GENERATION DESPERATION

Generation Desperation is available now
(in German (Goldmann/PRH) on May 13th, 2026).

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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US & EU (free shipping!) / UK (bookshop.org!)

“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 have written a mix of essay and reportage for places like the Guardian Long Read, Hazlitt, The New Republic, and The Caravan. I write frequently as a columnist for the Guardian, and my columns are frequently translated and published by Le Courrier International. I write about things that interest me: what happens when the systems meant to protect us fail, safeguarding democracy, the environment, how technology impacts our lives, European federalism, friendship, food, and the many layers of my adopted country, France.

Binational franco-américain depuis 2022, 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

The river, the rocket, the 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.

How I turned $15,000 into $1.2m during the pandemic—then lost it all
- the Guardian

Investing in risky stocks gave me the illusion of control in a time of uncertainty. Until it derailed my entire life.

Serving Soul Food in the City of Light - Eater

How Black Parisian chefs are exploring soul food and ‘Afropean’ identity in Europe’s dining capital.

The Vigilante President
- The New Republic

As impeachment and the 2020 election loom, Trump’s hard-core supporters are poised to unleash a wave of violence against their enemies.

Skin Worn Thin
- Hazlitt

Every time someone sees me as either white or black, I wonder, is passing an act of capitulation, or resistance? A rejection of identity, or of identification?