Benjamin Markovits

"Byron sets off for Greece, after the failure of his involvement in the Italian revolution, to fight for Greek independence. His relationship with Countess Guicciolli has declined, on his side at least, into an affection which seems indistinguishable from the absence of true feeling. He has wasted his passion for life; for men, for children, for his sister, for his own childhood. There is nothing left. He is sailing away to die. On arrival in Greece, one of the boys sent to serve him catches his eye. It strikes him as indicative of his decline in reputation and increase in age that nothing in his person or personality can interest the child. The boy's indifference soon enflames Byron into stronger desires. Wooing the pretty Greek boy, as Byron lies dying, becomes a test not only of his gift for winning the world round to him, as he always could, but of his own ability to feel again, and its corollary: to write."--Publisher description.

"A work of supreme control and complicated emotional subterfuge, YOU DON'T HAVE TO LIVE LIKE THIS is the breakout novel for one of Amerca's great young fiction writers. A book that uses the framework of our present reality to build it's own world, it blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction in the best way, and asks urgent, unforgettable questions about the future of our once great American cities, the state of American race relations, and the widening gap between rich and poor"--

Second in a trilogy exploring the life of Byron and the menage-a-trois between him and Lady Annabelle Milbanke and his sister Augusta Leigh.

Playing Days is a Sports Novel of sorts; though this should not deter the less athletic reader. For at every quiet turn of this unlikely bildungsroman,set against the basketball courts of a small German town, Benjamin Markovits frustrates generic convention.