New York author Keith Gessen makes the jump from criticism to fiction with All the Sad Young Literary Men, a laboriously titled, quick-witted debut novel. Gessen writes about a range of literary and cultural topics as a critic, though he's probably best known as a co-founder of n+1, a scrambled lit journal that aims to inject some fresh life into the American intellectual scene. All the Sad Young Literary Men's characters fit the n+1 profile (thirtyish intelligentsia), but Gessen's understated comic flair buoys the novel's more predictable preoccupations.