Martin Riker
Martin Riker is author of the novel Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return (2018), which was favorably reviewed in the New Yorker, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. His novel The Guest Lecture will be published by Grove in 2023. As a literary critic, Riker has written on contemporary fiction and literature in translation for such publications as New York Times Book Review, Wall Street Journal, London Review of Books, TLS, Paris Review Daily, and The Guardian. He served for almost a decade as Associate Director of the nonprofit publishing house Dalkey Archive Press, and as an editor for the periodicals The Review of Contemporary Fiction and CONTEXT: A Forum for Literary Arts and Culture. In 2010, he and his wife, Danielle Dutton, co-founded the feminist publishing house Dorothy. Dorothy has garnered international praise for publishing innovative writers such as Marguerite Duras, Leonora Carrington, and Renee Gladman, and for launching the careers of acclaimed contemporary writers such as Nell Zink, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, and Jen George.
The Guest Lecture
Martin Riker
In a hotel room in the middle of the night, Abby, a young feminist economist, lies awake next to her sleeping husband and daughter. Anxious that she is grossly underprepared for a talk she is presenting tomorrow on optimism and John Maynard Keynes, she has resolved to practice by using an ancient rhetorical method of assigning parts of her speech to different rooms in her house and has brought along a comforting albeit imaginary companion to keep her on track—Keynes himself.
Yet as she wanders with increasing alarm through the rooms of her own consciousness, Abby finds herself straying from her prepared remarks on economic history, utopia, and Keynes's pragmatic optimism. A lapsed optimist herself, she has been struggling under the burden of supporting a family in an increasingly hostile America after being denied tenure at the university where she teaches. Confronting her own future at a time of global darkness, Abby undertakes a quest through her memories to ideas hidden in the corners of her mind as she asks what a better world would look like if we told our stories with more honest and more hopeful imaginations.
With warm intellect, playful curiosity, and an infectious voice, Martin Riker acutely animates the novel of ideas with a beating heart and turns one woman's midnight crisis into the performance of a lifetime.
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