Generation Desperation

A fantastically compelling personal story that is also the story of a generation. Hurst captures millennial desperation about money, and the seduction of get-rich-quick stories in the social-media era. Told with perfect timing. – Simon KuperA cautionary tale to young men raised on internet hustle culture, Hurst offers us a silver thread of hope in a moment where masculinity can feel in freefall. A mythic warning about the pitfalls of chasing shiny things. Generation Desperation is a riveting, tender, and painfully timely epic about what really matters. – Angelica FerraraA clever and brutally honest, Zeitgeisty tale of an ambitious thirty-something trying to make sense of his generation, its hurdles, and what it means to let enough be enough. – Lindsey TramutaThis page-turner of a memoir tells a story which could only have happened in the 2020s with all the meme stocks, app-facilitated dates and Covid lockdowns that this implies. But for all its ultra-modernity it has an appealing timelessness to it as well. The ‘rags to riches to rags again’ story is a classic archetype after all, as are American writers in Paris in search of a different life. Hurst weaves the personal and the generational together with seamless ease in a thrilling book that says a lot about the times we are in. – Seb Emina

Alexander Hurst is a writer whose long-form essays and reportage have appeared in the Guardian, Hazlitt, The New Republic, Eater, The Caravan, and elsewhere. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, he has an undergraduate degree from Amherst College, Massachusetts, an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and an MA in Public Policy from Sciences Po, where he has also taught a first-year seminar on contemporary democracy in the United States. He writes a wide-ranging, regular column about French and European issues for the Guardian. He lives in Paris.