The Mystery Guest

"By its second paragraph, Boullier's ex--who left him suddenly and apparently cruelly some years earlier--has called to invite him to her friend's birthday party . . . In the kind of perfectly ironic detail that could only come directly from real life, he decides to distinguish himself by spending more than a month's rent on a bottle of 1964 Margaux, only to learn that as part of her artistic practice, Calle keeps all of her birthday gifts in storage in their original wrapping . . . It is a tightly written portrait of the artist as a young(ish) mess, and its ingenuity lies in its positioning of the 'mystery guest' as an idealized state that exists in diametric opposition to the thoroughly unmysterious position of the ex-lover . . . His problem--much to our delight, since this dilemma is what lends the book its jittery edge--is that he cannot be mysterious to save his life." --Philippa Snow "Bookforum"
"Existential angst has rarely been as humorous or as heartbreaking."

-- "People"

"Proust in a bottle . . . Read it . . . Pick it up again. Be startled." -- "GQ"
"Sad, funny and vivid . . . As The Mystery Guest beautifully shows . . . even when the story seems to have spun out of our control (your lover leaves you, you lose your job, you are surrounded by intimations of mortality and loss) the power to reclaim it lies within your grasp."

--Erica Wagner "New York Times Book Review"