Mark Slouka (born 1958 in New York City [1] ) is an American novelist and essayist who was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. He is a frequent contributor to Harper's Magazine .
Slouka was born to Czech immigrants, [2] Olga and Zdenek Slouka. In 1987 he graduated with Ph.D. from Columbia University and became a teacher. From 1985 to 1989 he served as Teaching Fellow at Harvard University where he was giving courses in American literature. After a one-year interlude at the Pennsylvania State University, Slouka moved to the University of California, San Diego, where from 2005 to 2006 he was a chairman of the Division of Creative Writing and in 1999 was a professor at Writing Division of the Columbia University. [3]
Slouka's first subject matter was the 1996 book War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the Assault on Reality which encompasses the extent to which virtual reality and blurring of real life with corporate fantasy has become a "genuine cultural phenomenon". [4] In 2003, Slouka's first novel God's Fool fictionalized the life of Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker. [5]
An essay of his entitled "Listening for Silence: Notes on the Aural Life" appeared in the 2004 anthology Audio Cultures. In this essay, Slouka inputs concepts and questions that pose a philosophical debate as to what silence is. Can silence really exist, or is it just what people decide to ignore that makes silence? Although people take notice of the visual landscape of our world, the change in aural landscape goes by seemingly unnoticed. Slouka views death as silence and, in some regards, it is because a human lacks the ability to hear any longer. Fear of silence is what creates the drive for noise and music. Slouka even says "fear forces our hand, inspires us, makes visible the things we love." Silence is an entity that brings out curiosity and there are other ways of describing it. Mainly, Slouka's contribution to the book made for some contrasting ideologies between musicians and authors such as Mark Slouka. In 2006 Slouka writes his short story "Dominion", originally published in TriQuarterly , was included within the anthology Best American Short Stories 2006 . His short story "The Hare's Mask", originally published in Harper's, was included in the anthology The Best American Short Stories 2011 .
His second novel, The Visible World, tells the story of a son uncovering his flawed parents' earlier life in the Czech resistance. [6] It gained notability in the UK following its inclusion in the 2008 Richard & Judy Book Club list.
In his book Essays from the Nick of Time, Slouka argues that "The humanities are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values" [7] In one of the essays, "Quitting the Paint Factory", he states, "Idleness is ... requisite to the construction of a complete human being; ... allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it."
His third novel (published in 2013) Brewster was called "instantly mesmerizing" by Pulitzer Prize–winner Jennifer Egan. [8]
In 2011, Slouka received the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Essays from the Nick of Time [9] and a year later was awarded with the O. Henry Award. [1]
Year | Title | Publisher |
---|---|---|
1996 | War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-tech Assault on Reality | Basic Books |
1998 | Lost Lake: Stories | Alfred A. Knopf |
2002 | God's Fool: A Novel | Alfred A. Knopf |
2007 | The Visible World: A Novel | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
2010 | Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations | Graywolf Press |
2013 | Brewster: A Novel | W. W. Norton & Company |
2016 | Nobody's Son: A Memoir | W. W. Norton & Company |
2018 | All That Is Left Is All That Matters: Stories | W. W. Norton & Company |
Brian Wilson Aldiss was an English writer, artist, and anthology editor, best known for science fiction novels and short stories. His byline reads either Brian W. Aldiss or simply Brian Aldiss, except for occasional pseudonyms during the mid-1960s.
Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He wrote the best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Eggers is also the founder of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, a literary journal; a co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness; and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in several magazines.
John Crowley is an American author of fantasy, science fiction and historical fiction. He has also written essays. Crowley studied at Indiana University and has a second career as a documentary film writer.
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She has been a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University since September 2010.
Irving Howe was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America.
William Howard Gass was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor. He wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which won National Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one of which, A Temple of Texts (2006), won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel The Tunnel received the American Book Award. His 2013 novel Middle C won the 2015 William Dean Howells Medal.
James Wolcott is an American journalist, known for his critique of contemporary media. Wolcott is the cultural critic for Vanity Fair and contributes to The New Yorker. He had his own blog on Vanity Fair magazine's main site which was awarded a Webby Award in 2007.
Sergio Troncoso is an American author of short stories, essays and novels. He often writes about the United States-Mexico border, immigration, philosophy in literature, families and fatherhood, and crossing cultural, religious, and psychological borders.
Cynthia Ozick is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist.
The American Book Award is an American literary award that annually recognizes a set of books and people for "outstanding literary achievement". According to the 2010 awards press release, it is "a writers' award given by other writers" and "there are no categories, no nominees, and therefore no losers."
Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Ann Patchett is an American author. She received the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction in the same year, for her novel Bel Canto. Patchett's other novels include The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), Taft (1994), The Magician's Assistant (1997), Run (2007), State of Wonder (2011), Commonwealth (2016), and The Dutch House (2019). The Dutch House was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Phillip Lopate is an American film critic, essayist, fiction writer, poet, and teacher. He is the younger brother of radio host Leonard Lopate.
Daniel Mendelsohn, is an American memoirist, essayist, critic, columnist, and translator, the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College, and the Editor at Large of the New York Review of Books. He is also the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to supporting writers of nonfiction.
Jabari Asim is an author, poet, playwright, and associate professor of writing, literature and publishing at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the former editor-in-chief of The Crisis magazine, a journal of politics, ideas and culture published by the NAACP and founded by historian and social activist W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910. In February 2019 he was named Emerson College's inaugural Elma Lewis ’43 Distinguished Fellow in the Social Justice Center.
Etruscan Press is an American publisher founded in 2001 with a grant from the Oristaglio Foundation. Housed at Wilkes University and partnering with Youngstown State University, Etruscan Press is distributed nationally by Consortium Distribution.
Floyd Skloot is an American poet, novelist, and memoirist. Some of his work concerns his experience with neurological damage caused by a virus contracted in 1988.
Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel is an American preservationist, historian, author, and television producer. She is an advocate for the preservation of the historic built environment. She has worked in the fields of art, architecture, crafts, historic preservation, fashion, and public policy in the U.S. She is the author of 24 books, numerous articles and essays, and recipient of many honors and awards. She is a former White House Assistant, the first Director of Cultural Affairs in New York City, and the longest serving New York City Landmarks Preservation Commissioner.
The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay is awarded by the PEN America to an author for a book of original collected essays. The award was founded by PEN Member and author Barbaralee Diamonstein and Carl Spielvogel, former New York Times columnist, "to preserve the dignity and esteem that the essay form imparts to literature." The winner receives a cash award of $10,000.
Alden Jones is an American writer and educator. She is the author of memoirs The Wanting Was a Wilderness (2020) and The Blind Masseuse (2013) and the short story collection Unaccompanied Minors (2014). The Blind Masseuse was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogal Award for the Art of the Essay.
{{cite magazine}}
: Cite magazine requires |magazine=
(help)![]() | Wikiquote has quotations related to Mark Slouka . |