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Chris Adrian Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

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

Chris Adrian

Chris Adrian

Chris Adrian Biography

Chris Adrian was born in Washington, D.C. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he received his MD from East Virginia Medical School. "Every Night for a Thousand Years", the New Yorker story from which this novel stemmed, was anthologized in Best American Short Stories 1998.. His fiction has also appeared in The Paris Review, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, and Story.

Mr. Adrian is Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Columbia University Medical Center.



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Interview

Chris Adrian explains the inspiration behind his first novel, Gob's Grief, how he manages to juggle writing with his medical studies, and why so many doctors seem to end up writing books.

What was the inspiration for Gob's Grief? Was it the period, the plot, a character?

My brother died in an automobile accident in 1993, and shortly after that I started a novel about an actor who plays a physician on a soap-opera. It bears no resemblance to Gob's Grief but shares with it a title and a concern with characters, living and dead, who try variously to understand, deny, accept, or defeat their mortality. The novel underwent many transmogrifications of plot, character, and setting, some of them truly strange and even a little gruesome, before a friend introduced me to Mrs. Woodhull, and Mrs. Woodhull introduced me to a New York in the years after the Civil War. I credit Mrs. Woodhull with saving what was otherwise doomed to be a failed effort and probably a lifelong source of misery for the author. I think I can safely call her and her time the inspiration for the book, while the events in my life that required me to write this novel are perhaps best called something else that connotes less airy joy and more unhappy obsession. I suppose I could call it the desperation, rather than the inspiration, for the novel. In any case, I wanted to write a story where somebody gets his ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Chris Adrian at BookBrowse
The Great Night jacket A Better Angel jacket The Children's Hospital jacket Gob's Grief jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Chris Adrian 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

  • Michael Cunningham

    Michael Cunningham

    Michael Cunningham is a novelist, screenwriter, and educator. His novel The Hours received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. He has taught at Columbia University and Brooklyn College. He is ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Gob's Grief

    Try:
    Specimen Days
    by Michael Cunningham

  • E.L. Doctorow

    E.L. Doctorow

    Named for Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Lawrence Doctorow occupies a central position in the history of American literature. On a shortlist that might also include Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Don ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Gob's Grief

    Try:
    The March
    by E.L. Doctorow

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