Very Recent History by Choire Sicha is an idiosyncratic and elegant narrative that follows a handful of young men in New York City as they navigate the ruins of money and power—in search of love and connection. After the Wall Street crash of 2008, the richest man in town is the mayor. Billionaires shed apartments like last season’s fashions, even as the country’s economy turns inside out. The young and careless go on as they always have, getting laid and getting laid off, falling in and out of love, and trying to navigate the strange world they traffic in:  the Internet, complex financial markets, credit cards, pop stars, micro-plane cheese graters, and sex apps. A true-life fable of money, sex, and politics, Choire Sicha’s Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City turns our focus to a year in the life of a great city. “The only book our ancestors will need…VERY RECENT HISTORY would start a revolution if we knew better.” - Rosecrans Baldwin, author of Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down “The only book our ancestors will need…VERY RECENT HISTORY would start a revolution if we knew better.” - Rosecrans Baldwin, author of Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down “Sicha vivisects the student-loan crisis, finance capital, and other plagues in the arch tone of one explaining it all to a naïf from the future―a rhetorical device that trains a floodlight on the great hypocrisies of our time. ” - Elle “Very Recent History is a true story of the quiet desperation that comes from a world full of meanness―and hype. It’s also an intensely political book, quietly outraged…Very Recent History takes on all the right things.” - Nancy Jo Sales, author of The Bling Ring “You look up from the book to find that Sicha took the opportunity to screw a new pair of eyes into your sockets. With his distance and his wit, he’s showed you the ridiculousness, and the impossibly high value, of everything you take for granted.” - The Stranger “Sicha’s uncanny, absurdist reduction is more than just a fun-to-read ruse: “Very Recent History” shames you, the reader, for losing sight, on a day-to-day basis, of just who is controlling your world… [VRH] is exultant in a way no mere clever premise can be.” - Page-Turner, New Yorker.com “An exemplary entry in―and in many ways a blistering critique of―a style of writing I think of as post-fiction. This writing represents a chiasmus between the real and the made-up, blurring the two into nonrecognition.” - Michael H. Miller, The New York Observer “Perhaps among a next wave of books about gay folks as full American citizens that doesn’t bother walking them through schematic journeys meant to stand in for the American Gay Experience.” - Salon “Sicha’s detached prose…makes that year feel more absurd than any of us might remember…a fresh look at a seemingly distant world that is actually our own. GRADE: A- ” - Entertainment Weekly, "Must List" “Has the same time-capsule charm as a book many of us read and were fascinated by in elementary school, Motel of the Mysteries , in which the world was destroyed and future generations were left to wonder at objects like a toilet.” - Time “Choire Sicha’s writing charms and delights, but beneath the biting wit and cynicism [he] dares to explore the darker underbelly of human avarice and capital, a book that’s equal parts blindingly terrifying and smartly humorous, and one of the most clever reads I’ve encountered in a long time.” - NPR “I liked the part where everyone is discussing Truman Capote’s article about hanging out with Montgomery Clift.” - Mother Jones “I love Choire Sicha’s writing, which is as taut and tense as the neck of a Wall Street banker on the day of the world financial collapse of 2008. Very Recent History reads like a novel written by Hemingway if he had given in to his gay tendencies and moved to New York. But it’s actually a thinly veiled nonfiction account of New York in the time we live, in which nothing matters anymore―except maybe money―and everyone is disconnected, and how very sad and lonely this is, especially for our hero, who is anything but that. It’s a true story of the quiet desperation that comes from a world full of meanness―and hype. It’s also an intensely political book, quietly outraged at the overlords who are steadily making a once vibrant city fit for habitation only by the wealthy and privileged. Very Recent History takes on all the right things.” - Nancy Jo Sales, author of The Bling Ring “In the tradition of Janet Malcolm, Renata Adler, and Joan Didion, but with a style and wit all his own, Choire Sicha has performed a useful public service: he has described how sex, love, work and money function for young people in the wake of a financial crisis that quietly eliminated the last remnants of their city’s idea of itself. This book will be especially useful for the generation it describes, who are so caught up in an infinite now that