A New York Times Editors Choice
Longlisted for the 2020 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize
In 1996, the unnamed narrator of Apartment is attending the MFA writing program at Columbia on his fathera�TMs dime and living in an illegal sublet of a rent-stabilized apartment. Feeling guilty about his good fortune, he offers his spare bedroom to Billy, a talented, charismatic classmate from the Midwest eking out a hand-to-mouth existence in Manhattan. The narratora�TMs rapport with Billy develops into the friendship hea�TMs never had due to a lifetime of holding people at arma�TMs length, hovering at the periphery, feeling a��fundamentally defective.a�\x9d But their living arrangement, not to mention their radically different upbringings, breeds tensions neither man could predict.