans have been making for themselves and others for millennia. I relished the complexity and understated humor of this impeccably constructed and wondrous novel. Idra Novey, author of Take What You Need
Lesser Ruins is a masterwork of a novel, as expansive as it is discerning, ironic, and extraordinarily sensitive. Mandy-Suzanne Wong, author of The Box
Praise for Saint Sebastian's Abyss
The New York Times Book Review, Editors Choice
New York Public Library, Best Books of 2022
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 Habers keenest inventions. Jackson Arn, The New York Times
In sinuous, recursive sentences infused with equal parts reverence and venom, Haber constructs a darkly parodic portrait of aesthetic devotion and intellectual friendship, in which the redemptive practice of collaborative interpretation becomes a cage that two egos relentlessly rattle. Nathan Goldman, Jewish Currents
Praise for Reinhardt's Garden
Longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award
The Millions, Most Anticipated of 2019
Texas Observer, Best Texas Books of the Decade
Outstanding . . . the descent into the heart of darkness at the very core of modernity. BOMB Magazine
Haber, who has been called 'one of the most influential yet low-key of tastemakers in the book world,' is about to raise it up a level with the debut of his novel. The Millions
