Kurt Andersen

Kurt Andersen is a writer whose fifth novel, The Breakup, will be published in August. His most recent books were Evil Geniuses and Fantasyland, and his work has been variously praised by critics as “ambitious and remarkable,” “dazzling,” “an absolute joy, “outrageously funny,” “stellar,” “a tour de force,” “a work of towering importance,” and “a great American novel.”

¶ He’s also a journalist, screenwriter and playwright. He contributes to The Atlantic and The New York Times, and was a staff writer and critic at The New Yorker and Time. He also hosted the Peabody Award-winning public radio show Studio 360, ran New York, and co-founded Spy magazine.

Coming August 2026

A penetrating and moving novel about a marriage cracking apart, set in a near-future United States that’s redrawing its borders.

Natalie and Asher’s 23-year marriage has long-standing fault lines over what they think of their fellow Americans and of AI-saturated modern life. In 2045, having survived the two-year civil war together, they’re living separately for the first time since they met. Millennial Asher is in San Francisco with their daughter; Gen-Z Natalie has retreated to her homestate of Tennessee in the Free American Republic. The couple’s relationship mirrors America’s own unraveling — confused, messy, painful, ambivalent, and impossibly intimate. Brought back together for a sprawling college tour with their 17-year-old, they find themselves on a road trip through a strange, uncertain new carved-up America, all while dealing with the flux — and resilience — in their own family. With the hovering question: What differences are irreconcilable, and when is something broken worth saving?

Ranging from tragic to comic to suspenseful, and brimming with imagination, The Breakup is a sweeping tale of the personal and sociopolitical intersecting –– bracingly plausible, keenly insightful, and surprisingly hopeful.

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“This remarkable novel contains multitudes—it’s a provocative political thought experiment, a sneakily profound meditation on AI and marriage, and a charming family road trip novel all rolled into one. With wide-ranging intelligence and his trademark wit, Kurt Andersen has written an epic elegy for a country strained past its breaking point, and imagined an eerily plausible version of our dark national future.”

Tom Perrotta, Ghost Town and Tracy Flick Can’t Win

“Great book! Pairing two divorces—one personal, one national—within a novel that’s funny and beautiful is something few writers could do. Thank you, universe, for Kurt Andersen and this page-turner.”

Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith and Super Sad True Love Story

“Well, it’s come to this: One of our most brilliantly observant and thoughtful writers is compelling us to contemplate an American future of disunion and AI-domination in a novel that is all the more powerful for its sobriety, its realism, and, yes, its humanity. With a grasp of history and of manners, of political forces and of emotional truths, Kurt Andersen has written an engaging, important, and illuminating book. In the 19th century, Anthony Trollope wrote of The Way We Live Now; in the 21st, Andersen invites us to think about the way we may have to.”

Jon Meacham, Pulitzer-winning author of And There Was Light and The Battle for Our Better Angels

“The Breakup is an amazing achievement, a harrowing and profound social satire set in the near future, capturing the breakup of a marriage and our poor country. Rich in characters, insight, sometimes painful, often funny, beautifully written.”

Anne Lamott, Good Writing and Bird By Bird

“A rich, incisive study of manners and morals in the American 21st century. And how the strain of constant adaptation to fearful events and discoveries is almost too much to bear, even for people of understanding and sympathy. Pointed, funny and unnerving, The Breakup conveys a sense of inevitability.”

Susanna Moore, The Lost Wife and In the Cut

“Kurt Andersen is the most brilliant social novelist of our time, in the tradition of Tom Wolfe and Don DeLillo, but even funnier and deeper. With a light touch and instinct for telling details, he mixes pitch-perfect satire with profound insights.”

Walter Isaacson, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written and Steve Jobs

“In this adventurous new novel Kurt Andersen transports us into a mesmerizing near future, at once surreal and bizarrely plausible. It’s a wild political story of armed robots and mid-America border checkpoints and terrorist groups with hilarious acronyms. But more important, it’s a human story, a family story. With wit, fizz, and that rare ability to articulate big ideas that haven’t yet been articulated, Andersen perceives the world on a different frequency from the rest of us.”

Jennifer Senior, Pulitzer-winning author of On Grief and All Joy and No Fun