mz
My blogs
| Gender | Male |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Writer |
| Location | Ferndale, Michigan |
| Introduction | I'm a fiction writer and part-time copywriter. I've lived in the Detroit area all my life. My first novel, SECOND HAND came out in 2000 (W.W. Norton). My latest novel, THE LEISURE SEEKER (2009, William Morrow) will be published in trade paperback by HarperPaperbacks in February of 2010. It's the story of an older couple from suburban Detroit who kidnap themselves from the adult children and doctors who run their lives to steal off on a forbidden vacation in their RV (The Leisure Seeker) down the forgotten roads of Route 66, through the ghost towns, deserted trailer parks, and giant roadside icons of freakshow America. I also have a short story collection called THE LOST TIKI PALACES OF DETROIT. Published in 2009 by Wayne State University Press, it features short fiction that I've published in THE LITERARY REVIEW, AMERICAN SHORT FICTION, NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, BELOIT FICTION JOURNAL and DETROIT NOIR. That snazzy photograph of me above was taken by Doug Coombe for THE METRO TIMES. |
| Interests | Books, film, music, photography, tiki, folk art, food, drink, obsolete pop culture, junk culture, drug culture, Beat culture, bohemia, Noir, The Days of the Dead, cemeteries, Detroit... |
| Favorite Movies | Kiss Me Deadly, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Clockwork Orange, everything by Wes Anderson, everything by the Coen brothers, Idiocracy, Almost Famous, Raging Bull, Drugstore Cowboy, Taxi Driver, Shaft, Sullivan's Travels, Annie Hall, The Lady Eve, Manhattan, Superfly, Ghost World, Dazed and Confused, Boogie Nights, The Apartment, Holiday, American Beauty, Sideways... |
| Favorite Music | The Velvet Underground, White Stripes, The Stooges, Beth Orton, Thelonious Monk, Portishead, Sly and the Family Stone, Jim White, Blanche, Duke Ellington, Dusty Springfield, Detroit Cobras, Beck, Curtis Mayfield, Calexico, Iron and Wine, Lou Rawls, Lucinda Williams, the Almighty MC5, Miles Davis, Nirvana, Hank Williams, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Johnny Cash, The Watson Twins, Thievery Corporation, Lucinda Williams... |
| Favorite Books | The Moviegoer by Walker Percy; The Americans by Robert Frank; Junkie by William S. Burroughs; Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger; Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates; The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles; Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry; On The Road by Jack Kerouac; The Sportswriter by Richard Ford, The Trial by Franz Kafka, Appointment in Samarra, Cathedral by Raymond Carver, What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg, The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, The Stories of T.C. Boyle, The Stories of John Cheever, Spence and Lila by Bobbie Ann Mason, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, Novel With Cocaine by M. Ageyev, Hunger by Knut Hamsun, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, On Photography by Susan Sontag, The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch, The Information by Martin Amis, The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter, The Stories of Anton Chekov, Jambeaux by Lawerence Gonzales, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, The Last Fine Time by Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Diaries of Dawn Powell, On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney, Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Kafka Was The Rage by Anatole Broyard, The World According To Garp by John Irving, Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag, Memoirs of a Beatnik by Diane di Prima, Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell... |