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Joshua Ferris is the author of three previous novels, Then We Came to the End, The Unnamed and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, and a collection of stories, The Dinner Party. He was a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and was named one of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" writers in 2010. To Rise Again at a Decent Hour won the Dylan Thomas Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and Best American Short Stories. He lives in New York.
Joshua Ferris's website
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Tell us a little about your writing
background up to this point
I lived in Key West as a kid, and there I started writing imitation Alfred
Hitchcock stories — not "The Birds" but, given Key West's coastal view, "The
Crabs." Many good people, boaters and sunbathers, were eaten alive as Hitchcock
turned in his grave. Then in college, at the University of Iowa, I started
writing stories again — again imitations but with sights set a little higher, or
at least more literary: Nabokov, Barthelme. Shortly after college I got a job in
advertising where I wrote ad copy for national brands, which taught me a good
many things. And after my time in advertising I enrolled in the MFA program at
the University of California, Irvine, where I started Then We Came to the
End.
So you had experience working
in an ad agency. Is that how you arrived at the setting of your novel?
Ad agencies can be a lot of fun. Creative departments are full of toys and
games and wacky surprises, and throwing a Nerf football down the hallway to
release tension isn't immediate cause for walking papers. I wanted my characters
to have the freedom to do certain things that wouldn't fly, say, in a law firm.
...
Kate Christensen is the author of eight novels, most recently Welcome Home, Stranger. Her fourth novel, The Great Man, won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has also published two food-centric memoirs, Blue Plate ... (more)
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Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1960. He graduated magna cum laude from Brown University, and received an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1986. His first ... (more)
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The Unnamed
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