Teddy Wayne, the author of Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, and Kapitoil, is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He writes regularly for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He lives in New York.
PRAISE FOR LONER:
“Engrossing… highlights hot-button issues on today’s campuses,
making it seem all too real.” —People, “The Best Books of the
Fall”
"Teddy Wayne has an uncanny ability to teleport to another location
and inhabit the people who live there...Dark and compulsively
readable...Wayne skillfully shows us every disturbing and obsessive
moment...a tightly written, tensely memorable short
novel." —Meg Wolitzer, NPR's Best Books of the Year
"An impressively creepy novel of first love...At a moment when so
many young writers want to join the ranks of the angels, Wayne’s
unfashionable wit, bitterness, and tight focus are a gift." —Lorin
Stein, The Paris Review
"Wayne has created a uniquely terrifying and compelling protagonist
for such a funny book... the best second-person novel I've read
since Sam Lipsyte's Homeland... a great, lethal little book." —The
Boston Globe
“Like all transgressive works of fiction, Loner is bound
to be controversial. In some ways, the novel resembles a
hyper-timely update to the psychological portrait of Humbert
Humbert in Lolita. Similarly, Loner also asks the
reader for a certain kind of bravery to stomach—and it rewards such
risks.” —GQ
“Wildly inventive and disturbing” —Esquire
"Harrowing... complex [and] necessary." —Salon
"A chilling commentary on gender politics... Teddy Wayne holds up
the Ivy White Male card as the ultimate trump. He means to slap
awake a country that glorifies wealth; deifies men; objectifies
women; and treats victims of sexual assault like sluts, kooks, and
gold-diggers. The story barely qualifies as fiction, and it arrives
on our shelves just in time." —The Millions
"Engrossing, sometimes disturbing... 'Loner' is a fresh look at an
old topic — longing, love and lust on campus. Read it, and
appreciate what Wayne has accomplished. You won’t be
alone." —The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Loner is a campus novel for our times...The novel’s
brilliance lies in the way Wayne toys with the reader’s sympathies
while allowing his narrator to pursue his dreadful
end...Loner is one prickly piece of work, but the genius is
hard to miss." —Los Angeles Review of Books
"Brilliantly terrifying... Teddy Wayne has written a masterclass on
the privilege found in white male narcissism." —Electric
Literature
"Wayne...writes with sly grace about the seemingly unsympathetic
plight of being a white American man, albeit by using ironic
extremes rather than domestic realism. His bemusement is real, and
often funny." —Bookforum
"Loner moves ahead to its climax (and a superbly executed plot
twist) with the sickening momentum of a horror movie... It stands
in stark contrast to Mr. Wayne’s previous novel, The Love Song of
Jonny Valentine (2013), a funny, sympathetic portrait of a
teenybopper pop star. The range shown in these two books, which
move from the ridiculous to the chilling, is evidence of a rising
talent." —The Wall Street Journal
“With wit and style, Whiting Award-winner Teddy Wayne strips away
the elite veneer of the overachieving denizens of Harvard. . .
Loner is comic and chilling campus coming-of-age at its
best.” —Shelf Awareness
"A frightening portrayal of privilege." —Marie Claire
"Deft, involving...There is comic brio, but also an insider's
precision, to Wayne's depiction...what is most frightening about
Wayne's antihero protagonist (and narrator) is not how different he
is from us--but how porous a border separates his monstrousness
from our normalcy." —Chicago Tribune
"The reader is...compelled to frantically turn the
pages."—Publishers Weekly
"Wayne’s writing is spiky and electric...it reminded me of the
early work of Jeffrey Eugenides...But if Loner at first
appears to be a comedy of manners, it quickly veers into something
far creepier...the reader may go from enjoying Loner to
finding the experience not just uncomfortable but excruciating."
