Long since a resident of New York City, he has written for New York Magazine, the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the Atlantic, and the New York Review of Books. In 2011, Gessen became involved with the Occupy Movement in New York City, and coedited the Occupy! Gazette (a newspaper reporting on the movement). He was later arrested while covering a protest at the New York Stock Exchange. His published works include a recent translation of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, and his own novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, published in 2013.