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Mark Slouka

Born: 1958 in Queens, New York
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: Slouka worked at the University of Chicago.

Biography: Mark Slouka is the child of Czech immigrants. He is the internationally recognized author of six books. Both his fiction and nonfiction have been translated into sixteen languages. His stories have twice been selected for inclusion in Best American Short Stories, and his essays have appeared three times for Best American Essays. A contributing editor to ''Harpers Magazine'' since 2001, his work also appears in ''Ploughshares'', ''Orion Magazine'', ''Bomb'', ''The Paris Review'', ''Agni'', and ''Granta''. A Guggenheim and NEA fellowship recipient, he has taught literature and writing at Harvard, Columbia, and University of Chicago. He is currently living in Brewster, NY.


Awards:
  • Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle for ''God’s Fool'' New York Times Notable Book in 1998 for the short story collection ''Lost Lake'' and the nonfiction work War of the Worlds National Magazine Award for fiction for his short story, ''

Primary Literary Genre(s): Fiction; Non-Fiction

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

Email: mzslouka@gmail.com
Mark Slouka on WorldCat : http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=mark+slouka


Selected Titles

Brewster :
ISBN: 0393348830 OCLC: 835951281

Still reeling from the death of his older brother, a sixteen-year-old track star befriends a street-fighting rebel and together they search for redemption amidst the social changes of 1968.

  Brewster :
ISBN: 9781846275005 OCLC: 894998898

Portobello Books, [Place of publication not identified] : 2014.

In this haunting novel, Mark Slouka brilliantly captures the polarising forces of a working class, hardscrabble ethos and the hopeful vibrancy of the sixties and early seventies. With concise, wise prose, he weaves together a tapestry of family, fate, friendship, and the impossibility of ever, really, leaving home. Originally published: New York: W.

Essays from the nick of time :
ISBN: 1555975712 OCLC: 555656549

Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minn. : ©2010.

" ... Reawakens us to the moment and place in which we find ourselves, caught between the fading presence of the past and the neon lure of the future"--Publisher description.

God's fool
ISBN: 9780393352641 OCLC: 971357837

God's fool /
ISBN: 0375402160 OCLC: 48221432

Knopf : New York : 2002.

"Born attached at the chest, Chang and Eng were considered a marvel, an omen, an act of God, evidence of His glory or proof of His wrath. Uniquely cursed, enslaved to one another for life, they were a joke of nature variously feared and abhorred, disturbing our most basic assumptions about the human condition."--Jacket.

Lost Lake /
ISBN: 0375402152 OCLC: 37975544

Alfred A. Knopf, New York : 1998.

A dozen stories set in New York State, all centered on a lake. In one, a woman rows in the night to meet her lover, in another a man recalls the day his father caught a big fish, or is that a childhood invention? He cannot remember.

Lost lake :
ISBN: 9780393352672 OCLC: 1007705607

A dozen stories set in New York State, all centered on a lake. In one, a woman rows in the night to meet her lover, in another a man recalls the day his father caught a big fish, or is that a childhood invention? He cannot remember.

  The visible world
ISBN: 9781405649568 OCLC: 228197118

Windsor/Paragon, [Bath] : 2008.

Talks about a doomed romance full of feeling and fervour that plays itself out in the heat of the Nazi occupation of Prague and then smoulders in the embers for decades before flaring into life again, thousands of miles away, with incendiary effects.

The visible world /
ISBN: 0618756434 OCLC: 70707786

"The Visible World is an evocative, powerfully romantic novel about a son's attempt to understand his mother's past, a search that leads him to a tragic love affair and the heroic story of the assassination of a high-ranking Nazi by the Czech resistance. The narrator of The Visible World, the American-born son of Czech immigrants living in New York, grows up in an atmosphere haunted by fragments of a past he cannot understand. At the heart of that past is his mother, Ivana, a spontaneous, passionate woman drifting ever closer to despair. As an adult, the narrator travels to Prague, hoping to learn about a love affair between his then young mother and a member of the resistance named Tomas, an affair whose untimely end, he senses, lay behind Ivana's unhappiness. Ultimately unable to complete his knowledge of the past, he imagines the two lovers as participants in one of the more dramatic (and true) moments of the war, and through the deeply romantic story he tells, creates not only the ending of their story but the beginning of his own. The Visible World is a literary page-turner and an immensely moving novel about the vagaries of love and our need to make sense of life through the telling of stories." ... from publisher's description.

War of the worlds :
ISBN: 0465004873 OCLC: 32087451

BasicBooks, New York : ©1995.

A technological revolution is unfolding that promises, in the words of its creators, to redefine what it means to be human. Face-to-face communication is quickly becoming obsolete; already we turn to computers for information, entertainment, companionship- even love. Science fiction? Hardly. This is the brave new vision of the digital avant-garde, computer crusaders leading a high-tech assault on what was once known as reality. Sophisticated, well-funded, unabashedly messianic, they have the power, the technological know-how, and the marketplace savvy to make good on many of their wildest prophecies. With War of the Worlds, Mark Slouka gives us a funny, but eerily disturbing, humanist's look at the culture of cyber-space.

 

 

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