Andrew Foster Altschul is an American fiction writer and political commentator. He is the author of the novels Deus Ex Machina and Lady Lazarus, and his short fiction and essays have been published in Esquire, McSweeney's, Fence, and One Story. His short story "A New Kind of Gravity" was anthologized in both Best New American Voices 2006 and the O.Henry Prize Stories 2007. He is also a contributing author of Where to Invade Next (McSweeney's, 2008). His political commentary has appeared in the Huffington Post, and he was the co-organizer of the Progressive Reading Series, a series of literary readings in San Francisco that raised money for progressive political candidates from 2004-2008. He is the books editor of The Rumpus, an online magazine started by Stephen Elliott in late 2008.
Altschul was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and then a Jones Lecturer in the Stanford Creative Writing Department. He is now an Assistant Professor at San Jose State University and the director of their Center for Literary Arts.