Rattapallax 29: Rick Moody’s “MH370”

Rick Moody was born in New York City. He attended Brown and Columbia universities. His first novel, Garden State, was the winner of the 1991 Editor’s Choice Award from the Pushcart Press and was published in 1992. The Ice Storm was published in May 1994 by Little, Brown and Company. Foreign editions have been published in twenty countries. (A film version, directed by Ang Lee, was released by Fox Searchlight in 1997, and won best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival.) A collection of short fiction, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven was also published by Little, Brown in August 1995. The title story was the winner of the 1994 Aga Khan Award from The Paris Review. Moody’s third novel, Purple America, was published in April 1997. Foreign editions have appeared widely. An anthology, edited with Darcey Steinke, Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited, also appeared in November 1997. In 1998, Moody received the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2000, he received a Guggenheim fellowship. In 2001, he published a collection of short fiction, Demonology, also published in Spain, France, Brazil, Germany, Holland, Portugal, Italy, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. In May of 2002, Little, Brown and Company issued The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions, which was a winner of the NAMI/Ken Book Award, and the PEN Martha Albrand prize for excellence in the memoir. His novel The Diviners appeared in 2005, and won the Mary Shelley Award from the Media Ecology Association. That novel was followed by Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas in 2007. His new novel, The Four Fingers of Death, was published in 2010. His short fiction and journalism have been anthologized in Best American Stories 2001, Best American Essays 2004, Best American Essays 2008, Year’s Best Science Fiction #9, Year’s Best Fantasy, and, multiply, in the Pushcart Prize anthology. His radio pieces have appeared on The Next Big Thing, Re:Sound, Weekend America, Morning Edition, and at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. His album Rick Moody and One Ring Zero was released in 2004, and The Wingdale Community Singers, in which he plays and write lyrics, have released two albums, the most recent of which is Spirit Duplicator (2009). Moody was a member of the board of directors of the Corporation of Yaddo from 1999 to 2004. From 2005 to 2006 he was secretary of the PEN American Center. He also co-founded the Young Lions Book Award at the New York Public Library. He has taught at the State University of New York at Purchase, the Bennington College Writing Seminars, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the New York Writers Institute, and the New School for Social Research. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.