Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Darin Strauss was born in Long Island and attended Tufts University.
His first novel, Chang & Eng (2000) was the runner-up for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, the Literary Lions Award, a Borders Award winner. His second book, The Real McCoy (2002), was named New York Times Notable Book.
His most recent work is Half a Life(2010), which won 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award.
He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and kids. He teaches writing at New York University.
Darin Strauss's website
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Colum McCannis the internationally bestselling author of the novels Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, Songdogs, Let the Great World Spin (for which he won the National Book Award) as well as two critically acclaimed story collections. His fiction has been published in thirty languages.
Darin Strauss is the bestselling author of three previous books. The recipient of a Guggenheim in fiction writing and numerous other awards, Strauss has seen his work translated into fourteen languages and published in more than twenty countries.
Colum McCann: They say all stories are the same. Of course this can't be true. The poem doesn't swerve and suddenly become a thriller. The playright doesn't necessarily know how to begin a rhyme. Can you discuss the challenges that face a novelist who switches to memoir?
Darin Strauss: My training and my inclination is to invent. Memoir was in some ways an easier form (you skip the hard, dreaming-stuff-up work) and in some ways more difficult (Wait, you can't just dream stuff up?). The novelist has permission to do whatever she chooses to supercharge whatever's interesting in her story. This is also known as freedom. So, had this been a ...
Sonali Deraniyagala was born and raised in Colombo, Sri Lanka. She has an undergraduate degree in Economics from Cambridge University and a doctorate in Economics from the University of Oxford. She is on the faculty of the ... (more)
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Joan Didion (1934-2021) was born in Sacramento, CA, the daughter of an officer in the Army Air Corps. A shy, bookish child, Didion spent her teenage years typing out Ernest Hemingway stories to learn how sentences work. She ... (more)
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