The Author

The author is the author of the (mostly) acclaimed novel, L.I.E., a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Award in a year that Mark Danielewski’s far superior novel, House of Leaves, took home the prize. Nevertheless, L.I.E. seemed to put the author on the map. The LA Times said, “If we feel we’ve heard enough about the land at malls and cloverleafs, we’re wrong; it’s probably the most authentically American experience there is, a point that [the author] makes in a blur of concrete, exit signs, and self-deprecating hilarity.” The Washington Post called the author “an inventive writer who manages simultaneously to romanticize and parody his own experience.” The Fort Worth Star-Telegram called the book “heart-wrenching” and voted it Best Debut Novel of the Year.

But for nearly 20 years, the author failed to publish a Next Novel. He wrote novels, mind you, but the Publishing Apparatus and the author seemed to be moving along diverging trajectories. It was almost as if the author was intentionally authoring into the void, despite frequent 3AM rants to the contrary, delivered in a contrived stage-whisper to his own sobbing reflection in the dimly lit bathroom of an apartment whose rotting infrastructure creaked and groaned under the weight of the author’s failure. This despairing middle-middle-period of the author’s authoring finally came to its unstoried end in the year 2020, when the author’s latest novel, Anthropica, hit the literal and proverbial shelves of our lackluster republic under the auspices of the Animal Riot publishing imprint. But did the people of earth chant the author’s name in unison? Did they elect officials who might absorb and — through the ancient process of literary communion — transmogrify the author’s pain, as the alchemist’s once turned lead to gold? The author hopes you have arrived here prepared to serve that function. Or that you might, at the very least, refer the author to the relevant parties or precincts.

Meanwhile you may rest assured that the author has not, despite the dearth of author-texts occupying the collective imagination, completely squandered his opportunities to author. His mind-bending and paradigm-shifting work has appeared in dozens of print and online forums, including McSweeney’s, Fence, Conjunctions, Agni, Post Road, The New York Times Magazine, Poets & Writers, The Collagist, and Unsaid. His authored works have been adapted for film and frequently anthologized. He has, it must be said, authored with strength, courage, and (frequently wavering) conviction, all despite the ever-fading enthusiasm of his imagined and imaginary readership.

Alis grave nil. May language release you from its lies.