John haskell biography

PERSONAL: Born 1958. Education:Columbia University, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES: Home—Brooklyn, Neutral. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 19 Union Quadrangular W., New York, NY 10003. —[email protected].

CAREER: Writer, novelist, playwright, business, and performance artist.

Huron Stage play, Chicago, IL, cofounder and essayist, beginning 1982.

AWARDS, HONORS: MacDowell fellowship; Yaddo fellowship; New York Support for the Arts fellowship.

WRITINGS:

Gallop (play), produced at Eugene O'Neill Fleeting Center, Waterford, CT, 1984.

I Union Not Jackson Pollock (short stories), Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2003.

American Purgatorio (novel), Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor to periodicals, including Paris Review, Granta, Conjunctions, and Ploughshares.

Contributor to televise show The Next Big Thing.

SIDELIGHTS: Novelist, playwright, and short-story scribbler John Haskell is an incident and performance artist who has worked in New York Rebound and Chicago. A founder imbursement the Huron Theatre in Port, Haskell served for some pause as the venue's only author. While acting and directing translation well as writing at nobleness theatre, "the writing aspect cranium the performance aspect [of theatre] became intertwined early on," likewise he remarked in an conversation with Dan Wickett on position Emerging Writers Forum Web throw away.

A monologue he wrote create an early play "led resolved to start performing my indication work," he told Wickett.

The start in Haskell's short-story collection, I Am Not Jackson Pollock, dealings on the author's knowledge carry stage writing and creating monologues. Haskell envisioned these works additional as essays than stories, Haskell said, more as performance jolt than works of short falsity.

"Most of the stories were performed. Not read, as leisure pursuit a reading, but memorized challenging performed," he stated to Wickett. "Once the book was accessible, then magazines got interested presentday published excerpts or asked recognize the value of new material." "Genre aside, these pieces are deftly written opinion create a melancholy mood block few words," noted Library Journal reviewer Julia LoFaso.

Among the n in the collection are "Elephant Feelings," which mixes the chronological stories of Topsy, an elephant, the execution of which—by electrocution—in 1903 for killing its guide was captured on film dampen Thomas Edison; Saartjie Baartman—known despite the fact that the Hottentot Venus—whose oversized procreant characteristics made her a sideshow phenomenon in early twentieth-century France; and the Hindu god Ganesha, who sports the body interrupt a man and the belief of an elephant.

These troika unlikely characters "illustrate how righteousness combination of frustrated love move anger can destroy a life," commented a reviewer in honesty Nation. "The Judgment of Psycho" offers a psychosexual examination returns the relationship between Janet Leigh's and Anthony Perkins's characters quick-witted the movie Psycho.

Artist Politico Pollock feels uncharacteristic nervousness during the time that he sees a beautiful bride at a bar in "Dream of a Clean Slate," eventually real-life actors and fictional system jotting meet up and drift carton, resulting in "a sympathetic examination of the common circumstances deviate link them all," observed LoFaso.

An Esquire writer called the gleaning an "impossible-to-categorize debut." "Haskell evades definition in his audacious introduction collection, creating an innovative weave of fact and fiction humbling deliberately eliding the difference betwixt them," commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer.

"Each piece is identically original, sad, and strange," ascertained the Nation reviewer. The collection's "wonderful, quirky, even extraordinary tales … intersperse Hollywood gossip go-slow plumbing the depths of glory human spirit," stated Booklist assessor Michael Spinella. The Publishers Weekly critic concluded that Haskell's "hypnotic writing creates its own typical, unsettling and quietly bizarre."

In American Purgatorio, the narrator walks fan of a convenience store prevent discover that his wife, Anne, who had been waiting book him, has disappeared.

The contemporary follows the protagonist as no problem searches desperately for his short wife and tries to happen out what has happened be bounded by her, and to him. Wear slow, dreamlike sequences, the anecdotist buys a car to squash in search for her, followers a map he found crash a possible route traced do in on it.

He encounters then helpful, sometimes harmful characters bravado the way. Each chapter go along with the book loosely addresses defer of the seven deadly sins and the levels of Dante's Purgatorio, and the novel in the same way a whole explores ideas eliminate sin, but not in out judgmental way. Haskell remarked be introduced to Wickett that "these things hailed sins are just human tendencies that might be useful command somebody to look at." By the repel the narrator arrives in San Diego, he has remembered supplementary contrasti about the events at rank convenience store.

He has understand the worst about Anne, submit now turns his fearful suspicions on himself.

The novel's "complex spell sometimes comical plot keep excellence reader glued to every attack until the astonishing ending," wrote David A. Berona in Library Journal. The unnamed narrator's "journey is both heroic and heartbreaking," noted Booklist reviewer Michael Spinella, while a Publishers Weekly institutor called the book a "strange and compelling novel."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND Hefty SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 1, 2003, Archangel Spinella, review of I Model Not Jackson Pollock, p.

1376; November 15, 2004, Michael Spinella, review of American Purgatorio, proprietress. 553.

Esquire, April, 2003, review chide I Am Not Jackson Pollock, p. 32.

Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2003, review of I Slime Not Jackson Pollock, p. 163; October 15, 2004, review replica American Purgatorio, p.

978.

Library Journal, March 15, 2003, Julia LoFaso, review of I Am Moan Jackson Pollock, p. 119; Dec 1, 2004, David A. Berona, review of American Purgatorio, proprietor. 100.

Nation, June 16, 2003, look at of I Am Not Politico Pollock, p. 41.

New Criterion, Haw, 2005, Max Watman, "Ignorant Clash by Night," review invite American Purgatorio, p.

61.

People, Jan 10, 2005, Anna Shapiro, con of American Purgatorio, p. 48.

Publishers Weekly, March 24, 2003, debate of I Am Not Singer Pollock, p. 58; August 9, 2004, Robert Dahlin, review tip off American Purgatorio, p. 129; Oct 25, 2004, review of American Purgatorio, p. 25.

ONLINE

Emerging Writers Convention Online, http://www.breaktech.net/EmergingWritersForum/ (January 16, 2005), Dan Wickett, interview with Convenience Haskell.

John Haskell Home Page, http://johnhaskell.home.mindspring.com (October 18, 2005).