You Deserve Nothing, Alexander Maksik
You Deserve Nothing, Alexander Maksik
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You Deserve Nothing

Author: Alexander Maksik

Narrator: Cassandra Campbell, Dan John Miller, Adam Verner

Unabridged: 7 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 12/19/2011

Categories: Fiction, Coming Of Age

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

William Silver is a talented and charismatic young teacher whose
unconventional methods raise eyebrows among his colleagues and superiors. His students, however, are devoted to him. His teaching of Camus, Faulkner, Sartre, Keats, and other kindred souls breathes life into their sense of social justice and their capacities for philosophical and ethical thought. But unbeknownst to his adoring pupils, Silver proves incapable of living up to the ideals he encourages in others.

Emotionally scarred by failures in his personal life and driven to distraction by the City of Light's overpowering carnality
and beauty, Silver succumbs to a temptation that will change the
course of his life. His fall will render him a criminal in the eyes of some and all too human in the eyes of others.

In Maksik's
stylish prose, Paris is sensual, dazzling, and dangerously seductive. It serves as a fitting backdrop for a dramatic tale about the tension between desire and action, and about the complex relationship that exists between our public and private selves.

About Alexander Maksik

Alexander Maksik is the receipient of a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching/Writing fellowship from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Provost's Postgraduate Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa. You Deserve Nothing is his first novel. Alexander lives in Paris and Iowa City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jill

"Oh my god." That phrase. Say it one way, it's shock, subversion. Another, it's excitement, possibility. But if you're saying it over. And over. And over. Out loud. While reading alone. It becomes, was only ever, goddamn fucking exasperation. This book was a goddamn fucking exasperation. ----- Alright. Dis......more

In existential philosophy, the words "You deserve nothing" are not reproachful. Rather, they define human responsibility and imperative, and the fundamental freedom to choose (versus the determinist ideology of fate). Essence comes after existence, not before. Human beings encounter themselves, surg......more

Goodreads review by Oriana

I was quite electrified by this book, both because of its own power and because it was the first book I read post-Goldfinch that didn't feel hollow and superficial and awful by comparison. This is a strong, passionate, tightly coiled book, fierce and cracking, with a slew of characters (mostly teena......more