Nathaniel Rich (novelist)

Nathaniel Rich (born March 5, 1980) is an American novelist and essayist. He is the author of the 2013 novel, Odds Against Tomorrow, the 2008 novel, The Mayor's Tongue and the 2005 nonfiction book, San Francisco Noir: The City in Film Noir from 1940 to the Present. Rich has written essays and criticism for The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Slate.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6]}

Rich is an alumnus of Yale University, where he studied literature.^[7] After graduation he worked on the editorial staff of The New York Review of Books.^[8] He moved to San Francisco to write San Francisco Noir, which the San Francisco Chronicle named one of the best books of 2005.^[9] That year he was hired as an editor by The Paris Review.^[10]

The Mayor's Tongue was described by Carolyn See in The Washington Post as a "playful, highly intellectual novel about serious subjects -- the failure of language, for one, and how we cope with that failure in order to keep ourselves sane."^[11]

NPR's Alan Cheuse called Odds Against Tomorrow a "brilliantly conceived and extremely well-executed novel...a knockout of a book."^[12] Cathleen Schine wrote, in the New York Review of Books, "Let's just, right away, recognize how prescient this charming, terrifying, comic novel of apocalyptic manners is...Rich is a gifted caricaturist and a gifted apocalyptist. His descriptions of the vagaries of both nature and human nature are stark, fresh, and convincing, full of surprise and recognition as both good comedy and good terror must be."^[13]

Rich is the son of New York Magazine writer and former New York Times columnist Frank Rich, and brother of writer Simon Rich.

Books

• San Francisco Noir: The City in Film Noir from 1940 to the Present. The Little Bookroom. 2005. ISBN 978-1892145307. 
• The Mayor's Tongue. Riverhead Books. 2008. ISBN 978-1594489907. 
• Odds Against Tomorrow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2013. ISBN 978-0374224240. 

Other writings

• List of essays for The New York Review of Books
• List of essays for Harper's Magazine
• Essay on the novel and climate change in The New York Times
• Essay on Brooklyn for The New York Times
• American Dreams series for "The Daily Beast"
• List of essays for Slate
• Interview with Stephen King for The Paris Review

References

External links

• Nathaniel Rich's website
• NPR interview with Rich
• Interview Magazine profile
• New York Times web interview
• The Northeast Kingdom, from The Short Story Project