GENERATION DESPERATION

Generation Desperation is available now
in English and in German (Goldmann/PRH)

In 2020, Alexander Hurst was 29 years old and broke, living as a writer in a cramped Paris flatshare. There were murmurs that a global pandemic was coming. Financial stability seemed unattainable, so far removed from his reality – the reality of the generation who came of age during the 2008 financial crisis.

On a whim, he poured his meagre savings into highly risky options trading. Within a year this small set of stocks was worth $1.2 million. Enough to turn his life on its head – but not in the way he had imagined, as he began a slow-motion descent into losing it all.

In exploring Alexander’s remarkable rise and fall from wealth, Generation Desperation grapples with the vital questions of our age: what do class and status mean in a late-stage capitalist society? Can everyone really build the life they want? Or is there a cost to pursuing money above everything?

Generation Desperation is an urgent, unmissable fable for our times.

’Somewhere in the multiverse, innumerable possibilities are collapsing into infinite different realities. Am I happier in any of them? I still don’t know. The answer to that question is just one more thing that $1.2 million could never buy.’

“Searing insights into the challenges of coming of age in the 21st century . . . an instructive tale about a smart young man looking to grow up in the precariousness of our time.’ – BLOOMBERG

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“A fantastically compelling personal story that is also the story of a generation . . . Told with perfect timing.” - SIMON KUPER

“A riveting, tender, and painfully timely epic about what really matters.” - ANGELICA FERRARA

'Has an appealing timelessness . . . Hurst weaves the personal and the generational together with seamless ease in a thrilling book.'
- SEB EMINA

who am i?

I spent most of my childhood in a quirky, pre-gentrification, inner-city neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio before crossing the Atlantic after undergrad at Amherst College to (finally) learn another language. After a year spent studying French in Strasbourg, I worked for a year in southern Chad, and then found my way to Paris and London for graduate school at Sciences Po and the London School of Economics. I live in Paris, where I sometimes teach a first-year seminar at Sciences Po, (“In search of respect: race and inequality confronting US democracy”) and am currently at work on a novel.

I am the author of a debut memoir, Generation Desperation, and write frequently about French and European political and social issues as a columnist for the Guardian (my columns are sometimes translated to French and (re)published by Le Courrier International). As far as France goes, I’ve reported longform features about illegal gold mining and the Amazon for The Guardian, a resurgence of left-Catholic activism for Commonweal, the intersection of Black French identity and African American soul food for Eater, on the Citizen’s Convention on Climate for The American Prospect, on the Yellow Vests for New Republic. I’ve written more broadly about vigilante violence and Trumpism, and Trumpism as a cult for New Republic, reported a longform feature on the fight to preserve Roma identity for India’s home for narrative journalism, The Caravan, and on race and passing for Hazlitt. Additionally, I’ve written in French on Tocqueville and the slide of democracy in the United States for Revue21.

Je suis également disponible en français pour des interventions, tables rondes, podcasts, et plateaux télé. Je suis intervenu dans le passé lors d’une soirée spéciale organisée par Le Courrier International en novembre 2024, consacrée au décryptage des résultats de l’élection, et j’ai participé à plusieurs tables rondes organisées par Le Monde et par Le Courrier International au Festival international du journalisme à Couthures-sur-Garonne, en juillet 2025. J’étais récemment l’invité du podcast Le code a changé de France Inter pour une série de trois épisodes, “Pour quelques dollars de plus : portrait d’un trader amateur”, et au plateau de l’émission En Société de France 5 sur les questions de politique américaine.

My non-fiction is represented by Emma Bal at Madeleine Milburn in London.

Literary fiction (in progress)

And Light Returns to Light tracks a single Leica camera as it passes through four lives, linking them in a constellation of love, violence, and memory.

From a teenage boy watching the American Midwest rust and gentrify around him at the height of the Iraq War, to the heat of newly independent 1960s Chad, the street barricades of 1968 Paris, and finally to the Amazonian rainforest in 2010’s French Guiana, the novel asks: when we capture a moment, do we fix ourselves in time, or do we bind ourselves to each other beyond time itself?

selected essays, reportage, photography

Rockets, gold, and the foreign legion

The Guardian

France’s Amazonian department of Guyane is a microcosm for the intersection of crises - ecological, climate, and sovereignty’s dual edge.

La bannière enflammée ou le testament de Tocqueville

Revue21

Je me souvient de mon geste radical d’adolescent du Midwest : l’autodafé du drapeau étoilé. L’occasion d’une méditation sur les fondements d’une Amérique en déshérence, qui fête, le 4 juillet, 2026, ses 250 ans.