Pan

'There is no other writer like him' MAGGIE NELSON

'I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune' BEN LERNER

A thrilling and darkly funny debut novel about the joy and anxiety of adolescence by the acclaimed memoirist and cult writer

Nicholas has plenty of reasons to feel unstable: he's fifteen, the child of divorced parents, living with his absent dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs, and an outsider at school. Then, one day in geometry class, he forgets how to breathe. The doctor says it's just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body.

As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas and his friends hunt for answers why - in art, music and literature - as they reach for a life beyond the confines of where they've grown up and what's expected of them. Pan takes us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.

'I didn't want the book to end' BLAKE BUTLER