Nirvana is Here

“In language that’s both understated and visceral, Hamburger skillfully distills those moments when his characters experience crucial identity shifts, not just in wild, foreign encounters but more often while eating, bathing, and tending to the animal needs of love and safety that link us all.” – Booklist

Have you ever searched for your high school crush online?

Two decades after they first met, Medieval Historian Ari Silverman is reconnecting with his high school obsession Justin Jackson, now happily married to a woman and the first African-American CEO of a successful dating website. While preparing to see Justin again, Ari recalls his relationship with him in the segregated suburbs of Detroit during the early 1990s and the secrets they still share. At the same time, he’s also grappling with the fate of his ex-husband, a colleague accused of sexually harassing a student.

In Aaron Hamburger’s NIRVANA IS HERE, two tales converge as Ari comes to a fateful decision about his past and present, his life and his inner character. Framed by the meteoric rise and fall of the band Nirvana and the #metoo movement, NIRVANA IS HERE touches on issues of identity, race, sex, and family with both poignancy and unexpected humor, with the sensuality and haunting nostalgia of Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name with the raw emotion of Kurt Cobain’s songwriting.

NIRVANA IS HERE: A Novel, by Aaron Hamburger; Trade Paper; 330 pages; ISBN: 978-1-94110-77-5; $16.00; May 14, 2019

About the Author

AARON HAMBURGER is the author of a story collection titled The View from Stalin’s Head (Random House), winner of the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and nominee for a Violet Quill Award. His second book, the novel Faith for Beginners (Random House), was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, O, the Oprah Magazine, Details, The Village Voice, Poets & Writers, Tin House, Out, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Forward, and numerous other publications. In addition, he has also won fellowships from Yaddo, Djerassi, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation as well as first prize in the Dornstein Contest for Young Jewish Writers. He has taught creative writing at Columbia University, the George Washington University, New York University, Brooklyn College, and the Stonecoast MFA Program. He currently resides in Washington, D.C.