Donald Antrim

Donald Antrim's second novel puts ninety-nine of a hundred brothers in the family library, quarrelling over what to do with their father's ashes while a genealogist called Doug narrates the collapse. The Hundred Brothers reached print in 1997 and was a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist the following year, and Jonathan Franzen, introducing a later edition, called it possibly the strangest novel ever published by an American. Antrim had started four years earlier with Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, and followed with The Verificationist in 2000. The Afterlife, from 2006, is a memoir circling his mother, Louanne Self. The Emerald Light in the Air collects seven stories that ran in The New Yorker between 1999 and 2014, a magazine he has contributed to for decades. Born in Sarasota, Florida, in 1958 to Harry Antrim, a scholar of T. S. Eliot, he studied at Brown. The New Yorker listed him in 1999 among twenty writers under forty worth watching, and a MacArthur Fellowship followed in 2013, citing prose held tight against surreal events. He teaches in the writing programme at Columbia.