—The New York Times Book Review
"Magnetic...incredibly compelling." —BookPage
"Wayne has crafted a magnificent story. Thrilling, engrossing, and
infuriating, Loner harks back—in a completely contemporary
timbre—to literary classics that create compelling portraits of
repellant characters, e.g., Crime and Punishment, The Great Gatsby,
Lolita." —PopMatters
“Stunning—and profoundly disconcerting…the pleasure of the book is
not in its ultratimely plot but in its complicated—and unsettlingly
familiar—cast. These people are nuanced even when they’re
disturbing, human even when they’re horrendous. A spectacular
stylist, Wayne is deeply empathetic toward his characters,
but—brutally and brilliantly—he refuses to either defend or excuse
them. A startlingly sharp study of not just collegiate culture, but
of social forces at large; a novel as absorbing as it is
devastating.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“An enthralling portrait of male narcissism and voyeuristic
obsession.” —Library Journal (starred review)
"Like a novel of manners distorted by a twisted funhouse mirror,
Teddy Wayne’s Loner moves with wit and stealth and merciless
deliberation towards increasingly brutal psychic terrain. Reading
it, I found myself amused and then—with creeping force—afraid,
repulsed, and ultimately unwilling to put it down." —Leslie
Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams and
The Gin Closet
“Loner is a brave book that takes up the calling of literature to
unsettle the reader into new understanding of the world. Wayne
employs extraordinarily fine psychological brushwork to produce
something rare in our desensitized era: a genuinely disturbing
portrait, not just of a fundamentally unreliable narrator but of a
culture that prizes class, achievement, and beauty over nourishing
human connection. David Federman is one of the most authentically
menacing characters to come around in a novel in a long time. There
is no cartoon bogeyman here, only a chaser after that external
proof of value that our pragmatic culture demands of
eighteen-year-olds. Wayne holds a mirror up to an America in which
self-esteem is paramount, parents enable inhumanity in the name of
advancement, and unchecked ego combines with social failure to
yield monstrous ends. It behooves us all to take a careful look in
the mirror Wayne offers, because the monster depicted here is the
one next door. The twists in the plot keep the reader’s heart
racing, even as the protagonist’s blood runs cold.” —Matthew
Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of We Are Not
Ourselves
"Teddy Wayne perfectly conjures the mind of a keenly observant,
socially ambitious, and utterly heartless college student. Yet no
matter what outlandish things David does, I couldn't help but root
for him—until the book's gut-punch ending." —Adelle Waldman,
bestselling author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
"Teddy Wayne’s captivating and increasingly disturbing Loner
features a character that you’d like to hug if you could be assured
that he wouldn’t try to stab you. It’s a wonderfully unnerving and
unreliable first-person account of a dangerous stalker who is also
a shy teenager just trying to get a date with the popular girl in
school. This impossible-to-reconcile character, mixed with Wayne’s
wry charm, makes Loner as thrilling as it is cautionary."—Jesse
Eisenberg, author of Bream Gives Me Hiccups
PRAISE FOR THE LOVE SONG OF JONNY VALENTINE:
"Sad-funny, sometimes cutting...more than a scabrous sendup of
American celebrity culture; it’s also a poignant portrait of one
young artist’s coming of age." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York
Times
"A funny, affecting tour of our cultural wasteland...It speaks well
of both Jonny and his creator that the result is this good, a
moving, entertaining novel that is both poignant and pointed — a
sweet, sad skewering of the celebrity industry...his satirist's eye
is impeccable...so limpidly does Wayne imitate the voice of a
preteen celebrity, he risks making it look easy...to create out of
that entitled adolescent voice a being of true longing and depth,
and then to make him such a devastating weapon of cultural
criticism — these are feats of unlikely virtuosity, like covering
Jimi Hendrix on a ukulele...you’d have to be made of triple
platinum not to ache for Jonny Valentine." —Jess Walter, New York
Times Book Review (cover review and Editors' Choice)
"Assured prose and captivating storytelling." —Oprah.com, Book of
the Week
"Buoyant, smart, searing." —Entertainment Weekly
"Depicting the inner life of a protagonist who is not yet a
full-fledged adult is no small feat, but author Teddy Wayne pulls
it off masterfully." —The Daily Beast
“Deft and delightful . . . touching (and unexpectedly
suspenseful).” —Wall Street Journal
"A showstopper….The book’s greatest triumph — and there are many —
is Jonny’s voice….In addition to an exquisite rendering of Jonny’s
growing awareness, the novel provides other delights [and] plenty
