Mischa Berlinski biography

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Mischa Berlinski

Mischa Berlinski

Mischa Berlinski Biography

Fieldwork is Mischa's first novel, it won him a $50,000 Whiting Award in 2008. Peacekeeping: A Novel was published in 2016.

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.



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Interview

Mischa Berlinski discusses his acclaimed debut novel, Fieldwork, his life in Thailand, and postulates on the existence of the mysterious "creaton" particle!

Your new novel tells the story of a confrontation between an anthropologist and a family of missionaries working with one of the tribal peoples of northern Thailand. Let's start with missionaries. How did you get interested in them?
I was hanging out on the beach in southern India, at one of those places where people go who have much more time than money, which was certainly my case, when I met a pair of very unusual brothers. They were Americans, and very, very scruffy, with long hair and beards. They were making a living as hashish smugglers, and I got along with them splendidly. The older one was maybe twenty-five and the younger one twenty-two. They had a very unusual background: it turned out that they were children of a family of missionaries living in Japan; had grown up in Japan; and spoke native Japanese. (This, by the way, was how they were making a living as hashish smugglers; they said that the customs officials in Japan were so shocked to be addressed in fluent, idiomatic, perfectly polite Japanese by a pair of big-nosed foreigners with long hair that they never even considered opening their luggage. But I'm digressing.) They were estranged from their parents, but from the way they spoke about their family and the ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Mischa Berlinski at BookBrowse
Peacekeeping jacket Fieldwork jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Mischa Berlinski but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Dennis Bock

    Dennis Bock

    Dennis Bock is a Canadian novelist from Belleville, Ontario. His first book of stories, Olympia, won the 1998 Canadian Authors’ Association Jubilee Award, the inaugural Danuta Gleed Award for best first collection of ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Fieldwork

    Try:
    The Communist's Daughter
    by Dennis Bock

  • Bo Caldwell

    Bo Caldwell

    Bo Caldwell is the author of the national bestseller The Distant Land of My Father. Her short fiction has been published in Ploughshares, Story, Epoch, and other literary journals. A former Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Fieldwork

    Try:
    City of Tranquil Light
    by Bo Caldwell

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