Frederick Reuss


Frederick Reuss is an American writer and author of six seriocomic novels, including his debut, Horace Afoot, which was named a New York Times Notable Book. Reuss' writing has been called "cosmopolitan, contemplative, contemporary prose." All of his novels explore the question of whether modern personal identity is still inviolable and, if so, how it is affected by external, cultural forces. He is best known for Mohr, a highly regarded work of speculative fiction based on a collection of letters, papers, and vintage family photographs owned by the playwright, a German-Jewish physician who exiled himself to Shanghai in the early 1930s as the Nazis were coming to power in Germany. On reading Mohr, art critic John Berger remarked that Reuss' "aerialist's sense of history, his sleight of hand, his animal knowledge of political practice, his silver tact and his cool tenderness make his performance nothing less than Orphic."

Novels

Horace Afoot. Denver: MacMurray & Beck, 1997 Henry of Atlantic City: A Novel. NY: MacMurray & Beck, 1999 The Wasties: A Novel. NY: Pantheon, 2002 Mohr. Denver: Unbridled Books, 2007 A Geography of Secrets. Denver: Unbridled Books, 2010 Maisie at 8000 Feet: A Novel. Denver: Unbridled Books, 2016

Other writing

Reuss' decades-long association with the Department of Anthropology in the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution has resulted in several non-fiction works. In Saynday Was Coming Along..., Reuss retold a collection of Kiowa trickster tales collected in the late 19th century by U.S. Army officer Hugh L. Scott; the work accompanied a Smithsonian traveling exhibition of drawings by the Kiowa artist Silver Horn.
Reuss also contributed to A Guide to the Kiowa Collections at the Smithsonian Institution, the product of a collaborative research project exploring the extensive Kiowa art and ethnology collections maintained by the Department of Anthropology.

Interviews and addresses

Life

Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1960, while his father, a career foreign service officer with the United States Information Agency, was stationed there. Reuss spent much of his youth in India and Germany. He holds a BA in political philosophy from Antioch College and lives in Washington, DC.