{
    "id": 319944,
    "slug": "less-andrew-greer",
    "nstc": null,
    "title": "Less",
    "subtitle": "a novel",
    "collection_title": null,
    "collection_part_number": null,
    "annotation": null,
    "description": "<p><strong>Who says you can't run away from your problems?</strong><br /><br /><span>You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world.</span><br /><br /><strong>QUESTION</strong><span>: How do you arrange to skip town?</span><br /><br /><strong>ANSWER</strong><span>: You accept them all.</span><br /><br /><em>What would possibly go wrong?</em><span>&nbsp;Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there is his last.</span><br /><br /><span>Because, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, LESS is, above all, a love story.</span><br /><br /><span>A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author The New York Times has hailed as \"inspired, lyrical,\" \"elegiac,\" \"ingenious,\" as well as \"too sappy by half,\" LESS shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.</span></p>",
    "imprint": null,
    "language_code": "eng",
    "original_language_code": null,
    "page_count": 263,
    "duration_seconds": null,
    "publication_date_first": "2017-07-18",
    "publication_date_latest": "2018-05-22",
    "cover_url": null,
    "editions": [
        {
            "isbn": "9780316316125",
            "product_form": "BB"
        },
        {
            "isbn": "9780316316132",
            "product_form": "BC"
        }
    ],
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    "created_at": "2025-09-19T13:18:02+00:00",
    "updated_at": "2025-11-01T00:26:05+00:00",
    "publisher": {
        "id": 4197,
        "slug": "little-brown-us",
        "name": "Little Brown US",
        "created_at": "2025-09-19T13:08:55+00:00",
        "updated_at": "2025-09-19T15:10:09+00:00"
    },
    "contributors": [
        {
            "id": 191095,
            "slug": "andrew-sean-greer-2",
            "key_names": "Greer",
            "names_before_key": "Andrew Sean",
            "prefix_to_key": null,
            "contributor_role": "A01",
            "readable_contributor_role": "Author"
        }
    ],
    "genres": [],
    "subjects": [
        {
            "scheme_identifier": "32",
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            "main_subject": false,
            "subject_code": "300",
            "created_at": "2025-09-19T13:18:02+00:00",
            "updated_at": "2025-09-19T13:18:02+00:00"
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