Joshua Ferris

Joshua Ferris is the author of three novels, all published by Little Brown & Company. To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (2014) won the International Dylan Thomas Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The tale of an atheist dentist—and avid Red Sox fan—who longs for nothing more than to be part of a Jewish community, even while he doesn’t believe in god. The Paris Review calls To Rise Again at a Decent Hour “an impressive investigation of faith and doubt. It’s a novel full of existential humor, and the laughs start before the book has even begun.” A 2014 NPR Best Book selection, the judge’s citation calls it, “possibly the funniest, weirdest American novel of the year.”

Ferris’s highly acclaimed debut novel, Then We Came to the End (2007)—a satire of a Chicago advertising agency at the end of the dotcom boom—was a finalist for the National Book Award, recipient of the 2007 PEN/Hemingway Award, and was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. A national bestseller, it was on the New York Times’ list of the ten best books of 2007, has been published in twenty-five languages, and sold in twenty countries. The LA Times writes, “What looks at first glance like a sweet-tempered satire of workplace culture is revealed upon closer inspection to be a very serious novel about, well, America.” The Telegraph calls it “funny and smart without being cynical.”

The Unnamed, (2010), is a dazzling novel about a marriage and a family and the unseen forces of nature and desire that seem to threaten them both. Tim Farnsworth loves his wife, his family, his work, his home. And then one day he stands up and walks out. And keeps walking. Constructed around one of Emily Dickinson’s poems that begins, “After great pain a formal feeling comes,” The Unnamed is the heartbreaking story of a life taken for granted and what happens when that life is abruptly and irrevocably taken away. Newsday writes, “Ferris’s literary magic transforms his bleak story not only into an intriguing novel of ideas but an existential mystery, an eerie road novel and, in spite of everything, an abiding love story.”

Among Ferris’s many other accolades, he is the winner of the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers Award and is on The New Yorker’s 2010 “20 Under 40″ list of fiction writers worth watching. His first published story, “Mrs. Blue,” appeared in the Iowa Review in 1999. His short story “The Pilot” was published in The New Yorker in June of 2010; and his short story “The Dinner Party” was published in The New Yorker in August of 2008. His short fiction has appeared in Granta, Tin House, New Stories From the South, Best New American Voices, The Guardian, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Short Stories 2009. His nonfiction has appeared in the anthologies State by State and Heavy Rotation.

Ferris attended the University of Iowa and the University of California, Irvine, and graduated from the University of Iowa with a BA in English and Philosophy in 1996. He then moved to Chicago and worked in advertising for several years before obtaining an MFA in writing from UC Irvine. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and family.