Encyclopedia of Contemporary Writers and Their Work
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Encyclopedia of Contemporary Writers and Their Work GEOFF HAMILTON and BRIAN JONES Encyclopedia of Contemporary Writers and Their Work Copyright 2010 by Geoff Hamilton All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: Facts On File, Inc. An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hamilton, Geoff. Encyclopedia of contemporary writers and their works / Geoff Hamilton and Brian Jones. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8160-7578-2 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4381-2970-9 (e-book) 1. English fiction—20th century—Bio-bibliography—Dictionaries. 2. American fiction— 20th century—Bio-bibliography—Dictionaries. 3. Commonwealth fiction (English)—Bio- bibliography—Dictionaries. 4. English fiction—21st century—Bio-bibliography—Dictionaries. 5. American fiction—21st century—Bio-bibliography—Dictionaries. 6. Authors, English—20th century—Biography—Dictionaries. 7. Authors, American—20th century—Biography— Dictionaries. 8. Authors, Commonwealth—Biography—Dictionaries. 9. Authors, English—21st century—Biography—Dictionaries. 10. Authors, American—21st century—Biography— Dictionaries. I. Jones, Brian. II. Title. PR881.H34 2010 823'.9140903—dc22 2009022546 Facts On File books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.factsonfile.com Text design by Erik Lindstrom Composition by Hermitage Publishing Services Cover printed by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Mich. Book printed and bound by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Mich. Date printed: May 2010 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS Introduction v Entries A to Z 1 Bibliography of Major Works by Major Contemporary Fiction Writers 397 Bibliography of General Secondary Sources 403 Index 405 INTRODUCTION his encyclopedia is intended as a guide to con- of academia—we can discover the first characteris- Ttemporary fiction writers in English, “contem- tic defining (roughly but in the main) the authors porary” meaning, for our purposes, writers born here assembled. With few exceptions—and they after 1959. From that pool we selected those writ- mostly prove the rule—they are natives or landed ers who have received the highest literary acclaim. immigrants of a country one might call Somewhere Some of them, such as David Foster Wallace, Else Entirely. Even those, such as Bret Easton Ellis, Chang-rae Lee, and Sherman Alexie, already have Rick Moody, or David Foster Wallace, who were well-established reputations and have become born near the very epicenter of that canonic sensi- fixtures on college syllabi. Others, such as Nell bility, seem inevitably to have gained an early citi- Freudenberger, Z. Z. Packer, and David Mitchell, zenship in this strange world. are now just beginning to claim a wide audience However, and this may be taken as a second and an institutional foothold. characteristic of the species, for all the diversity At first glance, the staggeringly rich and of their homogeneous origins, an overwhelm- diverse amalgam of literary talent gathered under ing number were “schooled” in the art of writing, the rubric “Contemporary Literature in English” in ways and at establishments that were and still would appear to defy any attempt at overall char- are profoundly shaped by the canonical sensibility acterization. While no author here came of literary they defy. Indeed, a surprising number graduated age before the 1980s, and while most are currently with M.F.A.’s—those modern, seemingly oxy- residing in Britain or America, their roots stem moronic degrees in academic creativity—from a from countries and histories scattered all over the single creative writing program: the Iowa Writers’ Western world, from the endless, debilitating stasis Workshop, founded in 1936 by Wilbur Schramm, of Daniel Alarcón’s Peru and the brutal misery of who received an M.A. in American civilization at Edwidge Danticat’s Haiti, to the weird nowhere- Harvard University and a Ph.D. in English at the land of Douglas Coupland’s Canada and through- University of Iowa and who had no creative back- out that vast and self-contradictory abstraction ground at all but was known by the somewhat omi- known as the British Commonwealth. Even in nous title of “the father of communications.” The Britain and America they give voice to a swarm of result, at times, seems a strange sort of uniformity, ethnicities, religions, classes, and walks of life. as if one wandered through an enormous depart- Indeed, if we hold in mind, almost as a ment store that sold a seemingly infinite variety of thought experiment, the vestigial profile of the the same thing. canonic Western literary sensibility (the CWLS)— Those who truly did come from somewhere that white, middle-class, Christian, Anglo-Saxon else entirely, like