The publication in one volume of Gilbert Rogin’s novels, What Happens Next? and Preparations for the Ascent, will bring to a new generation the comedy, pathos, and incisive observation that made him a favorite contributor to the New Yorker, where he published thirty-three stories in the 1960s and ’70s. Hailed by the New York Review of Books for the “grace and intelligence” of his writing, Rogin’s work nevertheless fell out of print for two decades—and yet seems astonishingly fresh to 21st-century eyes. Contemporary readers will find in him an antic genius in the manner of Larry David, and a literary stylist who “often writes with the humor and sensitivity of the best work of Saul Bellow” (Newsweek).

Rogin’s dyspeptic protagonist roams the streets and bedrooms of Manhattan dispensing his unique brand of laugh-out-loud wisdom on the faults of psychotherapy, the folly of marriage, and the foibles of family life. Rogin’s Everyman is the trenchant commentator on the human comedy that we all wish we could be. Drowning in the indignities thrust upon him by his ex-wife, his parents and his girlfriend (known only as the Human Dynamo), he nevertheless rises above the surface with flights of empathy and poetry to anchor himself in our affection.

Elegantly written and very funny, these novels confirm Rogin’s place alongside not just his literary contemporaries John Updike and Philip Roth, but also next to Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld as one of the great comic minds of his time—and our own.

PRAISE for Gilbert Rogin

“Ruthlessly exact and amazingly surreal and utterly convincing.” – John Updike

“Gilbert Rogin has accomplished a unique vision and seems to have brought to near perfection his own style.”—Joyce Carol Oates

“Rogin shares Cheever’s awareness of risk, his sense that to turn a corner of the banal may be to find oneself in a howling waste of strangeness . . . The slapstick works as well for Rogin as it did for Salinger.”—John Skow, Time

“As someone who had a small hand in the literary revival of both Richard Yates and Paula Fox, I can’t say I’m terribly surprised by how unbelievably terrific and funny and moving and electrifying Gilbert Rogin’s fiction is. That doesn’t mean I’m not newly terrified that a writer this good can be lost for this long. Anyone who cares about prose, storytelling, or humor will find so much here to celebrate.” – Tom Bissell

NEW PRESS on Gilbert Rogin

Profile/interview in the New York Observer, September 22, 2010
What Happens Next? & Preparations for the Ascent
Two Novels by Gilbert Rogin
Verse Chorus Press
Paperback, 364 pages
ISBN: 978-1-891241-27-7
Price: $17.95
Pub. date: October 11, 2010

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