Center for the literary arts in New York State
MILLENNIAL FICTION
Andrew Martin
4:30 p.m. Tuesday, September 8, 2026
University at Albany
Multi-Purpose Room
1400 Washington Avenue, Albany NY 12222
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Photo credit: Lulu Lui
Andrew Martin, fiction writer, is “a leading chronicler of millennial ennui in contemporary America” (Kirkus). His books include the “slacker classics,” Early Work: A Novel (2018), and Cool for America: Stories (2020).
Ann Patchett said, “Early Work… is really dirty… It’s a book about young graduate students who drink a lot, read a lot, have a lot of sex, and somehow, it’s just mesmerizing… terrific.”
His new novel is Down Time (2026), about five friends in their '30s, “growing older, if not always up.” In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Adam Straus said, “The pleasure of this book comes from reading perfectly rendered sentence after perfectly rendered sentence… Endlessly entertaining.”
Andrew Martin's essays and stories have appeared frequently in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper's, as well as in The Yale Review, The Atlantic, McSweeney's, The Times Book Review and elsewhere.
With support from the Bernard F. Conners Fund and cosponsored by the University at Albany's English Department’s Creative Writing Program and Young Writers Project, UAlbany’s Writing & Critical Inquiry Program (WCI), and the Honors College.
Andrew Martin: links
reviews:
“An unbridled sense of creative mischief permeates Down Time, perpetrated by both the author’s sparkling prose and the characters themselves . . . The pleasure of this book comes from reading perfectly rendered sentence after perfectly rendered sentence . . . Endlessly entertaining.”
—Adam Straus, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Keenly observed and fitfully propulsive . . . Extremely funny, which is not easy on the page. Many lines zing.”
—Ben Greenman, The New York Times Book Review
“Down Time is the first novel I’ve encountered that vividly evokes the pre-vaccine months without falling into the usual traps . . . Sharp, off-kilter, and particular . . . He achieves this not through satire—a crude tool ill-suited to a subject as tricky as the pandemic—but through acute psychological observation.”
–Lily Meyer, The Atlantic
“Martin’s best and biggest book so far, a clever, rigorous, and relentlessly, unfortunately, accurate portrait of how it is to be alive and in your thirties . . . To Martin’s great credit . . . he manages to avoid the pitfalls of the genre, and instead use the trappings of the story we all know too well to tell us something very specific about a few imaginary people, and something very universal about our own real selves.”
—Emily Temple, Literary Hub (Most Anticipated)
“This sharp new novel from the cult-favorite author of Early Work is about two ‘neurotic, ambivalent intellectuals’ and their friends: professors, artists, anti-Establishment types with money. As the pandemic bears down, their problems—with addiction, with sex, with relationships—begin to become untenable.”
—Emma Alpern, Vulture (Most Anticipated)