Ian Frazier

Ian Frazier (* 1951 in Cleveland, Ohio ) is an American writer focusing on the humorous field.

Ian Frazier (2010)

He is best known for his 1989 non-fiction book Great Plains , his bestseller Travels in Siberia (2010) and as an author for The New Yorker .

Life

Frazier grew up in Hudson, Ohio . His father worked as a chemist for Standard Oil of Ohio . The mother worked as an amateur actress on regional theater stages.

Frazier attended the Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, later Harvard University , where he served on the editorial board of the satirical magazine Harvard Lampoon . He graduated in 1973.

After leaving the Great Plains, Frazier lived in Brooklyn, New York, and Montclair, New Jersey with his wife, novelist Jacqueline Carey, and their children, Cora and Thomas.

Frazier's most autobiographical book is Family .

Writing career

After graduating, Frazier briefly worked as a writer for the men's magazine Oui in Chicago . The following year he moved to New York and worked for The New Yorker magazine . He has written documentaries, skits and articles for The Talk of the Town . Frazier moved to Montana in 1982 . There he collected material, anecdotes and impressions, which he later processed in his book Great Plains , published in 1989. He returned to the region in the late 1990s to do research for his book On the Rez , which dealt with the lives of the Indians who lived there. In his non-fiction books such as Great Plains , Family, and On the Rez , Frazier combines first-person narration with in-depth studies of subjects such as United States history, the American Indians, fishing and outdoor activities.

Frazier is one of the best newer exponents of the sober New York style. The closing lines of the essay Bear News , published in 1985 and reprinted in the 1987 collection Nobody Better, Better than Nobody , serve as an example of this style .

Beautiful scenery makes its point quickly; then you have to pay attention, or it starts to slide by like a loop of background on a Saturday morning cartoon ... When you see a bear, the spot where you see it becomes instantly different from every place else you've seen. Bears make you pay attention. They keep the mountains from turning into a blur, and they stop your self from bullying you like nothing else in nature. A woods with a bear in it is real to a man walking through it in a way that a woods with no bear is not. Roscoe Black, a man who survived a serious attack by a grizzly in Glacier Park several years ago, described the moment when the bear had him on the ground: "He laid on me for a few seconds, not doing anything ... I could feel his heart beating against my heart. " The idea of ​​that heart beating someplace just the other side of ours is what makes people read about bears and tell stories about bears and theorize about bears and argue about bears and dream about bears. Bears are one of the places in the world where big mysteries run close to the surface.

The critic of The New York Times James Gorman described Frazier in 1996 published collection of humorous texts v Coyote. Acme as those that can irresistibly make the reader laugh (in the cover story, Wile E. Coyote sued the maker of various rocket propelled items). Gorman rates Frazier's first collection of such stories, dating from 1986, under the title Dating Your Mom , as "one of the best collections of humorous texts ever".

Works

humor

• Dating Your Mom. Picador, New York 1986.
• Coyote v. Acme. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 1996, ISBN 0-374-13033-7 .
• Lamentations of the Father. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 2008, ISBN 0-374-28162-9 .

As editor of an anthology

• Humor Me: An Anthology of Funny Contemporary Writing (Plus Some Great Old Stuff, Too). Ecco, New York 2010.

Collections of essays

• Nobody Better, Better than Nobody. Farar, Straus & Giroux 1987, New York, ISBN 0-374-22310-6 .
• The Fish's Eye. 2002.

translation

• Daniil Charms: It Happened Like This. translated by Ian Frazier (1998)

Non-fiction

• Great Plains. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 1989, ISBN 0-374-21723-8 .
• Family. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 1994, ISBN 0-374-15319-1 .
• On the Rez. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 2000, ISBN 0-374-22638-5 .
• Gone to New York: Adventures in the City. Granta, London 2006, ISBN 1-86207-820-3 .
• Travels In Siberia. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 2010, ISBN 978-0-374-27872-4 .

items

• Our Local Correspondents: The Rap . In: The New Yorker . 84, No. 40, December 8, 2008, pp. 72-81. (Via Derrick Parker, a British Footballer)
• A Reporter At Large, Travels in Siberia - I: The Ultimate Road Trip . In: The New Yorker . August 3, 2009, pp. 36-49. (About Siberia )

Awards

In 1997 Frazier received the Thurber Prize for American Humor for Coyote vs. ACME . In 2019 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Contributors: Ian Frazier. ( Memento of the original from December 7, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: The New Yorker . Retrieved July 31, 2011  
2. ^ Ian Frazier: Family . Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 1994, p. 256.
3. ^ Ian Frazier: Family . P. 26.
4. ^ Ian Frazier: Family . P. 351.
5. ^ Ian Frazier: Nobody Better, Better than Nobody. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 1987, pp. 149-150.
6. ^ Coyote v. Acme ( Memento of the original from April 10, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ↑ James Gorman: Beep-Beep! In: The New York Times. June 23, 1996.
8. ^ Lamentations of the Father. ( Memento of the original from April 21, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
9. ↑ Newly elected members 2019. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed May 30, 2019 . 

Web links

• Frazier's article at Byliner
• Interview with Frazier at NPR about Travels in SIberia
• Ian Frazier at Farrar, Straus & Giroux
• Interview with Ian Frazier at WFMU 's The Speakeasy with Dorian. ( RealAudio )
• Patrick McFate's review of Gone to New York. visited on August 1, 2011.
• Real audio link from LAMENTATIONS OF A FATHER. at 28:42, Ian Frazier reads Laws Concerning Food and Drink; Household Principles; Lamentations of the Father. on January 24, 1998 on Prairie Home Companion .
• Coyote v. Acme , the famous fictional complaint. A lawyer responded with the following fictitious pleading: reply
• Craig Lambert: Seriously Funny: Ian Frazier combines an historian's discipline with an original comic mind. In: Harvard Magazine. September – October 2008.