Keith A. Gessen (born January 9, 1975)[2][3] is a Russian-born American novelist, journalist, and literary translator.

Gessen's mother was a literary critic[5] and his father is a computer scientist now specializing in forensics.

His maternal grandmother, Ruzya Solodovnik, was a Soviet government censor of dispatches filed by foreign reporters such as Harrison Salisbury; his paternal grandmother, Ester Goldberg Gessen, was a translator for a foreign literary magazine.

in creative writing from Syracuse University in 2004 but did not initially receive a degree, having failed to submit "a final original work of fiction.

In 2009, Penguin published his translation (with Anna Summers) of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales.

Gessen's first novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, was published in April 2008 and received mixed reviews.

[11] In 2010, Gessen edited and introduced Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, a book about the financial crisis.