Michael Frank (writer)

Last updated

Michael Frank is an American writer of fiction and nonfiction. His books include the memoir The Mighty Franks (2018); a novel, What is Missing (2020); and the nonfiction work One Hundred Saturdays (2022).

Contents

Career

Frank was a Contributing Writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review between 1998 [1] and 2004. [2] His short fiction, essays, and articles have appeared in The New York Times, [3] The Atlantic, [4] Tablet, [5] and The Yale Review [6] among other publications. His short story, "My Husband's Best Friend's Second Wife," was presented at Symphony Space's Selected Shorts. [7]

In 2018 Frank published his memoir The Mighty Franks, which describes his troubled relationship with his aunt and uncle, the husband and wife screenwriting team Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch. [8] The book received the 2018 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize and was named one of the best books of the year by The New Statesman [9] and The Telegraph . [10] The Atlantic said that in the memoir "Frank brings Proustian acuity and razor-sharp prose to family dramas as primal, and eccentrically insular, as they come." [11] The Times Literary Supplement said of the memoir, that it "may be the first to expose narrative abuse. In The Mighty Franks, [Frank] recalls being imprinted for life by a pair of Los Angeles 'sorcerers', verbal enchanters who immured him within a fairy-tale world." [12]

Frank published a novel, What Is Missing, in 2020, which The New Yorker described as "a penetrating examination of how a life can be defined by contingency and surprise." [13] Frank was also a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. [14]

In 2022 he published One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World, which tells the story of Frank's six-year-long encounter with Stella Levi, one of last remaining survivors of the Sephardic Jewish community who lived in the Juderia of Rhodes. It featured paintings based on historical photographs by the artist Maira Kalman. Described as "exceptional" by TheNew York Review of Books, [15] One Hundred Saturdays was named one of the ten best books of 2022 by The Wall Street Journal. [16]  The book was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize [17] and the 2024 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature [18] ; it was selected for a Natan Notable Book Award, [19] received two Jewish Book Council Jewish Book Awards in the categories of Holocaust Memoir and Sephardic Culture, [20] and the American Library Association's Sophy Brody Award for Outstanding Achievement in Jewish Literature. [21]

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Packer</span> American journalist and writer (born 1960)

George Packer is an American journalist, novelist, and playwright. He is best known for his writings for The New Yorker and The Atlantic about U.S. foreign policy and for his book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq. Packer also wrote The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, covering the history of the US from 1978 to 2012. In November 2013, The Unwinding received the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His award-winning biography, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, was released in May 2019. His latest book, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, was released in June 2021.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicole Krauss</span> American novelist (born 1974)

Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003, Best American Short Stories 2008 and Best American Short Stories 2019. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House. A collection of her short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020 and won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joshua Cohen (writer)</span> American novelist and story writer

Joshua Aaron Cohen is an American novelist and story writer, best known for his works Witz (2010), Book of Numbers (2015), and Moving Kings (2017). Cohen won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Netanyahus (2021).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simon Rich</span> American humorist, novelist, and television writer

Simon Rich is an American humorist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has published two novels and six collections of humor pieces, several of which appeared in The New Yorker. His novels and short stories have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dani Shapiro</span> American writer (born 1962)

Dani Shapiro is an American writer, the author of six novels including Family History (2003), Black & White (2007) and most recently Signal Fires (2022) and the best-selling memoirs Slow Motion (1998), Devotion (2010), Hourglass (2017), and Inheritance (2019). She has also written for magazines such as The New Yorker, The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, and Elle. In February 2019, she created an original podcast on iHeart Radio called Family Secrets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deborah Copaken</span> American photographer and writer

Deborah Elizabeth Copaken is an American author and photojournalist.

Shalom Auslander is an American novelist, memoirist, and essayist. He grew up in a strict, Orthodox neighborhood in Monsey, New York, where he describes himself as having been "raised like a veal", a reference to his strict religious upbringing. His writing style is notable for its existentialist themes, biting satire and black humor. His non-fiction often draws comparisons to David Sedaris, while his fiction has drawn comparisons to Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Groucho Marx. His books have been translated into over a dozen languages and are published around the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sana Krasikov</span> Ukrainian-born writer in the United States

Sana Krasikov is a writer living in the United States. She grew up in the Republic of Georgia, as well as the United States. She graduated from Cornell University in 2001 where she lived at the Telluride House, and from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 2017 she was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. In 2019 The Patriots won France's Prix Du Premiere Roman Etranger prize for best first novel in translation.

The Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize is an annual British literary prize inaugurated in 1977. It is named after the host Jewish Quarterly and the prize's founder Harold Hyam Wingate. The award recognises Jewish and non-Jewish writers resident in the UK, British Commonwealth, Europe and Israel who "stimulate an interest in themes of Jewish concern while appealing to the general reader". As of 2011 the winner receives £4,000.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kathryn Schulz</span> American journalist and author

Kathryn Schulz is an American journalist and author. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her article on the risk of a major earthquake and tsunami in the Pacific Northwest. In 2023, she won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir or Biography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jenny Erpenbeck</span> German writer and opera director (born 1967)

Jenny Erpenbeck is a German writer and opera director. She has won the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The End of Days and the 2024 International Booker Prize for Kairos.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leslie Jamison</span> American novelist and essayist

Leslie Sierra Jamison is an American novelist and essayist. She is the author of the 2010 novel The Gin Closet and the 2014 essay collection The Empathy Exams. Jamison also directs the nonfiction concentration in writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shani Boianjiu</span> Israeli author

Shani Boianjiu is an Israeli author. Her debut novel, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, was released in 2012, and has been published in 23 countries. In 2011 the National Book Foundation named her a 5 under 35 honoree.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Patricia Lockwood</span> American poet and author (born 1982)

Patricia Lockwood is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. Her 2021 debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, won the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Her poetry collections include Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a 2014 New York Times Notable Book. Since 2019, she has been a contributing editor for London Review of Books.

