Benjamin Kunkel

Last updated

Benjamin Kunkel
Born (1972-12-14) December 14, 1972 (age 51)
Glenwood Springs, Colorado, U.S.
OccupationNovelist, editor, political economist
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater

Benjamin Kunkel (born December 14, 1972, in Colorado) is an American novelist and political economist. [1] He co-founded and is a co-editor of the journal n+1. His novel Indecision was published in 2005, and Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis and Buzz: A Play & My Predicament: A Story were published in 2014. [2] [3]

Contents

Background and education

Kunkel was born in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, and grew up raised by hippie parents in Eagle, Colorado, formerly a cow town and now a town for commuters to Vail, Colorado. [4] [1] [5] He was educated at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. Kunkel studied at Deep Springs College in California, graduated with an A.B. from Harvard University, and received his MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia University. [6] [7] [8]

Career

In addition to regularly writing for The New York Times , Kunkel has written for the magazines Dissent , The Nation , The New York Review of Books , The London Review of Books , The Believer , and The New Yorker . Kunkel has written multiple short stories and book reviews for the print journal he started with friends from college and graduate school, n+1 . In the Fall 2004 issue, he published the short story "Horse Mountain," about an aging man. In the Spring 2005 issue, he published a review of J.M. Coetzee's works, imitating Coetzee's then-recent novel Elizabeth Costello . In the Fall 2005 issue, he published a short story "Or Things I Did Not Do or Say," about a man determined to kill another man. [9]

Much of Kunkel's work exhibits a preoccupation with global social justice and leftist politics, including the Marxist overview Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis, the Kirchner essay Argentinidad, and the anti-capitalist book The Commonist Manifesto. Kunkel is a member of the editorial committee of New Left Review . [10]

Indecision

Indecision was published by Random House in 2005. For the novel, in 2006 he won Le Prix du Premier Roman étranger. [11] Indecision begins with the acknowledgment, "For n+1." Jay McInerney wrote in the New York Times Book Review that it was "The funniest and smartest coming-of-age novel in years." [12] Kunkel has described the critically acclaimed novel as "overpraised." [13] [14]

Writings and interviews

Archives of his articles for other magazines

Reviews

Interviews and reading

Further reading

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kim Stanley Robinson</span> American science fiction writer (born 1952)

Kim Stanley Robinson is an American writer of science fiction. He has published 22 novels and numerous short stories and is best known for his Mars trilogy. His work has been translated into 24 languages. Many of his novels and stories have ecological, cultural, and political themes and feature scientists as heroes. Robinson has won numerous awards, including the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the World Fantasy Award. The Atlantic has called Robinson's work "the gold standard of realistic, and highly literary, science-fiction writing." According to an article in The New Yorker, Robinson is "generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science-fiction writers."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. M. Coetzee</span> South African and Australian writer and scholar (born 1940)

John Maxwell Coetzee FRSL OMG is a South African and Australian novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in the English language. He has won the Booker Prize (twice), the CNA Literary Award (thrice), the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina étranger, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and holds a number of other awards and honorary doctorates.

<i>Disgrace</i> Novel by J. M. Coetzee

Disgrace is a novel by J. M. Coetzee, published in 1999. It won the Booker Prize. The writer was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature four years after its publication.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fredric Jameson</span> American academic and literary critic (born 1934)

Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).

<i>London Review of Books</i> British journal of literary reviews

The London Review of Books (LRB) is a British literary magazine published bimonthly that features articles and essays on fiction and non-fiction subjects, which are usually structured as book reviews.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Terry Eagleton</span> English writer, academic and educator

Terence Francis Eagleton is an English literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University.

<i>New Left Review</i> British bimonthly journal

The New Left Review is a British bimonthly journal covering world politics, economy, and culture, which was established in 1960.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonathan Lethem</span> American novelist, essayist, short story writer

Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2011, he has taught creative writing at Pomona College.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adam Thirlwell</span> British novelist

Adam Thirlwell is a British novelist. His work has been translated into thirty languages. He has twice been named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. In 2015 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is an advisory editor of The Paris Review.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jay McInerney</span> American writer

John Barrett "Jay" McInerney Jr. is an American novelist, screenwriter, editor, and columnist. His novels include Bright Lights, Big City, Ransom, Story of My Life, Brightness Falls, and The Last of the Savages. He edited The Penguin Book of New American Voices, wrote the screenplay for the 1988 film adaptation of Bright Lights, Big City, and co-wrote the screenplay for the television film Gia, which starred Angelina Jolie. He was the wine columnist for House & Garden magazine, and his essays on wine have been collected in Bacchus & Me (2000) and A Hedonist in the Cellar (2006). His most recent novel is titled Bright, Precious Days, published in 2016. From April 2010 he was a wine columnist for The Wall Street Journal. In 2009, he published a book of short stories which spanned his entire career, titled How It Ended, which was named one of the 10 best books of the year by Janet Maslin of The New York Times.

