Kate Christensen Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

In the Drink (1999)
Jeremy Thrane (2001)
The Epicure’s Lament (2004)
The Great Man (2007)
Trouble (2009)
The Astral (2011)
The Last Cruise (2018)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

Blue Plate Special (2013)
How to Cook a Moose (2015)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Kate Christensen Books Overview

In the Drink

Combining sly humor with an urban edge, Kate Christensen’s In the Drink tells the story of a resolutely clear eyed young woman who makes a complete mess of her life, and lives to tell the tale. The novel’s hero*ine is the smart, pretty, underemployed, and single Claudia Steiner, personal secretary to Genevieve del Castellano, a terrifying, glamorous semi lunatic who has it in for her for reasons she can’t even begin to fathom. William, her best friend, considers Claudia his pal, his confidante, his sidekick in matters amatory, which would be fine if she weren’t desperately in love with him herself. Further complicating matters is Claudia’s old lover John Threadgill, an unpublished epic poet whose marriage to a Romanian stripper named Rima hasn’t kept him from trying to seduce Claudia at every opportunity. Claudia came to New York City fresh out of college, buoyed along by her dream of becoming a journalist. But her starry eyed notion of Claudia Steiner, Reporter on the Beat, quickly vanished into the ozone when she couldn’t muster the requisite hard bitten, white hot urgency, the chain smoking, the yelling, and the cutthroat story mongering. Now, at the age of twenty nine, she finds herself adrift in the city, careening dangerously from catastrophe to catastrophe. Desperately trying to keep her head above water, Claudia has little to rely on but a wry sense of humor, a keen appreciation of the medicinal properties of whiskey, and something more subtle a persistent little flame of belief in herself, which makes a happy ending seem possible even in this most unforgiving of cities. Hilarious, compassionate, and keenly observed, In the Drink is the enormously entertaining debut of a startlingly talented young writer. From the Hardcover edition.

Jeremy Thrane

Jeremy Thrane seems to have everything. As the long time boyfriend of the handsome but deeply closeted movie star Ted Masterson, he lives rent free in a beautiful apartment on the top floor of Ted’s Manhattan brownstone and has an easy job that gives him plenty of time to read books and write his novel. When an influential gossip columnist overhears Jeremy talking about Ted, Jeremy’s perfect world begins to crumble: in just a few hours Ted asks him to leave. Although Ted says he needs to spend more time with his wife and daughter, Jeremy suspects another man is involved. With little more than his books, his sprawling manuscript, and his fickle little bird Juanita, Jeremy finds that he needs to re connect with the eccentric family whose love he has taken for granted, and determine which of his friends have his true well being in mind. In a dizzying world of art galleries, rock clubs, trendy restaurants, casual sex, dry wit, and drier martinis, Jeremy Thrane must finally figure out what it means to grow up and fall in love.

The Epicure’s Lament

For ten years, Hugo Whittier, upper class scion, former gigolo, failed belle lettriste, has been living a hermit’s existence at Waverly, his family’s crumbling mansion overlooking the Hudson. He pas*ses the time reading Montaigne and M. F. K. Fisher, cooking himself delicious meals, smoking an endless number of cigarettes, and nursing a grudge against the world. But his older brother, Dennis, has returned, in retreat from an unhappy marriage, and so has his estranged wife, Sonia, and their she claims daughter Bellatrix, shattering Hugo’s cherished solitude. He’s also been told by a doctor that he has the rare Buerger’s disease, which means that unless he stops smoking, he will die all the more reason for Hugo to light up, because his quarrel with life is bitter and an early death is a most attractive prospect. As Hugo smokes and cooks and sexually schemes and pokes his perverse nose into other people s marriages and business, he records these events as well as his mordant, funny, gorgeously articulated personal history and his thoughts on life and mortality in a series of notebooks. His is one of the most perversely compelling literary personalities to inhabit a novel since John Lanchester s The Debt to Pleasure, and his ancestors include the divinely cracked and eloquent narrators of the works of Nabokov. As snobbish and dislikable as Hugo is, his worldview is so seductively conveyed that even the most resistant readers will be put under his spell. His insinuating voice gets into their heads and under their skin in the most seductive way. And as he prepares what may be his final Christmas feast for family and friends, readers will have to ask, Is this the end of Hugo? Imagine the book the young hero of the independent film hit Igby Goes Down might write twenty five years from now, and you’ll get an idea of the powerfully peculiar charm of The Epicure’s Lament.

The Great Man

From the acclaimed author of The Epicure’s Lament, a novel of literary rivalry in which two competing biographers collide in their quest for the truth about a great artist. Oscar Feldman, the ‘Great Man,’ was a New York city painter of the heroic generation of the forties and fifties. But instead of the abstract canvases of the Pollocks and Rothkos, he stubbornly hewed to painting one subject the female nude. When he died in 2001, he left behind a wife, Abigail, an autistic son, and a sister, Maxine, herself a notable abstract painter all duly noted in the New York Times obituary. What no one knows is that Oscar Feldman led an entirely separate life in Brooklyn with his longtime mistress, Teddy St. Cloud, and their twin daughters. As the incorrigibly bohemian Teddy puts it, ‘He couldn’t live without a woman around. It was like water to a plant for him.’ Now two rival biographers, book contracts in hand, are circling around Feldman’s life story, and each of these three women Abigail, Maxine, and Teddy will have a chance to tell the truth as they experienced it. The Great Man is a scintillating comedy of life among the avant garde of the untidy truths, needy egos, and jostlings for position behind the glossy facade of artistic greatness. Not a pretty picture but a provocative and entertaining one that incarnates the take no prisoners satirical spirit of Dawn Powell and Mary McCarthy.

Trouble

A vibrant story of female friendship and midlife sexual awakening from the acclaimed author of The Great ManJosie is a Manhattan psychotherapist living a comfortable life with her husband and daughter until, while suddenly flirting with a man at a party, she is struck with the sudden realization that she must leave her passionless marriage. A thrillingly sordid encounter with a stranger she meets at a bar immediately follows. At the same time, her college friend Raquel, a Los Angeles rock star, is being pilloried in the press for sleeping with a much younger man who happens to have a pregnant girlfriend. This proves to be red meat to the gossip hounds of the Internet. The two friends escape to Mexico City for a Christmas holiday of retreat and rediscovery of their essential selves. Sex has gotten these two bright, complicated women into interesting Trouble, and the story of their struggles to get out of that Trouble is totally gripping at every turn.A tragicomedy of marriage and friendship, Trouble is a funny, piercing, and moving examination of the battle between the need for connection and the quest for freedom that every modern woman must fight.

The Astral

From the PEN/Faulkner Award winning author of The Great Man, a scintillating novel of love, loss, and literary rivalry set in rapidly changing Brooklyn. The Astral is a huge rose colored old pile of an apart ment building in the gentrifying neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. For decades it was the happy home or so he thought of the poet Harry Quirk and his wife, Luz, a nurse, and of their two children: Karina, now a fer vent freegan, and Hector, now in the clutches of a cultish Christian community. But Luz has found and destroyed some poems of Harry’s that ignite her long simmering sus picions of infidelity, and he s been summarily kicked out. He now has to reckon with the consequence of his literary, marital, financial, and parental failures and perhaps oth ers and find his way forward and back into Luz s good graces. Harry Quirk is, in short, a loser, living small and low in the water. But touched by Kate Christensen s novelistic grace and acute perception, his floundering attempts to reach higher ground and forge a new life for himself become funny, bittersweet, and terrifically moving. She knows what secrets lurk in the hearts of men and she turns them into literary art of the highest order.