About this item
About the Author
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls John Kessel, "one of the writers capable of bending the tools of science fiction upon the human psyche." In a starred review of his 1997 story collection The Pure Product, Publisher's Weekly said, "Kessel is our American Brian Aldiss, capable of the most artful and rigorous literary composition, but with a mischievous genius that inclines him toward speculative fiction . . . he writes with subtlety and great wit . . . plus, his sense of comedy is remarkable." A writer of erudite comic and satiric short fiction, Kessel received the Nebula Award for his early novella "Another Orphan", a fantasy about a commodities broker who awakes one morning to find himself trapped in the novel Moby Dick, and for "Pride and Prometheus", in which Mary Bennet from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice meets Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein. His short fiction has been collected in three volumes, Meeting In Infinity (which contains "Another Orphan") , The Pure Product, and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence (which contains "Pride and Prometheus") . Kessel has published five novels: "Freedom Beach" (with James Patrick Kelly) , "Good News from Outer Space," "Corrupting Dr. Nice" (which writer Kim Stanley Robinson has called, "the best time travel novel ever written") , "The Moon and the Other," and "Pride and Prometheus" (an expansion of his Nebula-Award winning story) . Kessel's story "A Clean Escape" was dramatized as the first episode of the 2007 ABC TV series Masters of Science Fiction, starring Sam Waterston and Judy Davis. Though he's taken time out to write plays and perform a role in the independent film "The Delicate Art of the Rifle," Kessel teaches literature and creative writing at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. He is married to Therese Anne Fowler, author of the best-selling "Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald."
