Craig Clevenger - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Craig Clevenger is an American author of contemporary fiction. Born 1964 in Dallas, Texas

Dallas, Texas

Dallas is the third-largest city in Texas and the ninth-largest in the United States. The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is the largest metropolitan area in the South and fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States...

, he grew up in Southern California where he studied English at California State University, Long Beach

California State University, Long Beach

California State University, Long Beach is the second largest campus of the California State University system and the third largest university in the state of California by enrollment...

. He is the author of two novels, The Contortionist's Handbook

The Contortionist's Handbook

-Plot summary:John Dolan Vincent is a talented young forger with a proclivity for mathematics and drug addiction. In the face of his impending institutionalization, he continually reinvents himself to escape the legal and mental health authorities and to save himself from a life of incarceration....

and Dermaphoria

Dermaphoria

Dermaphoria is a novel written by American author Craig Clevenger.-Plot summary:Eric Ashworth awakens in jail, unable to remember how he got there or why. All he does remember is a woman's name: Desiree....

, both released by MacAdam/Cage

MacAdam/Cage

MacAdam/Cage is a small publishing firm located in San Francisco, California. It was founded by David Poindexter in 1998. As of 2003, it published around 30 to 45 titles per year, primarily fiction, short story collections, history, biography, and essays, and had twelve employees...

. His work has been classified by some as neo-noir

Neo-noir

Neo-noir is a style often seen in modern motion pictures and other forms that prominently utilize elements of film noir, but with updated themes, content, style, visual elements or media that were absent in films noir of the 1940s and 1950s.-History:The term Film Noir was coined by...

and has received praise from such authors as Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk

Charles Michael "Chuck" Palahniuk is an American transgressional fiction novelist and freelance journalist. He is best known for the award-winning novel Fight Club, which was later made into a film directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter...

and Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh is a contemporary Scottish novelist, best known for his novel Trainspotting. His work is characterised by raw Scottish dialect, and brutal depiction of the realities of Edinburgh life...

.

Clevenger lists among his influences Jim Thompson

Jim Thompson (writer)

James Myers Thompson was an American author and screenwriter, known for his pulp crime fiction....

, James M. Cain

James M. Cain

James Mallahan Cain was an American author and journalist. Although Cain himself vehemently opposed labeling, he is usually associated with the hardboiled school of American crime fiction and seen as one of the creators of the roman noir...

, Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...

, Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson

Richard Burton Matheson is an American author and screenwriter, primarily in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres. He is perhaps best known as the author of What Dreams May Come, Bid Time Return, A Stir of Echoes, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and I Am Legend, all of which have been...

, Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...

, Kōbō Abe

Kobo Abe

, pseudonym of was a Japanese writer, playwright, photographer and inventor. Abe has been often compared to Franz Kafka and Alberto Moravia for his surreal, often nightmarish explorations of individuals in contemporary society and his modernist sensibilities....

, Steve Erickson

Steve Erickson

Stephen Michael Erickson is an American novelist, essayist and film critic. He is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters's Award in Literature and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation., and is considered an important representative of the Avantpop...

, Mark Danielewski, Will Christopher Baer

Will Christopher Baer

Will Christopher Baer is an American author of noir fiction, often delving into sex, violence, mystery and erotica. Currently published works include Kiss Me, Judas, Penny Dreadful and Hell's Half Acre, all of which have since been published in the single volume Phineas Poe...

, Seth Morgan, James Ellroy

James Ellroy

Lee Earle "James" Ellroy is an American crime fiction writer and essayist. Ellroy has become known for a so-called "telegraphic" prose style in his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences, and in particular for the novels The Black...

, Michael Hogan

Michael Hogan

Michael Hogan may refer to:*Michael Hogan , American scholar and president of the University of Illinois*Michael Hogan Michael Hogan may refer to:*Michael Hogan (academic) (fl. early 2000s), American scholar and president of the University of Illinois*Michael Hogan (Canadian actor) Michael Hogan...

, John O'Brien

John O'Brien (novelist)

John O'Brien was an American author. His first novel Leaving Las Vegas was published in 1990 by Watermark Press and made into a film of the same name in 1995.-Life and career:...

, Michael Ventura

Michael Ventura

Michael Ventura is an American novelist, screenwriter, essayist, and cultural critic.-History:Michael Ventura commenced his career as a journalist at the Austin Sun, a counter-culture bi-weekly newspaper that published in the 1970s. Ventura is best known for his long-running column, "Letters at 3...

and Rupert Thomson

Rupert Thomson

-Biography:Following the sudden death of his mother, Rupert Thomson was educated as a boarder at Christ's Hospital School. At seventeen, he was awarded a scholarship to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he studied Medieval History and Political Thought. He worked for four years as a...

.

Currently living in San Francisco, Clevenger is at work on an untitled third novel based on his short story The Fade.

He shares a fan base with fellow authors Will Christopher Baer

Will Christopher Baer

and Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones is a Blackfeet Native American author of experimental fiction, horror fiction, crime fiction, and science fiction. He shares a fan base with fellow authors Will Christopher Baer and Craig Clevenger known as . November 16, 2010 Stephen will have a collection of short stories...

The Contortionist's Handbook

Clevenger's debut novel, The Contortionist's Handbook

The Contortionist's Handbook

, was first published in 2002. It is the story of John Dolan Vincent, a prodigious forger who has been detained for a psychiatric interview following a near-fatal painkiller overdose. As the narrator bluffs his way through the interview in order to avoid being involuntarily institutionalized, he tells the reader his true story - the one he is not telling the psychiatrist - revealing both his past and the true nature of his circumstances. The Contortionist's Handbook has since been translated into five languages - German, Italian, Polish, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese - as well as published in the United Kingdom by HarperCollins. Several other translations are forthcoming, including Russian and Japanese. Film rights for The Contortionist's Handbook were optioned in 2007 by Greenestreet Films. Miguel Sapochnik has been linked as director and Channing Tatum as producer and star.

Dermaphoria

In 2005, MacAdam/Cage released Clevenger's second novel, Dermaphoria

Dermaphoria

, the diary of an amnesiac LSD chemist who becomes addicted to a drug which synthesizes the feeling of human touch. The film rights to Dermaphoria were optioned in October 2006 by independent producers George Griffith, Ross Clarke and Teryn Fogel.

Sources

MacAdam/Cage bio for Craig Clevenger
Transcript of Chuck Palahniuk's Audio Blog Monday, Aug. 18, 2003
"Tied Up in Knots," Irvine Welsh for "The Guardian," Apr. 16, 2005
"Greenestreet Books Deal" Variety.com May 2007

The Contortionist's Handbook

Hardcover, 2002; ISBN 1-931561-15-X
Trade Paper, 2003; ISBN 1-931561-48-6

Official sites

Official site of Craig Clevenger
The Velvet The official online community of Craig Clevenger, Will Christopher Baer and Stephen Graham Jones

Interviews

Audio

KQED's "The Writer's Block
Craig Clevenger reading from Dermaphoria at Pete's Candy Store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn while on tour in October, 2005
Misnomer Radio's Logan Rapp interviews Craig Clevenger.

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