Eckhard Gerdes (born 1959) is an American novelist and editor. He earned his MFA in creative writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
He is the author of twelve novels:
His work reflects experimental technique, sometimes ignoring time, space, or cause-and-effect, in the service of stories of individuals struggling to transcend fear and limitation. His recent work has been associated with the Bizarro Fiction movement, of which he is one of the leading proponents.
Essays on his work, and reviews of individual publications, have appeared in Rain Taxi, Notre Dame Review,[1] Review of Contemporary Fiction[2][3] and elsewhere.
Gerdes is the editor of The Journal of Experimental Fiction, issues of which are usually Festschrifts on a single writer (e.g. John Barth, Raymond Federman, Harold Jaffe). He has also written on modern and post-modern literature for Review of Contemporary Fiction, Hyde Park Review of Books, and other magazines.
Gerdes has won several literary awards, including twice recipient of the Richard Pike Bissell Creative Writing Award. My Landlady the Lobotomist is currently a nominee for the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel of the Year. The Million-Year Centipede was selected as one of the top ten mainstream novels of 2007 in the Preditors and Editors Readers Poll. He lives in Chicago; he has three children.