Welcome to Litsy!

A frighteningly prescient novel of today�s America�one man�s story of a racially charged real estate experiment in Detroit, Michigan. �You get in the habit of living a certain kind of life, you keep going in a certain direction, but most of the pressure on you is just momentum. As soon as you stop the momentum goes away. It�s easier than people think to walk out on things, I mean things like cities, leases, relationships and jobs.� Greg Marnier, Marny to his friends, leaves a job he doesn�t much like and moves to Detroit, Michigan in 2009, where an old friend has a big idea about real estate and the revitalization of a once great American city. Once there, he gets involved in a fist-fight between two of his friends, a racially charged trial, an act of vigilante justice, a love affair with a local high school teacher, and a game of three-on-three basketball with the President�not to mention the money-soaked real estate project itself, cut out of 600 acres of emaciated Detroit. Marny�s billionaire buddy from Yale, Robert James, calls his project �the Groupon model for gentrification,� others call it �New Jamestown,� and Marny calls it home� until Robert James asks him to leave. This is the story of what went wrong. You Don�t Have to Live Like This is the breakout novel from the �fabulously real� (Guardian) voice of the only American included in Granta�s Best of Young British Novelists. Using the framework of our present reality, Benjamin Markovits blurs the line between the fictional and the fact-based, and captures an invisible current threaded throughout American politics, economics, and society that is waiting to explode. (less)

A frighteningly prescient novel of today�s America�one man�s story of a racially charged real estate experiment in Detroit, Michigan. �You get in the habit of living a certain kind of life, you keep going in a certain direction, but (…more)