I was born in 1967 and grew up on North Mozart Street in Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood, once home to Burghard's Egg Factory, Roband's Drugstore, and the Starsky & Fudge ice cream parlor. My early childhood was spent listening to Miss Kaufmann read stories at Nortown Public Library, learning to draw and color in Miss O'Connor's kindergarten class at Boone Elementary, walking along Lunt Avenue Beach with my mother. I finally left Chicago in 1984 to attend Vassar College, but returned in 1988 and worked for a little over a decade as an editor, nonfiction author, playwright, theater director, and very occasional film producer. I wrote for a number of periodicals, especially the Chicago Reader. In 2000, I won a fellowship to Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program and thought I would write a nonfiction book about the uncomfortable relationship between arts and the corporate world. The working title was For a Few Dollars More. Instead, I wound up writing fiction and remaining in New York where I served as senior editor of Book Magazine until that publication folded in 2003. My first novel, Crossing California, was published by Riverhead Books in 2004, The Washington Story in August, 2005. My next novel, Ellington Boulevard, was published in 2008 by Spiegel & Grau Publishers, a division of Doubleday. Cindy Spiegel, who edited my first two novels, was the editor on this one as well. These days, I write full-time, mostly fiction, but occasionally articles. My newest book is a nonfiction memoir for Spiegel & Grau entitled My Father's Bonus March . In 2010, I will return to fiction with the publication of my novel The Thieves of Manhattan . My wife Beate Sissenich is a professor of Political Science at Indiana University. We currently live in New York City on Duke Ellington Boulevard. Our first daughter, Nora Langer Sissenich, was born in 2005. Solveig Langer Sissenich was born in 2009.

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CURRENTLY READING: The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño

MOST RECENTLY READ Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood Sex with Strangers, Laura Eason Death With Interruptions, José Saramago The Waves, Virginia Woolf Love and Consequences, Margaret Jones

MOST RECENTLY VIEWED Around a Small Mountain, dir. Jacques Rivette Wild Grass, dir. Alain Resnais Brighton Rock, dir. John Boulting Partly Cloudy With Meatballs, dir. Phil Lord The Hurt Locker, dir. Kathryn Bigelow