Pan: A Novel

Longlisted for The Center for Fiction's 2025 First Novel Prize

“Pan is saturated with a grand, psychedelic spirit . . . For those who wonder if the American novel has anything new to offer . . . Pan is exhilarating, a pure joy—and a sheer, nerve-curdling terror—from end to end.” —Matthew Spektor, The Washington Post

“Deliciously observed, ferociously strange . . . Reading his experience of these raptures is invigorating and often hilarious . . . Like a great painter, Clune can show us the mind, the world, with just a few well-placed verbs.” —Kaveh Akbar, The New York Times Book Review

A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this wild, highly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive literary minds

Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to feel unstable already: He’s been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. 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; his best friend, Ty; and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt for answers why—in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock and roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where their classmate Tod’s charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law.

Thrilling, cerebral, and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out—named one of The New Yorker’s best books of the year—earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops 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.