Nominated for The Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize • A Washington Post Notable Book •
Named a Best Book of the Year by TIME and Slate “ Pan is saturated with a grand psychedelic
spirit . . . For those who wonder if the American novel has anything new to offer . . . Pan is
exhilarating a pure joy—and a sheer nerve-curdling terror—from end to end.” —Matthew Spektor
The Washington Post “Deliciously observed ferociously strange . . . Reading his experience
of these raptures is invigorating and often hilarious . . . Like a great painter Clune can
show us the mind the world with just a few well-placed verbs.” —Kaveh Akbar The New York
Times Book Review A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the
rabbit hole in this wild highly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive
literary minds Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to
feel unstable already: He’s been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his
Russian-born mom kicked him out. Then one day in geometry class Nicholas suddenly realizes
that his hands are objects . The doctor says it’s just panic but Nicholas suspects that his
real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his
body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles Nicholas his best friend Ty and
his maybe-girlfriend Sarah hunt for answers why—in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire in
rock and roll and in Bach and in the mysterious drugged-out Barn where their classmate Tod’s
charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking
more than just the law. Thrilling cerebral and startlingly funny Pan is a new masterpiece
of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune whose
memoir of heroin addiction White Out —named one of The New Yorker ’s best books of the
year—earned him a cult readership. Now in Pan the great novel of our age of anxiety Clune
drops us inside the human psyche where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our
inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.
