Born Konstantin Alexandrovich Gessen into a Jewish family in Moscow, Soviet Union, he and his parents and sister moved to the United States in 1981. They settled in the Boston area, living in Brighton, Brookline and Newton, Massachusetts. Gessen's mother was a literary critic and his father is a computer scientist now specializing in forensics. His siblings are Masha Gessen, Daniel Gessen and Philip Gessen. His maternal grandmother, Ruzya Solodovnik, was a Soviet government censor of dispatches filed by foreign reporters such as Harrison Salisbury; his paternal grandmother, Ester Goldberg Gessen, was a translator for a foreign literary magazine. Gessen graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in history and literature in 1998. He completed the course-work for his M.F.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University in 2004 but did not initially receive a degree, having failed to submit "a final original work of fiction." According to his Columbia University faculty biography, he ultimately received the degree.
Career
Gessen has written about Russia for The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The Atlantic, and the New York Review of Books. In 2004–2005, he was the regular book critic for New York magazine. In 2005, Dalkey Archive Press published Gessen's translation of Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl, an oral history of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. In 2009, Penguin published his translation of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales. Gessen's first novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, was published in April 2008 and received mixed reviews. Joyce Carol Oates wrote that "in this debut novel there is much that is charming and beguiling, and much promise". The novelist Jonathan Franzen has said of Gessen, "It's so delicious the way he writes. I like it a lot." New York Magazine, on the other hand, called the novel "self-satisfied" and "boringly solipsistic". In 2010, Gessen edited and introduced Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, a book about the financial crisis. In 2011, he became involved in the Occupy Movement in New York City. He co-edited the OCCUPY! Gazette, a newspaper reporting on Occupy Wall Street and sponsored by n+1. On November 17, 2011, Gessen was arrested by the New York City police while covering and participating in an Occupy protest at the New York Stock Exchange. He wrote about his experience for The New Yorker. In 2015, Gessen co-edited City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis, which was named a "Best Summer Read of 2015" by Publishers Weekly. In 2018, Gessen's second novel, A Terrible Country, was published. In March 2019, it was serialized on BBC Radio 4.
Personal life
Gessen is married to the writer Emily Gould and was previously married when he arrived in New York City at age 22., he resided in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.
