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  • Published: 29 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9781911717621
  • Imprint: Fern Press
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $34.99

Pan





An intense and funny coming-of-age debut novel about the magical thinking of youth and the mystery of adolescence

Nicholas has plenty of reasons to feel unstable: he’s fifteen, the child of divorced parents, living with his absent dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs, and an outsider at school. Then, one day in geometry class, he forgets how to breathe. 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 and his friends hunt for answers why – in art, music and literature – as they reach for a life beyond the confines of where they’ve grown up and what’s expected of them. Pan takes 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.

  • Published: 29 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9781911717621
  • Imprint: Fern Press
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $34.99

About the author

Michael Clune

Michael Clune is the critically acclaimed author of the memoirs Gamelife and White Out, chosen by the New Yorker as one of the best books of 2013. Clune’s work has appeared in Harper’s, the New Yorker, Granta and elsewhere, while he has been recognised by fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, and others. He is currently the Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Praise for Pan

Michael Clune writes lucid, shrewd, startling prose capable of laying bare pockets of human experience that might otherwise go without words. Pan proves his mesmeric ability to return our world and selves to us made strange and changed; there is no other writer like him

Maggie Nelson

A strange, vivid and intense novel about the mystery of consciousness and the magic of childhood

Tao Lin

I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune

Ben Lerner

No one writes like Michael Clune. His uncanny ability to fuse the universal with the arcane breaks new ground for the bildungsroman in Pan, where he dexterously stacks up spinning plates until, before you know it, there’s nothing left but changeling magic. I didn’t want the book to end, and I’m still trying to figure out how it transformed the inscrutable doom of adolescence into a symphonic odyssey with style to spare

Blake Butler

This strange anti-love child of Arthur Machen, Philip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs infected my brain with odd humor, paranoia and existential dread. Bursting with truly breathtaking prose, Pan is an ontological coming of age story for, well, the ages

Paul Tremblay

A remarkable and singular novel whose sensitivity to the texture of experience opens up the possibility of a fresh perceptiveness in the reader. It’s tender and searching, an addictive philosophical quest. I loved it with all my heart.

Chetna Maroo, Booker-shortlisted author of WESTERN LANE

A staggering coming-of-age novel . . . Wild, strange and savagely funny

Service95

[Pan] has literary circles buzzing . . . Rendered in dazzling prose, Clune’s debut novel paints a luminous portrait of the unique psychosis that growing up in suburbia can foster

Bustle

With prose as strange as it is hypnotising, Pan will leave you breathless and wanting for more

Harper’s Bazaar

A delightfully odd coming-of-age story

Esquire

A true original . . . A new Michael Clune book is a cause for celebration

Paul Murray

Brilliant . . . Mind-bending, psychologically intricate, really thrilling

Lauren Groff

This staggering coming-of-age saga is tough to shake

Publishers Weekly

Pan holds your attention as a sweet-and-sour tale of the no man’s land between childhood and adulthood . . . In this stylish and unsettling novel, the greatest fear is that inside your head is the only place to be

Observer
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