Rick Moody
Best-selling Novelist & Memoirist
Author of The Ice Storm
“Funny, fierce, and generous, Moody's maximalist prose gives the writer leeway, and the reader pleasure. Sometimes swashbuckling, sometimes laserlike, he can spin out the absurdity of human behavior in giddy syntactic arabesques, or nail it with a single noun.” —The Boston Globe
Rick Moody's first novel, Garden State, was the winner of the 1991 Editor's Choice Award from the Pushcart Press and was published in 1992. The Ice Storm was published in May 1994 by Little, Brown & Co. Foreign editions have been published in twenty countries; and a film version, directed by Ang Lee, was released by Fox Searchlight in 1997. His newest novel is entitled The Diviners. Right Livelihoods, a book of three novellas, was published in 2007. A collection of short fiction, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, was also published by Little, Brown & Co. in August 1995. The title story was the winner of the 1994 Aga Khan Award from The Paris Review. Moody's third novel, Purple America, was published in April 1997. Foreign editions have appeared widely. An anthology, edited with Darcey Steinke, Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited, also appeared in November 1997. Moody's newest book of fiction, The Four Fingers of Death (Little, Brown), is forthcoming in 2010.
In 1998, Moody received the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2000, he received a Guggenheim fellowship. In 2001, he published a collection of short fiction, Demonology, also published in Spain, France, Brazil, Germany, Holland, Portugal, Italy, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. In May of 2002, Little, Brown & Co issued The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions, which was a winner of the NAMI/Ken Book Award, and the PEN Martha Albrand prize for excellence in the memoir. His short fiction and journalism have been anthologized in Best American Stories 2001, Best American Essays 2004, Year's Best Science Fiction #9, and, multiply, in the Pushcart Prize anthology. His radio pieces have appeared on The Next Big Thing and at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. His album Rick Moody and One Ring Zero was released in 2004, and an album by The Wingdale Community Singers was released in 2005. A second album, "Spirit Duplicator", will be released in the fall of 2009.
Moody is a member of the board of directors of the Corporation of Yaddo. He is the secretary of the PEN American Center, and he co-founded the Young Lions Book Award at the New York Public Library. He has taught at the State University of New York at Purchase, the Bennington College Writing Seminars, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the New School for Social Research. Rick Moody was born in New York City. He attended Brown and Columbia Universities. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
About THE FOUR FINGERS OF DEATH (2010)
Montese Crandall is a downtrodden writer whose rare collection of baseball cards won’t sustain him, financially or emotionally, through the grave illness of his wife. Luckily, he wins a job to write a novelization of the 2025 remake of a 1963 horror movie, “The Crawling Hand.” He tells therein of the United States’s long-awaited manned mission to Mars. Of the nine intrepid astronauts, only a lonely human arm (missing its middle finger) returns to earth, crash landing in the Arizona desert. The arm may hold the secret to reanimation or may simply be an infectious killing machine. It crawls through a civilization at its breaking point, economically and culturally—a dystopia of lowlife and laughable alternative lifestyles. The Four Fingers of Death proves again why Rick Moody has been called, “one of the most prodigiously talented writers in America” (The Wall Street Journal).
About RIGHT LIVELIHOODS (2007)
Right Livelihoods begins with a cataclysmic vision of New York City after the leveling of 50 square blocks of Manhattan. Four million have died. Albertine, the “street name for the buzz of a lifetime,” is a mind-altering drug that sets The Albertine Notes in motion. The collection’s second novella, K & K, concerns a lonely young office manager at an insurance agency, where the office suggestion box is yielding unpleasant messages that escalate to a scary pitch. Ellie Knight-Cameron’s responses to these random diatribes illuminate the toll that a lack of self-awareness can take. At the center of The Omega Force is a buffoonish former government official in rocky recovery. Dr. “Jamie” Van Deusen is determined to protect his habitat—its golf courses (and Bloody Marys), pizza places (and beers) from “dark-complected” foreign nationals. His patriotism and wild imagination are mainly fueled by a fall off the wagon. Only Rick Moody could lead us to feel affection for this man and the other misguided, earnestly striving characters in this alternately unsettling, warm, trio of stories. This is Rick Moody's eighth book.
