Less

Less is a satirical novel by the American writer Andrew Sean Greer, published in 2017. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and a sequel, Less Is Lost, followed in 2022.

Arthur Less is forty-nine, a gay writer from San Francisco whose reputation rests largely on having once been the partner of Robert Brownburn, a poet of genuine standing. He had some success with his first novel and has spent the years since failing to repeat it, and his latest manuscript has just been turned down by his publisher.

The invitation to the wedding of Freddy Pelu, the man he has not got over, arrives at the same time as his fiftieth birthday, and his response is flight. He assembles a calendar of the literary engagements he usually refuses: an interview in New York, a conference in Mexico City about Robert, an award ceremony in Turin at which he unexpectedly does well, and a series of other arrangements that keep him moving. The book is a comic novel about a man running away from his own life, and what he runs into is the whole of it.