Benjamin Anastas
Benjamin Anastas is an American novelist, memoirist, journalist and book reviewer born in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He teaches literature and writing at Bennington College and is on the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program.
Writing career
Fiction
Anastas started publishing his short fiction while still a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His first novel, An Underachiever's Diary, is a comic send-up of the meritocracy narrated by the underachieving half of a set of identical twins, and is set in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On the jacket of Anastas's second book, The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance: A Novel, Daniel Handler called it "hands down, the best novel of the year". It concerns the disappearance of the pastor of a liberal Congregational church in suburban Boston and was a New York Times Notable Book.Journalism and other writings
Anastas's fiction, criticism, essays and journalism have appeared in Story, GQ, The Paris Review, The New Republic online, The New York Observer, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and Bookforum. In 2005, The Yale Review published his novella Versace Enthroned with Saints: Margaret, Jerome, Alex and the Angel Donatella and later awarded it the Smart Family Foundation Prize for Fiction.Anastas has published articles on the Mayan Calendar 2012 hoax in The New York Times Magazine, the prosperity gospel in Harper's Magazine and a short piece about his father's nude portrait on Granta