Peter Gadol
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Peter Gadol grew up in Westfield, New Jersey and received an A.B. magna cum laude in English and American Literature from Harvard College in 1986. While at Harvard, he studied writing with Seamus Heaney, wrote a thesis on Wallace Stevens under the supervision of Helen Vendler, edited the literary magazine The Harvard Advocate, and was for two years a fiction intern at The Atlantic.
Gadol is the author of five books. His debut novel, Coyote, published by Crown in 1990, was hailed by The Los Angeles Times as “the work of an energetic mind, one seemingly unfettered by fashionable norms,” and his second novel, The Mystery Roast (Crown, 1993), was described by The Washington Post as “a savory spoof of trends, but ultimately...a love story involving secrets and dreams, anxieties about fulfillment and intimacy and the Muses that inspire us nonetheless.”
Closer to the Sun, published by Picador USA in 1996, was inspired by Gadol’s move to Los Angeles and tells the story of a young couple who, after having lost their home in a canyon wildfire, enlist the help of a drifter to rebuild the house themselves, the drifter himself overcoming the loss of a lover to AIDS.
In The Long Rain (Picador USA, 1997), Gadol returned to California, this time wine country, to write a literary thriller about a lawyer who defends a man wrongly accused of committing a crime the lawyer himself committed. The novel was translated into several languages, nominated for a prize from PEN West, and is currently in film development by Constantin Films of Germany.
His most recent novel, Light at Dusk (Picador USA, 2000), is set in the Paris of a slightly near-future in which the far right has ascended and racist skinhead gangs freely roam the streets. The daylight abduction of a Lebanese boy causes a young American ex-diplomat to re-enter the morally questionable world he abandoned in order to find the child. The LA Weekly applauded the novel for its “elegant, but mannered prose; tight, suspenseful plotting; moody Parisian setting; fearlessly high-modernist concerns,” and claimed the novel “will not look out of place slouching on the shelf somewhere between Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene.”
Currently Gadol is writing an epic novel about twentieth-century design titled American Modern. The first chapter, set at the Bauhaus on its last day in Berlin 1933, was published in Black Clock in March of 2004. His short fiction has appeared in Story and Tin House, and he is an Associate Professor in the Graduate Writing Program at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles.
