Ross Barkan is a born and raised New Yorker, journalist and author of four novels. He is the co-founder of The Metropolitan Review, New York’s youngest books and culture magazine. His latest work of fiction, Colossus, is summarised as follows:

“A stark and unsettling portrait of success, in the vein of Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen, that revives the long-established intersection between ambition and corruption in the pursuit of the American dream.

Teddy Starr has it all. A beloved pastor in a small Midwestern town, a devoted husband and father of three, and a rising real estate magnate, he has built a life that gleams with virtue and success. Self-made in every sense, Teddy is a man of conviction, or at least it seems. But behind the pulpit and the polished smile lies a fractured past, and when a figure from that buried life reemerges, the once-sturdy walls of his world begin to fall.

As scandal and ambition collide, Colossus becomes the story of American hunger for reinvention and the blatant self-interest beneath its surface. Written with the moral gravity of Robert Penn Warren and the psychological insight of Philip Roth, Ross Barkan offers a timely update on the examination of the American identity in an age of performance and decay.”

Ross meets Jack at Edwards in downtown Manhattan

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