Joshua Ferris


Joshua Ferris is an American author best known for his debut novel Then We Came to the End. The novel is a comedy about the American workplace, is narrated in the first-person plural, and is set in a fictitious Chicago ad agency facing challenges at the end of the 1990s Internet boom.

Biography

Ferris graduated from the University of Iowa with a BA in English and philosophy in 1996. He moved to Chicago and worked in advertising for several years before obtaining an MFA in writing from UC Irvine. His first published story, "Mrs. Blue," appeared in the Iowa Review in 1999. Then We Came to the End received positive reviews from The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Esquire, and Slate, has been published in 25 languages, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and received the 2007 PEN/Hemingway Award.
In August 2008, The New Yorker published Ferris's short story "The Dinner Party", which earned him a nomination for the Shirley Jackson Awards. Another story, "A Night Out", was published in Tin House's tenth-anniversary issue. Other short fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices 2007 and New Stories from the South 2007. His nonfiction has appeared in the anthologies State by State and Heavy Rotation. The New Yorker included him in its 2010 "20 Under 40" list.
Ferris's second novel, The Unnamed, was published in January 2010. It garnered many prominent, although mixed, reviews. Kirkus Reviews called it "audacious, risky and powerfully bleak, with the author's unflinching artistry its saving grace." The New York Times review, by novelist Jay McInerney, called it "a road novel with severe tunnel vision.”
Ferris's third novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, was published in May 2014. The novel was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize in the first year that American works of fiction were eligible, and won the 2014 Dylan Thomas Prize and the National Jewish Book Award.

Novels

  • Then We Came to the End
  • The Unnamed
  • To Rise Again at a Decent Hour
  • ''A Calling for Charlie Barnes''

    Short fiction

  • The Dinner Party: Stories
TitleYearFirst publishedReprinted/collected
The fragments2013
The breeze2013

  • "Mrs. Blue", Iowa Review 29.2
  • "Ghost Town Choir", Prairie Schooner 80.3
  • "It Would Be Life--", Phoebe
  • "Uncertainty", Tin House 34
  • , Granta 101
  • , The New Yorker, 11 Aug 2008
  • , The New Yorker, 3 Aug 2009
  • "A Night Out", Tin House 40
  • ", Granta 109
  • , The New Yorker, June 14 & 21, 2010
  • , The New Yorker, June 2, 2014
  • , The New Yorker, August 1, 2016

    Essays and reporting

  • , "The Guardian"
  • , "The Guardian"