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Mylene Dressler Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

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

Mylene Dressler

Mylene Dressler

How to pronounce Mylene Dressler: Mee-lan (like Milan, the city)

Mylene Dressler Biography

Mylène Dressler was born in The Hague, the Netherlands in 1963, and – after a career as a professional ballet dancer – began her literary studies at the University of San Francisco, and was later a doctoral student at Rice University. She is the author of three novels, The Medusa Tree, The Deadwood Beetle, and The Floodmakers. Her novels and stories have been translated into French, Dutch and Turkish, and she has been a faculty member or a visiting writer at the University of Texas at Austin, the National Autonomous University of Chiapas, the University of Groningen, Rice University, and the University of St. Thomas, among others.

Dressler’s honors and awards include the Fulbright Fellowship, the Paisano Fellowship in Fiction, and the Fellowship in Writing from the McCullers Center in Columbus, Georgia. She makes her home in Texas and in the canyon country of southern Utah with her husband and two border collies.

From the author's website

Mylene Dressler's website

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Interview

Mylène Dressler compares writing a first novel to drawing a map to a place you've never seen but are longing to get to; while writing a second book is like standing with that beautiful map in your hands. Read her interview to find out why she says this.

How was writing this novel different than writing your first?
I think I can best describe it by saying that writing a first novel feels like drawing a map to a place you've never seen but are longing to get to, while writing a second is like standing with that beautiful map in your handsonly it doesn't describe the new country you're in. All the experience of having made that first mapof writinggoes with you, of course, all the gained knowledge of structure and form and character. But with each new work, the way "through" has to be found all over again. When I began writing The Deadwood Beetle, for example, I had to discover almost everything about its setting and characters; I didn't even know, at first, that the book's narrator, Tristan Martens, would be a specialist in insects. And this as it turned out exactly mirrored the process I went through writing my first book: one of beginning with only a voice in my head and the barest outline of an idea, and then having to thrash my way through.

What research did this novel require? Did it require any, or with some knowledge of basic historical facts, did the story simply emerge?
Parts of the story emerged from my basic ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Mylene Dressler at BookBrowse
The Deadwood Beetle jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Mylene Dressler 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

  • Kazuo Ishiguro

    Kazuo Ishiguro

    Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, on November, 8 1954. He came to Britain in 1960 when his father began research at the National Institute of Oceanography, and was educated at a grammar school for boys in Surrey.

    ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The Deadwood Beetle

    Try:
    When We Were Orphans
    by Kazuo Ishiguro

  • Ian McEwan

    Ian McEwan

    Ian McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fé... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The Deadwood Beetle

    Try:
    Amsterdam
    by Ian McEwan

We recommend 3 similar authors

View all 3 Read-Alikes

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Top Picks

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    Graveyard Shift
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    Following the success of her debut novel, If We Were Villains, M. L. Rio's latest book is the quasi-...
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    At the start of Maame Blue's The Rest of You, Whitney Appiah, a Ghanaian Londoner, is ringing in her...

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    In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.

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