Sam Kitchener

Telling on mother

But Nathan Hill’s hero has writer’s block, and finds his estranged mother’s lurid past a much more interesting story

issue 28 January 2017

  • The Nix

    Nathan Hill

    Picador, pp. 640

Like many debut novels, The Nix, by the American author Nathan Hill, is about somebody writing their first book. Samuel Andresen-Anderson, an erstwhile literary wünderkind, working as an English professor at an undistinguished college outside Chicago, was paid a huge advance a decade ago, on the strength of a single short story.

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