Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Dexter Palmer lives in Princeton, New Jersey. He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University, where he completed his dissertation on the work of James Joyce, William Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon (and where he also staged the first academic conference ever held at an Ivy League university on the subject of video games).
In addition to Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen, Dexter Palmer is the author of two previous novels: Version Control, which was selected as one of the best novels of 2016 by GQ, The San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications, and The Dream of Perpetual Motion, which was selected as one of the best debuts of 2010 by Kirkus Reviews.
Dexter Palmer's website
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Dexter Palmer on writing The Dream of Perpetual Motion
I began writing the work that eventually became The Dream of Perpetual Motion in
1996. Basically, it was a means of procrastination, since it allowed me to write something
instead of the papers for the courses I was taking in graduate school. Fittingly, the book
that inspired it was one that was sitting in the library stacks next to some other forgotten
book that I should have been reading as research for a paper (which was to have been on
H. G. Wells’ novel Tono-Bungay). That book was called Futuredays, and it contained a
reproduction of illustrations for a series of cigarette cards drawn by the artist Jean-Marc
Côtéin 1900 that purported to show what life would be like in the year 2000.
What was interesting to me from my perspective, just on the edge of the millennium
that these images claimed to predict with tongue in cheek, wasn’t so much the renderings
of alternate forms of transportation that took up most of the collection, but the manner in
which some things that apparently seemed fantastic to Côté came off as mundane to me,
such as the idea of receiving the news through an audio recording. (On the other hand,
there ...
Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa, and grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec, and in Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree ... (more)
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Clare Beams is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which won the Bard Prize and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public ... (more)
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