Launch Day

My new novel, Glass Century, has arrived

When I started the manuscript that would become Glass Century, it was November 2019. I had just turned thirty and the pandemic future was unfathomable. I knew, after publishing two novels I very much liked but somehow wanted more out of, I needed to take a crack at something bigger. I wanted to write a book that encompassed my city, my time, the time beyond me, and a particular era of darkness and hope in America. I wanted to write about 9/11. I wanted to write about a family. I wanted, even, to hand a cameo to the man who has embodied the last fifty years of America as much as anyone, Donald J. Trump.

And so Glass Century arrives, today. This is all feels a bit surreal but I am very excited. Please go buy it now—in print, audiobook, or e-book, whatever you’d like. My launch party is unfortunately sold out but you can catch me this Thursday in Brooklyn reading with several excellent writers, including the fabulously talented John Pistelli. Get your ticket so you’ll be able to get inside. And on May 12, I will be coming to Philadelphia. If you are in the City of Brotherly Love, join me and Adrian Nathan West. I’d love to see you.

The Wall Street Journal called Glass Century “absorbing” and said it was “charged with heart-in-throat suspense.” If you’re on the fence, though, about whether to buy and read my novel, some other strong reviews have come in since.

In a wonderful Compact essay, Stephen Adubato declares that “in the nearly 24 years that have passed since then, the burning towers have made cameos in novels by authors ranging from Don Delillo to Ottessa Moshfegh. But few have captured their horror and the lasting impact they’ve had on an entire generation better than Ross Barkan in his new novel, Glass Century.”

The Jewish Books Council writes that “Glass Cen­tu­ry earns its place in the canon of the New York City nov­el, along with Don Delillo’s Under­world, Tom Wolfe’s The Bon­fire of the Van­i­ties, E. L. Doctorow’s Rag­time, and many others.”

A number of talented writers have reviewed Glass Century generously. Alexander Sorondo believes it is a great Millennial novel “about the bygone world of institutions, of norms and hierarchies and values, in which Millennials were raised to someday conduct themselves, and find fulfillment, as adults; and ultimately it’s about watching that world vanish almost the moment they were old enough to inherit it.”

ARX-Han, in a beautiful and fascinating mediation on the structure and physicality of Glass Century, writes of the “very subtle and hard-to-articulate beauty that leaks through the metastructure of the novel. If I were to connect it to a cinematic analogue, it calls to mind the ending sequence of Gangs of New York and it’s time-lapsed montage of urban evolution that, like Glass Century, seems to pose the exact same question—what is a city other than amalgamation of stories … Glass Century even seems to gesture toward an account of New York as a kind of super-agent: a kind of sprawling narrative superstructure that directs the flow of the entire country, like some enormous magnetic compass pointing in a certain direction.”

I’ll have more reviews and commentary to share on Glass Century as time goes on. It was a genuine labor of love, and I am thrilled to see it in the world.