Hua Hsu is an American writer and academic, based in New York City. He is a professor of English at Bard College and a staff writer at The New Yorker. His work includes investigations of immigrant culture in the United States, as well as public perceptions of diversity and multiculturalism. He is the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific. His second book, Stay True: A Memoir, was published in September 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emma Cline</span> American writer

Emma Cline is an American writer and novelist from California. She published her first novel, The Girls, in 2016, to positive reviews. The book was shortlisted for the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her second novel, The Guest, was published in 2023. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Tin House, Granta, and The Paris Review. In 2017, Cline was named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists, and Forbes named her one of their "30 Under 30 in Media". She is a recipient of the Plimpton Prize.

<i>Priestdaddy</i> 2017 memoir by Patricia Lockwood

Priestdaddy is a memoir by American poet Patricia Lockwood. It was named one of the 10 best books of 2017 by The New York Times and was awarded the 2018 Thurber Prize for American Humor. In 2019, the New York Times included the book on its list "The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years," and The Guardian named it one of the 100 best books of the 21st century.

<i>Let the Record Show</i> (Schulman book) 2021 oral history of ACT UP by Sarah Schulman

Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993 is a 2021 oral history written by former ACT UP activist Sarah Schulman. Using 188 interviews conducted as part of the ACT UP Oral History Project, Schulman shows how the activist group was successful, due to its decentralized, dramatic actions, and emphasizes the contributions of people of color and women to the movement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rachel Aviv</span> American writer and author

Rachel Aviv is a staff writer at The New Yorker who wrote the book Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us in 2022. She frequently writes about psychiatry and Tablet called her "Janet Malcolm’s successor".

References

  1. ↑ "The Epistolary Me". Los Angeles Times. 1998-05-03. Retrieved 2022-08-31.
  2. ↑ "Illuminating lives in flight". Los Angeles Times. 2004-11-14. Retrieved 2022-08-31.
  3. ↑ Frank, Michael (2019-11-15). "She Grew Up on a Remote Italian Island. Then Came the Holocaust". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2022-08-30.
  4. ↑ Frank, Michael (2017-06-05). "The Peculiar Pleasures of Recording Your Own Audiobook". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2022-08-30.
  5. ↑ "Anna Pizzuti and Foreign Jews in Italy During the Second World War". Tablet Magazine. 2017-07-10. Retrieved 2022-08-30.
  6. ↑ Frank, Michael (July 1998). "My Husband's Best Friend's Second Wife". The Yale Review. 86 (3): 111–127. doi:10.1111/0044-0124.00239.
  7. ↑ "My Husband's Best Friend's Second Wife by Michael Frank". Selected Shorts & Symphony Space Online Store. Retrieved 2022-08-30.
  8. ↑ Haldeman, Peter (2017-05-31). "Move Over, Royal Tenenbaums: Meet the Mighty Franks". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2022-08-30.
  9. ↑ "Books of the year 2017, part three: chosen by Joan Bakewell, Michael Moorcock, Olivia Laing and others". New Statesman. 2017-11-21. Retrieved 2022-08-30.
  10. ↑ "The 50 best books of 2017". The Telegraph. 26 November 2017. Retrieved 2022-08-30.
  11. ↑ Hulbert, Ann (2017-04-18). "A Primal and Eccentric Family Drama". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2022-08-30.
  12. ↑ "The Mighty Franks by Michael Frank | Book review | The TLS". TLS. Retrieved 2023-11-13.
  13. ↑ Yorker, The New (2019-11-25). "Briefly Noted Book Reviews". The New Yorker. ISSN   0028-792X . Retrieved 2023-11-13.
  14. ↑ "Michael Frank". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved 2022-08-30.
  15. ↑ Rowland, Ingrid D. "An Exceptional Witness | Ingrid D. Rowland". ISSN   0028-7504 . Retrieved 2023-11-13.
  16. ↑ "The 10 Best Books of 2022". The Wall Street Journal. 2022-11-28. ISSN   0099-9660 . Retrieved 2023-11-13.
  17. ↑ "The Wingate Literary Prize". JW3. 2024-03-13. Retrieved 2024-05-26.
  18. ↑ "Finalists". Sami Rohr Prize. Retrieved 2024-05-26.
  19. ↑ "Announcing the Natan Notable Books Spring 2022 Winner". Jewish Book Council. 2022-07-05. Retrieved 2023-11-13.
  20. ↑ "72nd National Jewish Book Award Winners". Jewish Book Council. 2023-01-18. Retrieved 2023-11-13.
  21. ↑ "2023 Sophie Brody Medal Winner Announced". RUSA Update. 2023-01-29. Retrieved 2023-11-13.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.