GENERATION DESPERATION

Alexander Hurst’s debut memoir, Generation Desperation is available in English (Hodder & Stoughton) on January 29th, 2026, and in German (Goldmann) in spring 2026.

In 2020, Alexander Hurst was a broke freelance journalist living in a cramped flatshare. As the world stuttered to a halt, he poured a meager mix of savings—and then borrowed more—into high risk options trades. Within a year he’d make over $1 million in gains, but the money would thinly cover the way he was breaking apart: obsessed, isolated, convinced that just one more trade would really change everything.

And then he’d lose it all.

This is the story of that rise and fall. But more than that, it’s an interrogation of the 21st-century ‘desperation capitalism’ that pushed millions to try and trade their way out of financial insecurity.

What does it mean to live in an economy where a lottery ticket feels more achievable than a mortgage? What becomes of a society that offers speculation in place of stability, and of those who despairingly try to play the game in order to leave it?

’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.’

Darkly funny and devastatingly honest, Generation Desperation is the essential memoir of a generation promised prosperity, but handed precarity.

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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 have written a mix of essay and reportage for places like the Guardian Long Read, Hazlitt, The New Republic, and The Caravan. I contribute a column several times a month for the Guardian’s recently launched Guardian Europe edition. 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, friendhip, 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 l’invité du podcast Le code a changé de France Inter, et de l’émission C politique, présentée par Thomas Snegaroff sur France 5.

My non-fiction is represented by Emma Bal at Madeleine Milburn in London. I’m currently finishing the first draft of a novel about four people and a single Leica camera entangled together across time and geography. From newly-independent, early 1960’s Chad, to the student-led street protests of Paris in May, 1968, to French Guiana in the mid 2010s, what does it mean to witness, and what does it mean to remember?

I would love to discuss fiction representation with the right agent.

selected essays, reportage, photography

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?