<i>n+1</i> American literary magazine

n+1 is a New York–based American literary magazine that publishes social criticism, political commentary, essays, art, poetry, book reviews, and short fiction. It is published three times each year, and content is published on its website several times each week. Each print issue averages around 200 pages in length.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Lerner</span> American writer

Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, critic and teacher. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations. Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.

Paul Bayard La Farge was an American novelist and essayist. He wrote five novels: The Artist of the Missing (1999), Haussmann, or the Distinction (2001), The Facts of Winter (2005), Luminous Airplanes (2011), and The Night Ocean (2017), all of which, particularly Haussmann, earned positive critical attention. His essays, fiction and reviews have appeared in publications such as The Believer, The Village Voice, Harper's, and The New Yorker.

Paul Neilan is an American novelist. He is the author of the book Apathy and Other Small Victories.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joshua Ferris</span> American author

Joshua Ferris is an American author best known for his debut 2007 novel Then We Came to the End. The book is a comedy about the American workplace, told in the first-person plural. It takes place in a fictitious Chicago ad agency experiencing a downturn at the end of the 1990s Internet boom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karan Mahajan</span> American novelist

Karan Mahajan is an Indian-American novelist, essayist, and critic. His second novel, The Association of Small Bombs, was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction. He has contributed writing to The Believer, The Daily Beast, the San Francisco Chronicle, Granta, and The New Yorker. In 2017, he was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chad Harbach</span> American writer (born 1975)

Chad Harbach is an American writer. An editor at the journal n+1, he is the author of the 2011 novel The Art of Fielding.

<i>The Childhood of Jesus</i> 2013 novel by J. M. Coetzee

The Childhood of Jesus is a 2013 novel by South African-born Australian Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee.

<i>Zama</i> (novel) Novel

Zama is a 1956 novel by Argentine writer Antonio di Benedetto. Existential in nature, the plot centers around the eponymous Don Diego de Zama, a minor official of the colonial Spanish Empire stationed in remote Paraguay during the late 18th century and his attempts to receive a long-awaited promotion and transfer to Buenos Aires in the face of personal and professional stagnation. Di Benedetto drew heavily from Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. These existential themes of inward and outward stasis because of circumstance drive the novel's narrative as being constantly in motion yet never changing. Together with two of his other novels, El silenciero (1964) and Los suicidas (1969), Zama has been published as part of Benedetto's informal La trilogía de la espera. The novel is considered by various critics to be a major work of Argentine literature.

Robert Boyers is an American literary essayist, cultural critic and memoirist. Currently, he is the editor of the quarterly magazine Salmagundi, Professor of English at Skidmore College, and Director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute, which he founded in 1987.

References

  1. 1 2 Wallace, David (March 11, 2014). "How Benjamin Kunkel Went From Novelist to Marxist Public Intellectual". Vulture. Retrieved March 3, 2023.
  2. "Benjamin Kunkel". www.goodreads.com.
  3. "Benjamin Kunkel". The New Republic.
  4. Foley, Dylan (December 25, 2008). ""State" treasures: Essays map magic". The Denver Post. Retrieved March 3, 2023.
  5. Benjamin Kunkel. "Benjamin Kunkel | In Boulder · LRB 26 March 2021". Lrb.co.uk. Retrieved March 3, 2023.
  6. "Benjamin Kunkel". international literature festival berlin. September 17, 2022. Retrieved March 3, 2023.
  7. "Benjamin Kunkel | The Modern Novel". www.themodernnovel.org.
  8. "Benjamin Kunkel," Gawker.
  9. "Or Things I Did Not Do or Say | Issue 3 | n+1". Nplusonemag.com. May 25, 2011. Retrieved March 3, 2023.
  10. "Benjamin Kunkel". The Artists Institute. Retrieved March 3, 2023.
  11. livre, Actu/Monde du (October 25, 2006). "Prix du premier roman : Benjamin Kunkel et Max Monnehay lauréats !". BUZZ... littéraire : Critiques livres, romans et analyse.
  12. Merritt, Stephanie (November 20, 2005). "Welcome to the political world" via The Guardian.
  13. "How Benjamin Kunkel Went From Novelist to Marxist Public Intellectual". Vulture. Retrieved June 14, 2020.
  14. McInerney, Jay (August 28, 2005). "'Indecision': Getting It Together". The New York Times.