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Arthur Phillips was born in Minneapolis and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion.
His first novel, Prague, was named a New York Times Notable Book, and received the Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for best first novel. His second novel, The Egyptologist, was an international bestseller, and was on more than a dozen "Best of 2004" lists. Angelica, his third novel, made the Washington Post best fiction of 2007 and led that paper to call him "One of the best writers in America." The Song Is You was a New York Times Notable Book, on the Post's best of 2009 list, and inspired Kirkus to write, "Phillips still looks like the best American novelist to have emerged in the present decade." His fifth book, The Tragedy of Arthur, was published in 2011 to critical acclaim, including being named a New York Times Notable Book, and being shortlisted for the IMPAC International Literary Prize.
The play taken from that book received its world premiere reading at New York's Public Theater in 2011 and became a full stage production in 2013, under the auspices of the Guerrilla Shakespeare Project. His short story, "Companionship," was adapted into an opera by Rachel Peters and received its debut at the Fort Worth Opera in 2019.
The film version of Angelica was released in 2015, and other films based on his work are currently in development. His work has been published in twenty-seven languages.
He has written for television's Damages (FX/DirecTV), Bloodline (Netflix), Tokyo Vice (HBOMax) and created television series for FX Networks, HBO, and Sundance. He has further television pilots in development.
He lives in New York with his two sons.
Arthur Phillips's website
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Write what you know!
Hemingways tyrannical proverb haunts
writing classes and roils the sleep of the lonely would-be novelist, who in
relentless dreams and depressing reality alike feels himself drowning in Uncle
Ernests quasi-papal bull. "Write what I know? What I know
But what," the
author frets, "if I dont know anything?"
In that case, not to worry, for there is always the British Museum.
If you should decide to write a novel about a topic you know almost nothing
about, a scholarly discipline requiring years to master, if you feel compelled
to set the story in a land youve scarcely visited, during an era you can only
dimly conjure from childhood reading and yellowed clippings, if you have
followed your hyperactive and petulant imagination down a rabbit hole and there
gazed at glowing, magical projections of inverted pyramids and pith-helmeted
lunatics and pharaohs with unconventional appetites, but found little by way of
actual knowledge, rest easy, because at the British Museum you will make a new
friend: an expert who not only knows everything, but who is required--yes, required--to
answer all your e-questions, no matter how many, how foolish, how wrong-headed,
fantastic, or ...
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
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