of genuinely affecting moments." —Boston Globe
"'A fun, highly diverting read.…Wayne generates considerable
sympathy for the 11-year-old kid trapped at the center of the
churning entertainment machine….This is a portrait of the artist as
a young brand.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Hugely entertaining." —The Washington Post
"Heartbreakingly convincing...Hate Bieber? Wayne's touching
portrait might change your mind." —People
"Provocative and bittersweet…A very funny novel when it isn't so
sad, and vice versa." — Kirkus (starred review)
"Surprisingly moving...heartbreaking...A mix of pre-adolescent
angst and industry cynicism that makes him sound like Holden
Caulfield Jr. adrift in Access Hollywood hell." —Rolling Stone
"Masterfully executed. If this impressive novel, both entertaining
and tragically insightful, were a song, it would have a Michael
Jackson beat with Morrissey lyrics." —Publishers Weekly (starred
review)
“A stunning achievement in literary zeitgeist." —Interview
“The Love Song of Jonny Valentine takes us deep into the dark arts
and even darker heart of mass-market celebrity,
twenty-first-century version. In the near-pubescent hitmaker of the
title, Teddy Wayne delivers a wild ride through the upper echelons
of the entertainment machine as it ingests human beings at one end
and spews out dollars at the other. Jonny’s like all the rest of
us, he wants to love and be loved, and as this brilliant novel
shows, that’s a dangerous way to be when you’re inside the
machine.” —Ben Fountain, New York Times bestselling author of Billy
Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
“This is a book with a runaway narrative engine, tremendous
ambitions, and an even bigger heart. I do not lie when I tell you:
Teddy Wayne is as good a young writer as we have.” —Charles Bock,
New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Children
“A pitch-perfect anthem for our surreal American Dream, a power
ballad for the twenty-first-century unhappy family, an epic ode to
the fleeting glory of fame....A deeply entertaining novel with
humor and heart to spare.” —Amber Dermont, New York Times
bestselling author of The Starboard Sea
PRAISE FOR KAPITOIL:
"[Karim]'s a type—the nerdy and needy young immigrant—that we’re
all familiar with but that no other writer, as far as I know, has
invented such a funny and compelling voice and story for...it does
what novels can do better than any other art form: Show us a
familiar world through unfamiliar eyes." —Jonathan Franzen in The
Daily Beast
"Teddy Wayne has written one of the best novels of my
generation...Why did 9/11 happen, and why do we continue to respond
so blindly? Wayne answers these questions better than Mohsin Hamid
or Joseph O’Neill, the best authors of this genre until now...Wayne
has completely foreseen and transcended the exhaustion of the 9/11
genre." —The Boston Globe
"Brilliant...a major literary talent." —The Houston Chronicle
"Flat out top-notch. Kapitoil makes you see America and the English
language more clearly than ever before..." —McSweeney's
"[A] wonderfully assured debut novel, at once poignant, insightful,
and funny." —Booklist (starred review)
"[A] strong and heartfelt debut novel...that beautifully captures a
time that, in retrospect, seems tragically naïve." —Publishers
Weekly (starred review)
"Affecting, timely, and frequently hilarious." —Vanity Fair
"The first funny novel about oil." —GQ
"A book ripe with beauty and potential...and a flawlessly developed
first-person voice. Karim Issar is a character readers will
remember, and readers had better prepare themselves to remember the
name of Teddy Wayne as well. It’s one they’ll be hearing again and
again..." —BOMB
"Kapitoil is one of those uncommon novels that really is novel.
Though the storytelling is conventional, it is satisfyingly so, and
the book's estimable young narrator is a human type whom nobody
until Wayne was ever inspired to write about." —Jonathan Franzen,
author of Freedom and The Corrections
"Teddy Wayne has written a brilliant book. Karim Issar is one of
the freshest, funniest heroes I've come across in a long time, and
thanks to his often excruciating adventures—financial, romantic,
linguistic, and otherwise—we start to see America with Karim's
weird and wonderful clarity. In its honesty, humor, intelligence,
and hard-won wisdom, Kapitoil is 'Karim-esque' to the nth degree,
and that is a very good way to be." —Ben Fountain, author of Brief
Encounters with Che Guevara
"An innovative and incisive meditation on the wages of corporate
greed, the fundamental darkness of Kapitoil's vision is lit by the
author's great comic intelligence and wit." —Kathryn Davis, author
of The Thin Place
"What a wonderful character Karim is—the hapless, hilarious,
math-obsessed hero of Teddy Wayne's first novel. Kapitoil is a
delight. Who knew oil futures could be such fun?" —Joshua Henkin,
author of Matrimony
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