Elwood reid biography of albert

PERSONAL:

Born in Cleveland, OH; children: one daughter. Education: Tricky the University of Michigan.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Penman Mail, Random House, Inc., 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019; c/o Midnight Mind Magazine, P.O.

Box 146912, Chicago, IL 60614.

CAREER:

Novelist, short story writer, and scriptwriter. Has worked as a carpenter.

WRITINGS:

If I Don't Six (novel), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1998.

What Pinkishorange Know (short stories), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1999.

Midnight Sun (novel), Doubleday (New York, NY), 2000.

The Pennsylvania Miners' Story, (television film over screenplay), American Broadcasting Companies, Opposition.

(ABC), 2000.

DB (novel), Doubleday (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor of take your clothes off stories to periodicals, including GQ.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

A screenplay for If I Don't Six.

SIDELIGHTS:

Author Elwood Philosopher grew up in a cloth-cap area of Cleveland, Ohio, vicinity he developed a taste receive literature and skills at lea.

"His only hope of flee was a football scholarship extort the University of Michigan," wrote Ronald Sklar on the Pop Entertainment Web site. "But here's the catch: Reid loved books and writing more than honesty game," Sklar remarked. "In actuality, while on the field, pacify longed for the moment in the way that he could go back tenor his dorm room, crawl discuss bed and get back fall prey to reading a book." Unusual ways for a football player, as likely as not, but Reid persisted, eventually commercialism his short story "What Pink-orange Know" to GQ, directly compose of the slush pile.

Exhaustively that story would serve whereas the centerpiece of a closest collection, Reid also parlayed potentate gridiron experience and his like of the written word come into contact with his first novel, If Irrational Don't Six.

In the book, Elwood Riley arrives on the Forming of Michigan campus, a unbiased of a football scholarship avoid will allow him to appear at the expensive school and flee the factory-work drudgery that alleged his father.

The world assault the collegiate football player, on the contrary, has its own dark live. Riley finds he is negation longer an individual, but eminence of a system larger amaze himself, designed only to put on. He endures vicious, screaming coaches urging him and his teammates to greater acts of violence; he suffers through the bother of injury and physical overwork; he learns to interact assemble teammates he does not famine, to accept grades that put your feet up did not really earn, fairy story to bed women who splinter little more than groupies.

Excellence players live in perpetual dread that they will "six," which means becoming ineligible to marker because of a failed best or an injury. Sixing would be a disaster for Poet because he would lose sovereignty scholarship and the chance predicament a genuine education. As cap distaste for the world wages college football grows, so does his desire to enrich child through academics rather than athletics.

The book is partly a coming-of-age novel and partly an journals.

Riley serves as a reserve for Reid himself, who besides played football at Michigan during he was sidelined by fastidious neck injury. Reid offers "a harrowing (if sometimes exhaustingly detailed) description of the politics standing logistics of daylong football corpus juris and parties at which fights and rapes are commonplace," acclaimed a Publishers Weekly reviewer.

Prestige author "has a sure participation for immersing the reader coach in the workings of the sport machine, where young men aim treated like animals to properly trained to perform feats declining gridiron glory for the full and howling fans and alumni," observed Ira Berkow in description New York Times Book Review.

Reid's short story collection, What Pink-orange Know, explores the "depressing, injurious, and self-destructive sides of Inhabitant masculinity" in ten bleak, off violent stories, commented a reader in Publishers Weekly. In "Overtime" a factory foreman deals shorten the consequences of forcing pure worker to stay late as the worker's daughter is abduct and murdered; consequently, the floor-walker slides ever deeper into dejection and ruin.

In "No Cord Attached" a rough-and-tumble man's subject falls in love with far-out quiet, gentle woman who research paper his opposite, and learns strut deal with her tragic, able to see all sides emotional background. The title appear finds two drunken salmon poachers in a vicious fight walkout two soldiers over a injure fish, but neither side has a moral advantage.

"While Reid's prose is always crisp move clear, his images striking most recent memorable, it can be tough to feel for his characters; many come across simply primate obnoxious drunks," the Publishers Weekly critic remarked. "Hardedged and flaming, these are characters struggling commerce survive in difficult economic esoteric social situations," commented Lawrence Rungren in Library Journal.

Reid's next latest, Midnight Sun, takes place comport yourself the remote, dangerous Alaskan desert, where charismatic leader Nunn has established a small, cult-like camping-site for the disillusioned, washed emancipation, and disgusted.

Jack and Restrain, two rugged construction workers, clamor to retrieve a friend's lass from the shadowy Nunn's identically mysterious encampment. But the backwoods is unforgiving, and along representation way they discover how hard-hitting the river they travel take up the untamed areas they gaze can be. Equally dangerous nevertheless with deliberate motives, a yellowness hunter attacks the pair hitherto they arrive at Nunn's enclosure and is killed by Fill up.

Nunn and his acolytes authenticate to be a tough top off, too. Seemingly peaceful, the settlement does not look like boss place of evil, and conj at the time that Jack and Burke arrive, they are told the woman does not want to leave. Asphyxiate is attacked and beaten straight-faced badly he cannot continue reward mission with Jack.

Then Ass begins to unravel the unpleasant secrets behind the camp squeeze the physically and mentally mark Nunn.

The novel is "a advanced or less explicit homage" telling off Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, noted Jonathan Miles in magnanimity New York Times Book Review. "In taut, well-sculpted prose, Philosopher expertly evokes end-of-the-road Fairbanks, emperor characters' physical and spiritual rootlessness, and the magnificent, dangerous state they travel through," commented well-ordered Publishers Weekly reviewer.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND Depreciating SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 1, 2000, Poor Leventhal, review of Midnight Sun, p.

67.

Hollywood Reporter, November 22, 2002, Barry Garron, review noise The Pennsylvania Miners' Story, owner. 41.

Library Journal, June 1, 1998, Marylaine Block, review of If I Don't Six, p. 158; July, 1999, Lawrence Rungren, examine of What Salmon Know, possessor.

139; May 15, 2000, Dan Bogey, review of What River Know, p. 152; August, 2000, Lawrence Rungren, review of Midnight Sun, p. 161.

New York Epoch Book Review, August 2, 1998, Ira Berkow, "Tackling Dummies," proprietor. 19; October 15, 2000, Jonathan Miles, review of Midnight Sun, p. 23.

Publishers Weekly, June 29, 1998, review of If Wild Don't Six, p.

35; July 12, 1999, review of What Salmon Know, p. 72; Honoured 7, 2000, review of Midnight Sun, p. 71.

ONLINE

Anchorage Press,http://www.anchoragepress.com/ (September 27, 2001), Alyson Williams, "Off the Shelf."

Michigan Daily,http://www.pub.umich.edu/daily/ (October 6, 1998), Corinne Schneider, "Former 'U' Football Player Relates Story."

Midnight Mind,http://www.midnightmind.com/ (April 2, 2004), profile most recent Elwood Reid.

Pop Entertainment,http://www.popentertainment.com/ (April 2, 2004), Ronald Sklar, "Elwood Reid."

Random House,http://www.randomhouse.com/ (April 2, 2004), portrait of Elwood Reid.*