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.[1]

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 at UCLA (BA, 1972), then journalism (M.A. 1973). 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.[2]

Considered a "writer's writer," Erickson frequently is mentioned as one of America's best living novelists[3] even as some readers in his country remain unfamiliar with him. His work has been cited by Thomas Pynchon, Haruki Murakami, David Foster Wallace, Dana Spiotta, Neil Gaiman, Richard Powers, Kathy Acker, Jonathan Lethem, William Gibson and Mark Z. Danielewski. Greil Marcus has called Erickson "the only authentic American surrealist," and Rick Moody has included Erickson "in the league of Pynchon, DeLillo, Atwood, Rushdie, Okri, Pamuk, Ondaatje, Lethem—a maximal visionary."[4] 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one of the five favorite novels of the previous year.[5] In the December 2015 issue of Granta, Lethem declared the then unpublished Shadowbahn the best American novel of whatever year in which it was ultimately released.[6]

BBC Radio 4 broadcast an adaptation of Shadowbahn as part of its Dangerous Visions series in June 2018. A motion picture adaptation of Zeroville starring James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jacki Weaver and Megan Fox was released in September 2019.[7] In July 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, Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison. In early 2022 Erickson published on Zerogram Press the literary non-fiction American Stutter — chronicling the author's life and nation's travails in the period of 2019-2021 — after mainstream New York houses reportedly wanted to defer publication until 2024 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
• LA Weekly profile by Michael Ventura (1986)
• MostlyFiction interview (2007)
• New York Times review of Zeroville
• LitReactor Interview (2012)
• National Public Radio review of These Dreams of You
• Los Angeles Review of Books review of These Dreams of You
• New York Times review of Shadowbahn
• The Rumpus review of Shadowbahn
• The Rumpus interview by Rick Moody (2017)
• Here's the Thing interview by Alec Baldwin (2017)
• BBC4 adaptation of Shadowbahn (2018)
• The Believer interview

На других языках

[ru] Эриксон, Стив