Steve Erickson

Stephen Michael Erickson is an American novelist. The author of influential works such as '' Days Between Stations'', '' Tours of the Black Clock'' and '' Zeroville'', he is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters award and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award.

Biography

Steve Erickson was born and raised in Los Angeles. For many years his mother, a former actress, ran a small theatre in L.A. His father, who died in 1990, was a photographer. Erickson had a pronounced stutter as a child, when teachers believed he couldn't read. This motif occasionally has recurred in novels such as '' Amnesiascope.''

Erickson studied film, literature and journalism at UCLA. For a few years he worked as a freelance writer for alternative weekly newspapers. His first novel, ''Days Between Stations,'' was published in 1985. Along with three non-fiction books, ''Leap Year'', '' American Nomad'' and '' American Stutter'', Erickson has published ten novels in more than a dozen languages. Erickson appears briefly as a fictional character in Michael Ventura's 1996 novel '' The Death of Frank Sinatra''.

Erickson has written for the ''New York Times Magazine'', ''Esquire'', '' Smithsonian'', ''Rolling Stone'' and ''Los Angeles'' magazine among others, and twice has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award. For fourteen years he was founding editor of the literary journal ''Black Clock''. He is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside.

A "writer's writer," Erickson is considered by some one of America's best living novelists even as other readers remain unfamiliar with him. His work has been cited by Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Dana Spiotta, Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, Kathy Acker and Mark Z. Danielewski. Greil Marcus calls Erickson "the only authentic American surrealist" and Rick Moody includes Erickson "in the league of Pynchon, onDeLillo, argaretAtwood, almanRushdie, enOkri, rhanPamuk, ichaelOndaatje, onathanLethem—a maximal visionary." Erickson's ''Tours of the Black Clock'' appears on critic Larry McCaffery's list of the 20th Century’s Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction, and in a winter 2008 poll by the National Book Critics Circle of 800 novelists and writers, ''Zeroville'' was named one of the five favorite novels of the previous year. In the December 2015 issue of ''Granta'', Lethem declared the then unreleased '' Shadowbahn'' the best American novel of whatever year in which it was ultimately published. In 2021 the University Press of Mississippi published '' Conversations With Steve Erickson'' as part of a series that includes William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, William S. Burroughs and Toni Morrison, calling Erickson "a subterranean literary figure...hosedream-fueled blend of European modernism, American pulp and paranoid late-century postmodernism makes him essential to an appreciation of the last forty years of American fiction."

In 2018 BBC Radio 4 broadcast an adaptation of ''Shadowbahn'' as part of its ''Dangerous Visions'' series. A motion picture of ''Zeroville'' starring James Franco, Seth Rogen and Jacki Weaver was released in 2019. In 2022 Zerogram Press published '' American Stutter'' after mainstream New York houses reportedly deferred publication due to the book's "ferocity."

Bibliography

Novels

* '' Days Between Stations'' (1985)
* ''Rubicon Beach'' (1986)
* '' Tours of the Black Clock'' (1989)
* '' Arc d'X'' (1993)
* '' Amnesiascope'' (1996)
* '' The Sea Came in at Midnight'' (1999)
* ''Our Ecstatic Days'' (2005)
* '' Zeroville'' (2007)
* ''These Dreams of You'' (2012)
* ''Shadowbahn'' (2017)

Other

* ''Leap Year'' (1989)
* ''American Nomad'' (1997)
* ''American Stutter'' (2022)

Awards

* National Endowment for the Arts (1987);
* Notable Book of the Year, ''New York Times Book Review'' (1987): ''Rubicon Beach'';
* Notable Book of the Year, ''New York Times Book Review'' (1989): ''Tours of the Black Clock'';
* Best Books of the Year, ''Village Voice'' (1989): ''Tours of the Black Clock'';
* Notable Book of the Year, ''New York Times Book Review'' (1993): ''Arc d'X'';
* Best Fiction of the Year, ''Entertainment Weekly'' (1993): ''Arc d'X'';
* Best Novel nominee, British Fantasy Society (1997): ''Amnesiascope'';
* Notable Book of the Year, ''New York Times Book Review'' (1999): ''The Sea Came in at Midnight'';
* Best Books of the Year, ''Uncut'' (1999): ''The Sea Came in at Midnight'';
* Best Novel nominee, British Fantasy Society (1999): ''The Sea Came in at Midnight'';
* 2001 MacDowell Fellow;
* 2002 MacDowell Fellow;
* Best Books of the Year, ''Los Angeles Times Book Review'' (2005): ''Our Ecstatic Days'';
* Best Books of the Year, ''Uncut'' (2005): ''Our Ecstatic Days'';
* John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2007);
* Best Books of the Year, ''Newsweek'' (2007): ''Zeroville'';
* Best Books of the Year, ''Washington Post BookWorld'' (2007): ''Zeroville'';
* Best Books of the Year, ''Los Angeles Times Book Review'' (2007): ''Zeroville'';
* American Academy of Arts and Letters, Award in Literature (2010);
* Best Books of the Year, ''Los Angeles Times'' (2012): ''These Dreams of You'';
* Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award (2014);
* Best Books of the Year, ''Los Angeles Times'' (2017): ''Shadowbahn'';
* Best Books of the Year, ''Bookworm'', KCRW (2017): ''Shadowbahn''

References

External links

Official Site







''LitReactor'' Interview (2012)

National Public Radio review of ''These Dreams of You''

''Los Angeles Review of Books'' review of ''These Dreams of You''


* ttps://therumpus.net/2017/02/shadowbahn-by-steve-erickson/ ''The Rumpus'' review of ''Shadowbahn''* ttps://therumpus.net/2017/03/swinging-modern-sounds-78-conceived-as-a-playlist/ ''The Rumpus'' interview by Rick Moody (2017)
''Here's the Thing'' interview by Alec Baldwin (2017)

BBC4 adaptation of ''Shadowbahn'' (2018)

''The Believer'' interview

{{DEFAULTSORT:Erickson, Steve
1950 births
20th-century American novelists
21st-century American novelists
American male novelists
Living people
Writers from California
American male essayists
20th-century American essayists
21st-century American essayists
20th-century American male writers
21st-century American male writers