Ron Currie Jr

Background and education

Currie was raised and still resides in Waterville, Maine. He attended Clemson University and withdrew before graduation.

Career

Currie's first book, God is Dead, was published to critical acclaim in 2007, earning Currie comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Carver. God is Dead received the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library, as well as the Metcalf award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Critics praised the book’s daring mix of dark humor and earnest sentiment. Andrew Ervin, writing in The Believer, said “few authors would dare to depict the near rape and death of God amid a horrendous genocidal war, and fewer still could make it so bladder-threateningly hilarious.” Bookpage said “Each of the chapter-length stories seem to have emerged from a fever dream, sampling alternate futures that spring up like mutant weeds.” God is Dead was named a notable book of 2007 by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Currie published his first full-length novel, Everything Matters!, in 2009. The winner of an Alex Award from the American Library Association, Everything Matters! made several best-of lists for 2009, including the Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, and Amazon.com. Writing in the New York Times, Janet Maslin called Currie a “startlingly talented writer” who “survives the inevitable, apt comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and writes in a tenderly mordant voice of his own.”

Currie's third book, the novel Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, was published by Viking in February, 2013. The New Yorker called it the writer's "most grounded work yet and perhaps his darkest." "Anything does seem possible in Currie's fantastical fiction...Currie's gorgeously questioning prose explores the deeper meanings things gain after they're gone."

Currie's fiction has also appeared in Glimmer Train, The Sun, Other Voices, The Nervous Breakdown, and Night Train.