Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Darin Strauss Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Darin Strauss

Darin Strauss

Darin Strauss Biography

Darin Strauss was born in Long Island and attended Tufts University. His first novel, Chang & Eng (2000) was the runner-up for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, the Literary Lions Award, a Borders Award winner. His second book, The Real McCoy (2002), was named New York Times Notable Book. His most recent work is Half a Life(2010), which won 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award.

He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and kids. He teaches writing at New York University.

Darin Strauss's website

This bio was last updated on 05/30/2016. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Interview

A Q&A with Darin Strauss about his memoir Half a Life, a nakedly honest, ultimately hopeful examination of guilt, responsibility, and living with the past.

Colum McCannis the internationally bestselling author of the novels Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, Songdogs, Let the Great World Spin (for which he won the National Book Award)  as well as two critically acclaimed story collections. His fiction has been published in thirty languages.

Darin Strauss is the bestselling author of three previous books. The recipient of a Guggenheim in fiction writing and numerous other awards, Strauss has seen his work translated into fourteen languages and published in more than twenty countries.


Colum McCann:  They say all stories are the same. Of course this can't be true.  The poem doesn't swerve and suddenly become a thriller. The playright doesn't necessarily know how to begin a rhyme. Can you discuss the challenges that face a novelist who switches to memoir?

Darin Strauss: My training and my inclination is to invent. Memoir was in some ways an easier form (you skip the hard, dreaming-stuff-up work) and in some ways more difficult (Wait, you can't just dream stuff up?). The novelist has permission to do whatever she chooses to supercharge whatever's interesting in her story. This is also known as freedom. So, had this been a ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Books by this Author

Books by Darin Strauss at BookBrowse
Half a Life jacket More Than It Hurts You jacket
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Darin Strauss but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Sonali Deraniyagala

    Sonali Deraniyagala

    Sonali Deraniyagala was born and raised in Colombo, Sri Lanka. She has an undergraduate degree in Economics from Cambridge University and a doctorate in Economics from the University of Oxford. She is on the faculty of the ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Half a Life

    Try:
    Wave
    by Sonali Deraniyagala

  • Joan Didion

    Joan Didion

    Joan Didion (1934-2021) was born in Sacramento, CA, the daughter of an officer in the Army Air Corps. A shy, bookish child, Didion spent her teenage years typing out Ernest Hemingway stories to learn how sentences work. She ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Half a Life

    Try:
    The Year of Magical Thinking
    by Joan Didion

We recommend 11 similar authors


Non-members can see 2 results. Become a member
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...
  • Book Jacket: The Wide Wide Sea
    The Wide Wide Sea
    by Hampton Sides
    By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.