Danticat and Alarcón, or male who even to this day fights a stubborn rear- Sherman Alexie—born and raised on the Spo- guard action, largely in spite of himself, in the halls kane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington v vi Encyclopedia of Contemporary Writers and Their Work (pop. 1,100)—in many ways, ironically, preserve American milieu, virtually all our authors came of the best and strongest traits of the CWLS, writ- literary age in the 1980s. And with the elections ing with passionate engagement, unmediated by of Thatcher and Reagan, in ’78 and ’80 respec- ironic distance or hyper-sophistication, of worlds tively, it was as if a well-heeled 1950s couple had rich in experience and human resonance, for all returned to their suburban ranch estate to find the appalling circumstances they often narrate. the brutally hung-over remains of a generation- Whereas—and this may serve as a third charac- long house party—and cleaned house. The jaded, teristic of the species—the nearer we approach drug-addled cynicism, apathy, and quietism of the the (vestigial) epicenter of the CWLS, now ’70s was swept into the trash, and new rules laid Somewhere Else Entirely, the more we encounter down for living in this house. An entire generation an almost suffocating, metaphysical irony, feed- of youth was put on permanent curfew and denied ing unhealthily on itself for want of other food. the car keys. Neatness, propriety, and presentability Nowhere, perhaps, is this more or more sadly evi- became the norm, and rebellion and entropic pas- dent than in the case of the late David Foster Wal- sion in all its forms became a matter for the bed- lace, who committed suicide in 2008 and whose room and the basement. Little wonder that irony 1,096-page Infinite Jest, an epochal touchstone of attained a kind of apotheosis: with nowhere to contemporary literature in English, may be seen go, and not much to do, confined and baffled by as a relentless yet doomed attempt to escape the restrictions and expectations long despised, Some- ironic through an excess of irony. “The next real where Else Entirely was the only place to be. literary ‘rebels’ in this country,” Wallace wrote in We may very roughly distinguish, then, three his essay “E Unibus Pluram” (From the ones the subspecies within the broader species of contem- many), “might well emerge as some weird bunch porary literature in English: (1) this latter true and of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to troubled vestige of the CWLS; (2) the new, “anti- back away from ironic watching, who have the rebels,” who, like the Goths and Vandals of old, childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate come to Rome from the outside and recover its single-entendre principles. Who treat plain old original virtues in a new and vigorous form; and (3) untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life a varied host of authors who continue, on a modest with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self- but by no means unrewarding scale, the traditional consciousness and hip fatigue” (81). praxis of the CWLS, telling good stories, exploring This preoccupation with irony may be the contemporary concerns with sensitivity and skill, single most definitive quality of the literature here and holding an old but trusty mirror up to nature. assembled; evident even—perhaps most vividly— Perhaps the single most dominant theme of in instances where the author attempts to over- this literature as a whole is that of intersection or come it, as in What Is the What: The Autobiography hybridity, whether it be racial, familial, psychologi- of Valentino Achek Deng, A Novel, the harrowing cal (especially surrounding questions of personal tale of a Sudanese “lost boy,” told by Dave Eggers, identity), ethnic, geographical, cultural, aesthetic, native of the middle-class Chicago suburb of Lake or linguistic (as in the Ebonics of Ricardo Cortez Forest and graduate of the University of Illinois in Cruz’s Straight Outta Compton). Hybrid anatomies, Urbana-Champaign. unstable intersections, gaps and fissures proliferate; The rise of irony deserves at least a summary countless narratives revolve around them like stars historical sketch. Excepting those authors who around black holes, forming a literature of the 21st were born and raised entirely outside the Anglo- century. A Absurdistan Gary Shteyngart (2006) dysfunctional situation, and Shteyngart occa- Satire might be defined as art in reverse. Rather sionally relapses into hunting cows: Absurdistan’s than revealing pearls of beauty buried in the Timofey, for example, cherishes an electric iron scummy details of our daily existence, it reveals as Debutante’s Rybakov cherished an electric fan, hidden ugliness lurking beneath life’s most shim- and the novel laughs at a Petersburg thug’s frus- mering and smiling surfaces.