Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Readalikes
John Dalton is the author of the novel, Heaven Lake, which won the Barnes and Noble 2004 Discover Award in fiction. It was also awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for best first fiction of 2004 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His second novel The Inverted Forest was published in 2010.
Dalton grew up near St. Louis, Missouri, as the youngest of seven children. He lived in Taiwan (the setting for his first novel) during the late 1980s and travelled extensively in mainland China and Asia. He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the 1990s but has now returned to St. Louis where he lives with his wife and two daughters. He is director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri - St. Louis.
About This Biography
This biography was last updated on 11/11/2014. We try to keep BookBrowse's biographies both up to date and accurate, but with over 2500 lives to keep track of it's inevitable that some won't be as current or as complete as we would like. So, please help us - if the information about a particular author is out of date, inaccurate or simply very short, and you know of a more complete source, please let us know. Authors and those connected with authors:
If you wish to make changes to your bio, send your complete biography as you would like it displayed so that we can replace the old with the new.
An Interview with John Dalton, author of Heaven Lake
Q: Is it true that part of your novel is based on an actual proposition
you received in Taiwan?
A: It is, yes. This happened only a few months after I'd arrived in Taiwan in
1989. I'd moved to Toulio on a whim to teach English in a language school. At
night, after classes, I'd go and have dinner with several other foreign teachers
along a lane of food stalls. We were great rarities in town, often stared at,
frequently approached. Several nights in a row a local gentleman, an
overly-cheery businessman with a fitful manner, came to our table. He was an
enthusiastic beer drinker. One evening, after many rounds of beer, he told his
story. He'd recently been to the mainland to seek out business opportunities
and, purely by chance, had met and fallen in love with a woman whom he described
as the most beautiful woman in China. He wanted to marry her. She and her family
welcomed the prospect. Politically, however, such a union would either be
impossible or result in long bureaucratic delays. And so he made a standing
offer of ten thousand U.S. dollars to our table of foreign teachers for anyone
willing to travel to the mainland, marry the woman under ...
Mischa Berlinski was born in New York in 1973. He studied classics at the University of California at Berkeley and at Columbia University. He has worked as a journalist in Thailand. He lives in Rome. (more)
If you enjoyed:
Heaven Lake
Try:
Fieldwork
by Mischa Berlinski
Tom Bissell is the author of Chasing the Sea, God Lives in St. Petersburg, The Father of All Things, Why Video Games Matter, Magic Hours: Essays On Creators and Creation (2012) and Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Heaven Lake
Try:
God Lives In St. Petersburg
by Tom Bissell
We recommend 7 similar authors
The Tea Planter's Wife
by Dinah Jefferies
An utterly engrossing, compulsive page-turner set in 1920s Ceylon.
Darling Days
by iO Tillett Wright
An intoxicatingly vivid portrait of colonial Kenya and its privileged inhabitants.
About the book
Blood at the Root
"A gripping, timely, and important examination of American racism."
- PW Starred Review
Visitors can view some of BookBrowse for free. Full access is for members only.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends books that we believe to be best in class. Books that will whisk you to faraway places and times, that will expand your mind and challenge you -- the kinds of books you just can't wait to tell your friends about.
Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info & giveaways by email.
