Andrew Palmer

Andrew Palmer made his fiction debut with The Bachelor, a literary novel that places reality television beside poetry and asks what each form promises about love. Its unnamed narrator returns to Des Moines after a breakup and struggles to begin another book. He becomes absorbed in a season of the television program The Bachelor while also reading the life and work of John Berryman, especially the poet's effort to make experience matter through art. Hogarth issued it in 2021. Palmer uses the narrator's housesitting stays in Iowa and California to examine ambition, performance, loneliness, and the uncertain border between observing a life and participating in it. The book's women have distinct aims and judgments, preventing the narrator's romantic confusion from becoming its only measure of them. Palmer grew up in Iowa and has published shorter work in outlets including The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Slate, and The New Yorker. His debut joins cultural criticism to a quiet account of creative and emotional reentry.