Joshua Ferris

Joshua Ferris, 2007

Joshua Ferris (born November 8, 1974 in Danville , Illinois , USA ) is an American writer who landed a bestseller with his debut novel Then We Came to the End in 2007.

Life

Ferris grew up in Key West , Florida . At the age of eight he wrote adventure stories and parodies of Hitchcock works, he described his youth in an interview with Deutschlandradio Kultur . He received his Bachelor of Arts in English and Philosophy from the University of Iowa in 1996 . He moved to Chicago and worked in advertising agencies for several years before deciding to also earn a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine .

His first published short story , Mrs. Blue , appeared in Iowa Review in 1999 . His first novel Then We Came to the End received positive reviews in the prestigious media The New York Times Book Review , The New Yorker , Esquire and Slate , and has been translated into 25 languages. The book was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2007 and received the Hemingway Foundation PEN Award .

Then We Came to the End is a comic satire about middle-class American working life and is told in the first person plural. It is set in a fictional Chicago advertising agency that went into decline after the Internet bubble burst in the early noughties.

The New Yorker published his short story The Dinner Party in August 2008. Further short stories appeared in the anthologies Best New American Voices 2007 and New Stories from the South 2007 . Ferris essay came out under the anthology titles State by State and Heavy Rotation . Influential magazine The New Yorker included his name in its 2010 author rankings "20 under 40".

His second novel The Unnamed came out in the USA in January 2010. Fiametta Rocco, head of literature at The Economist magazine , called it one of the best books of the past decade.

Joshua Ferris lives in New York City - Brooklyn and prefers to work in his second home in the nearby small town of Hudson .

Works

Novels

• To Rise Again at a Decent Hour . Viking, 2014. (Awarded the Dylan Thomas Prize 2014)
  • in German: My foreign life , translated from English by Marcus Ingendaay , Luchterhand-Verlag, 2014, 384 p., ISBN 978-3-630-87450-0
• The Unnamed (2010).
  • in German: Ins Freie , from English by Marcus Ingendaay, Luchterhand-Verlag, Munich 2010. 352 pp., ISBN 978-3-630-87297-1 .
• Then We Came to the End (2007) Little, Brown & Company.
  • in German: We were immortal , translated from the English by Frank Wegner, Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek 2007. 442 pp.

Short story collection

• The Dinner Party and Other Stories . Little, Brown & Company 2017.
  • German by Marcus Ingendaay: Men who misbehave , stories. Luchterhand, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-630-87560-6 .

Short stories

• Mrs. Blue , Iowa Review 29.2 (Fall 1999)
• Ghost Town Choir , Prairie Schooner 80.3 (Fall 2006)
• It Would Be Life-- , Phoebe (2007)
• Uncertainty (2007)
• More Afraid of You , Granta 101 (Spring 2008)
• The Dinner Party (2008)
• The Valetudinarian (2009)
• A Night Out , Tin House 40 (10 year anniversary edition)
• The Pilot , The New Yorker , June 14-21, 2010

Web links

Commons : Joshua Ferris  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Literature by and about Joshua Ferris in the catalog of the German National Library
• Penguin Books Interview (01/2008)
• Powell's Books Interview (02/2007)
• Pop Entertainment Interview (05/2007)
• New York Times book review Then we came to an end (03/2007)
• Guardian Joshua Ferris excerpt (04/2007)
• NPR Radio Interview in Fresh Air
• Guardian Writers' Rooms
• Joshua Ferris on working life in American fiction
• The Dinner Party - Short Story
• Joshua Ferris on David Foster Wallace
• Joshua Ferris in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Deutschlandradio Kultur, September 13, 2010: “Commuting Between Death and Humor” by the American writer Joshua Ferris
2. ↑ Florian Felix Weyh on Deutschlandfunk from June 8, 2007: "We call it termination" Joshua Ferris draws a moral picture from the modern world of work
3. ^ The Dinner Party , The New Yorker, August 11, 2008
4. ↑ The Unnamed , Granta 109 (Winter 2009) ( Memento of the original from April 13, 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. (Novel reading sample)  
5. ^ Entry Fiametta Rocco at the Economist
6. ↑ The best books of the month , The Economist Podcast, February 20, 2010  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as broken. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (MP3; 35.5 MB)  
7. ↑ Joshua Ferris wins Dylan Thomas prize , theguardian.com, accessed May 4, 2018
8. ↑ Joshua Ferris: My Strange Life. Luchterhand Literaturverlag (hardcover books, literature, North American literature)
9. ↑ Joshua Ferris: My foreign life or To rise again at a Decent Hour - SPIEGEL ONLINE
10. ↑ Uncertainty , Tin House 34 (Dead of Winter Edition) ( Memento of the original from July 19, 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.  
11. ↑ The Valetudinarian , The New Yorker , August 3, 2009 ( Memento of the original from January 13, 2011 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.