Ted Mooney (born in Dallas, Texas) is an American novelist and short story writer; He has published four novels: Easy Travel to Other Planets (1981), Traffic and Laughter (1990), Singing into the Piano (1998), and The Same River Twice, (2010). Mooney has also served as the senior editor of Art in America from 1977 to 2008 and currently teaches at the Yale University Graduate School of Art.
Mooney's first and most successful novel, Easy Travel to Other Planets, was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and was also a finalist for the American Book Award. the novel was mentioned in Larry McCaffery's list of the 100 greatest books of the 20th century, where it was described as:
"a haunting, lyrical novel [which] perfectly exemplifies the blend of the postmodern mainstream and SF to be found in the other two novels (i.e., DeLillo's White Noise and Gibson's Neuromancer) which best captured the vast, media-driven transformations at work in American life during the 80s."[1]
The novel also introduced the term "information sickness", which has since been used in various contexts as a symptom or result of overexposure to media.