&NOW

Laird Hunt is the award-winning author of a book of short stories, mock parables and histories, The Paris Stories (2000), originally from Smokeproof Press, though now re-released by Marick Press, and five novels from Coffee House Press: The Impossibly (2001), Indiana, Indiana (2003), The Exquisite (2006) Ray of the Star (2009) and Kind One (2012), which was a finalist for the 2013 Pen/Faulkner award and the winner of a 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction. A new novel, Neverhome, will be published in the United States by Little, Brown and by Chatto in the UK.  His translation of Oliver Rohe’sVacant Lot was published by Counterpath Press, who also published his co-translation with Anne-Laure Tissut of Arno Bertina’s Brando, My Solitude. He is published in France by Actes Sud, and has novels either published or forthcoming in Japan, Italy, Spain, Germany and Turkey. His writings, reviews and translations have appeared in the United States and abroad in, among other places, the Wall Street Journal, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Bomb, Bookforum,Grand Street, The Believer, Fence, Conjunctions, Brick, Mentor, Inculte, and Zoum Zoum. Currently on faculty in the University of Denver’s Creative Writing Program, where he edits the Denver Quarterly, he has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, and will be in residence at Marfa (Lannan Foundation) this summer. He and his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, live in Boulder, Colorado, with their daughter, Eva Grace.

Steve Katz is best known as one of the premier authors of experimental fiction of the past fifty years, but his work is also not easily pigeon-holed. Books like the pop-art novel,The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (1968) and the verité-surrealism mixture of Moving Parts (1977) show an author continually expanding the boundaries of what fiction can do. Others like Florry of Washington Heights and Antonello's Lion employ a searching and questioning realism, always aware of the act of writing.  On the strength of such works, W. C. Bamberger has called Katz "the most important living American novelist." Katz's most recent project, The Compleat Memoirrhoids: 137.n, is a shuffled, episodic memoir of his long career in the arts and alternative ways of living, detailing youthful exposure to the legends of cool and be-bop jazz in the New York of the 1950s; encounters with Nabokov, Pynchon, Janis Joplin, Warhol, Ashbery, Plimpton, Vonnegut, and countless scenesters at Cornell and in 1960s New York; firespotting, ranching, and filmmaking in the American West; hitchhiking to Italy; teepee construction in the Canadian maritimes in the company of Richard Serra and Philip Glass; becoming at last a world-traveller and Tai Chi teacher, while continuing always as a restless innovator in fiction. The Compleat Memoirrhoids comes out from Starcherone Books this Fall.