AVAILABLE IN HARDCOVER, PAPERBACK, EBOOK, AND AUDIOBOOK

ORDER > BOOKSHOP | B&N | AMAZON

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2020 by The Boston Globe and The Chicago Tribune 

“Adam Levin is one of our wildest writers and our funniest, and Bubblegum is a dazzling accomplishment of wit and inventiveness – an irrepressible and insanely entertaining examination of our obsessive culture that doesn’t forget to be fond of that which it is satirizing. Levin’s keen and ornery mind, reveling in the world with vast energy, shows us new ways of loving it.”
George Saunders, author of the Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo 

“Admirably bonkers and fitfully phenomenal. . . As Levin’s previous novel, The Instructions, demonstrated even more amply (at 1,000-plus pages), you don’t come to this writer for elegance of proportion. You come for comedy, for sensibility, for style; and in this sense Bubblegum is prodigiously sustaining. . .Levin can make the kitchen-sink ambition of midcentury postmodernism feel positively new, bidding fair for the maximalist mantle of a Pynchon or a Stanley Elkin. But Levin’s consuming interest in everyday subjectivity equally pulls in the direction of minimalism; what engorges the sentences here is actually the kitchen sink of consciousness. . .When it’s humming, the pileup of plenitude and emptiness is as future-perfect as the Curio itself, the sound of the day after tomorrow… Levin’s faith in his flesh-and-bone robots yields a stunning transubstantiation.  . .[His] brains may have earned him a cult like Belt’s, but here he swells to a democratic reach. Give him a try sometime. His gate’s wide open.”
Garth Risk Hallberg, The New York Times Book Review 

"Monumentally imaginative. . .While the influence of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest looms large—there are long descriptions of movies, Jonboat’s intoxicatingly beautiful wife, a vividly imagined alternate history, and a focus on the costs of entertainment and pleasure—Levin’s vibrant voice is unlike anyone else in contemporary fiction. . .Breathtakingly bizarre, this relentlessly inventive novel teems with humanity, humor, and pathos like few other recent works and is a book many will obsess over and delight in."
Booklist, starred review 

“Adam Levin’s brilliant, inventive, fully imagined alternative world gives us insight and clarity about the actual world we live in. We are implicated, warned, but what a hilarious ride. Bubblegum is a wild, ambitious, and original novel. Levin is a wonder.”
Dana Spiotta, author of Eat the Document

"Funny. . .moving. . .Levin creates a fascinating world with a wild and often touching coming-of-age story at its center." 
Publishers Weekly 

“Levin is the new Mailer. Think The Naked and The Dead, remove World War II, insert the war we are in now; up the introspection, lower the Nobel posturing (Bubblegum!) and the pontificating of the self, keep the outsized ambition, make the damned book even larger. One wonders how the Mailer vacuum went empty this long. This is ambition and large-statement talent. The precision of the errancy is thrilling. This son of a bitch is perfect.”
Padgett Powell, author of You & Me

"Tantalizing."
The Boston Globe 

"Punk's not dead. . .Bubblegum is crazy, erudite, and disturbing, a catalog of eccentricities and ferocious humor...Levin is one of those writers who keeps alive your faith in literature, in what books can do that Twitter, Instagram, and Netflix can't. He arouses hope for the future of the novel." 
Les Inrocks (France) 

“With Bubblegum, Adam Levin has created a cubist painting about consumerism, fetishization, and the increasingly blurred line between life and advertisement in a hyper-materialist, post-IRL society. Levin masterfully creates a world without the internet to examine the impact and insanity it has sewn into the American project, and he does so while gleefully skewering our unraveling vernacular. A freaky marvel of a tome.”
Catherine Lacey, author of Certain American States, The Answers and Nobody is Ever Missing
 
“Bubblegum is startling. Ingenious in its form and meaning-making. Levin gives you everything. A hilarious and serious meditation on what we might become. To paraphrase one of its characters, the novel makes me feel understood.”
Salvador Plascencia, author of The People of Paper

"Eccentric, inventive, bountiful, Rabelaisian."
Libération (France)

“A book may be said to be a kind of fist, and the readers of such a fist-book as Bubblegum can surely not predict or prepare for the ecstatic bewilderment of the encounter, particularly when they are greeted in the depths of it by long-form theoretical analysis of their plight.”
Jesse Ball, author of Census

“... A novel that brilliantly straddles that hazy no-man’s land between literary and genre fiction ... To spend 800 pages – and in my case 11 days – in the head of a man crippled with self-doubt and a deep, abiding fear of social interaction isn’t a reading experience I would actively seek out. And yet if Adam Levin had emailed me an additional 100,000 words of Belt’s circuitous ramblings, I would have carried on reading with nary a thought to the contrary. This is because, as Belt’s memoir toggles between 1988 and 2013, Levin does an astonishing job at varying the tone and pitch of the novel. The book is often incredibly funny ... In contrast to the laughs, the story can be emotion­ally devastating ... if you decide to take the dive, and I heartily suggest you do, reading Bubblegum is an experi­ence you won’t soon forget.”
Ian Mond, Locus