Francis Levy is the author of the comic novels Erotomania: A Romance, published by Two Dollar Radio

Two Dollar Radio

Two Dollar Radio is an independent publishing house based in Columbus, Ohio, also known as The Two Dollar Radio Movement. The company was founded in 2005 by husband and wife team Eric Obenauf and Eliza Jane Wood, with Brian Obenauf. Emily Pullen joined the publishing house as an editor and outreach...

 in 2008 and subsequently translated in a Spanish edition by Tusquets Editores in 2009, and Seven Days in Rio, published by Two Dollar Radio in 2011. Levy is also the co-founder of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination. He has been profiled in The East Hampton Star, AIGA Voice, Nerve.com, and elsewhere.

Writing

Levy’s debut novel, Erotomania

Erotomania

Erotomania is a type of delusion in which the affected person believes that another person, usually a stranger or famous person, is in love with him or her. The illness often occurs during psychosis, especially in patients with schizophrenia or bipolar mania...

: A Romance, a satirical examination of compulsive sexuality, was a Queerty Top 10 Book of 2008 and named a Standout Book of the Year by Inland Empire Weekl. Erotomania was reviewed in The Village Voice

The Village Voice

The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...

, The Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...

, Time Out Chicago and elsewhere. Levy’s short stories, poems, criticism, and essays have appeared in The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

, The Washington Post

The Washington Post

The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...

, The New Republic

The New Republic

The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...

, The Village Voice

The Village Voice

The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...

, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly

The Quarterly

Gordon Lish founded and edited the avant garde literary magazine, The Quarterly in 1987. The Quarterly showcased the work of contemporary authors.Volume 1 of The Quarterly was published in the Spring of 1987...

, and Evergreen Review

Evergreen Review

Evergreen Review is a U.S.-based literary magazine founded by Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press. It existed in print from 1957 through 1973, and was re-launched online in 1998...

. The journal American Imago

American Imago

American Imago is an academic journal established in 1939 by Sigmund Freud and Hanns Sachs. It seeks to explore the role of psychoanalysis in contemporary cultural, literary, and social theory, while also considering issues related to anthropology, philosophy, politics, history, art history,...

published a long autobiographical essay about Levy’s psychoanalytic treatment entitled “Psychoanalysis: The Patient’s Cure” in its Spring 2010 issue. Levy blogs as The Screaming Pope.

The Philoctetes Center

Inspired by CP Snow’s famed “Two Cultures” essay

The Two Cultures

The Two Cultures is the title of an influential 1959 Rede Lecture by British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow. Its thesis was that "the intellectual life of the whole of western society" was split into the titular two cultures—namely the sciences and the humanities—and that this was a major...

, The Philoctetes Center (2003–2011) brought together scientists, artists, and scholars in an attempt to bridge the separation between the worlds of science and the humanities. In doing so, the Center hosted a range of figures from the humanities, including Edward Albee

Edward Albee

Edward Franklin Albee III is an American playwright who is best known for The Zoo Story , The Sandbox , Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , and a rewrite of the screenplay for the unsuccessful musical version of Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's . His works are considered well-crafted, often...

, John Turturro

John Turturro

John Michael Turturro is an American actor, writer and director known for his roles in the films Do the Right Thing , Miller's Crossing , Barton Fink , Quiz Show , The Big Lebowski , O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the Transformers film series...

, Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker is a contemporary American writer of fiction and non-fiction. As a novelist, he often focuses on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness, and has written about such provocative topics as voyeurism and planned assassination...

, John Cameron Mitchell

John Cameron Mitchell

John Cameron Mitchell is an American writer, actor, and director. He is best known for his motion pictures Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Shortbus and Rabbit Hole.- Early life:...

, Rick Moody

Rick Moody

Rick Moody is an American novelist and short story writer best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into a feature film of...

, Ned Rorem

Ned Rorem

Ned Rorem is a Pulitzer prize-winning American composer and diarist. He is best known and most praised for his song settings.-Life:...

, Rocco Landesman

Rocco Landesman

Rocco Landesman has been a long-time Broadway theatre producer. In August 2009 he became chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts...

, C.K. Williams, Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds

-Life:Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco. She was raised as a “hellfire Calvinist”, as she describes it. She says she was by nature "a pagan and a pantheist" and notes "I was in a church where there was both great literary art and bad literary art, the great art being psalms and the bad...

, Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith is an American artist classified as a feminist artist, a movement with beginnings in the twentieth century...

, Bruce McCall

Bruce McCall

Bruce McCall is a Canadian author and illustrator, best known for his frequent contributions to The New Yorker.Born and raised in Simcoe, Ontario, Canada, he was fascinated by comic books and showed an early aptitude for drawing fantastical flying machines, blimps, bulbous-nosed muscle cars and...

, Lewis Black

Lewis Black

Lewis Niles Black is an American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor. He is known for his comedy style, which often includes simulating a mental breakdown, or an increasingly angry rant, ridiculing history, politics, religion, trends and cultural phenomena...

, Philip Pearlstein

Philip Pearlstein

Philip Pearlstein is an American painter, and part of the contemporary Realist school.-Biography:Pearlstein was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and received his Masters in art history at New York University. He was a friend of Andy Warhol from...

, and Chuck Close

Chuck Close

Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits...

, together with such distinguished scientists as physicist Brian Greene

Brian Greene

Brian Greene is an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. He has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996. Greene has worked on mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi-Yau manifolds...

, Nobel prize-winning researchers Gerald Edelman

Gerald Edelman

Gerald Maurice Edelman is an American biologist who shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work with Rodney Robert Porter on the immune system. Edelman's Nobel Prize-winning research concerned discovery of the structure of antibody molecules...

 and Christian De Duve

Christian de Duve

Christian René, viscount de Duve is a Nobel Prize-winning cytologist and biochemist. De Duve was born in Thames Ditton, Surrey, Great Britain, as a son of Belgian refugees. They returned to Belgium in 1920...

, and neuroscientists Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio

Antonio Damasio is David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, where he heads USC's Brain and Creativity Institute and Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute. Prior to taking up his posts at USC, in 2005, Damasio was M.W...

 and Joseph LeDoux, among others.

Education

Levy received a BA from Columbia University in 1969 and an M.F.A from the Yale School of Drama in 1973. He also holds a third-degree black belt from Seido Karate, and was the subject of a profile concerning his workout regimen in the online edition of The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....

.