Remember This: A Novel

Reviews, Blurbs, and Interviews

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL INDIE EXCELLENCE AWARDS

FINALIST FOR TEXAS INSTITUTE OF LETTERS’ SERGIO TRONCOSO AWARD FOR BEST FIRST WORK OF FICTION

SELECTED FOR THE SOUTHERN FESTIVAL OF BOOKS

BONUS PICK FOR THE INTERNATIONAL PULPWOOD QUEENS AND TIMBER GUYS BOOK CLUB

The bright lights, subway squeal, grime, and AIDS tragedy of New York in 1988 become the backdrop as a young man’s sensibility—formed by the complicated loves and demands of his three sisters—tests itself against the push-and-pull compulsions of an illicit love affair. As we follow John Martin through this story, from New Braunfels, Texas, to the Big Apple, it becomes our story too: a look at the complexities all of us carry from past into future, fumbling at self-knowledge, hungering for experience.

— Albert Goldbarth, twice winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

“Exquisitely written and full of longing, a tender and moving elegy for lost loves of every kind.”

— Valerie Laken, author of Dream House and Separate Kingdoms
 

“Some novelists seem to have an inborn knack for originality and the kind of narrative driven storytelling style that engages the reader’s total attention from beginning to end. Set in the midst of cultural upheaval, Remember This is just such a novel by just such an author as Steve Adams. An inherently fascinating, thought-provoking, and memorable read.”

— Midwest Book Review

“Flawlessly crafted, original, and intimate. A haunting meditation on loss and desire, Remember This is a love letter to a gritty New York long surrendered to upscale coffee shops and apartment high rises, to the reckless passions of fading youth, to art and all its possibilities, and to beauty itself.”

— Jennifer S. Davis, author of Our Former Lives in Art and Her Kind of Want 

Remember This is a search for an understanding of the essential nexus of love and loss. A lot of novels are; most lose their way. But Steve Adams, through an alchemy of narrative stealth and lissome prose, fired to a cherry red in the binary crucible of Texas in the 1960s and New York in the 1980s (territories already thoroughly consecrated to love and loss), produces a new kind of shimmering, literary metal. It's not gentle business, though. It's a ferocious trial, and arrives at an annihilating verdict that is as unexpected as it is inevitable. Read this book, take a deep breath, then read it again.

— Bill Cotter, author of The Parallel Apartments and Fever Chart

“For me it felt thrilling and dangerous to land in the middle of this wild city, where you could do, and be, anything, and where ‘anything’ always seemed on the cusp of suddenly confronting you. It challenged you and your sense of who you were.”

— Interview with author Steve Adams at Deborah Kalb Books.

“I experience settings intensely, which is one reason I love New York so much: it’s such a rich and intense place. It has its own life, and if you live there, you’re a part of that life. And so I wanted to write about New York that way, as a living place.”

— Interview with author Steve Adams by Ramona Reeves at Bloom