Peter LaSalle – författare

What I Found Out About Her: Stories of Dreaming American, winner of the 2014 Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, reaffirms Peter LaSalle's reputation as one of the most startlingly original writers working in the short fiction genre today.In this collection of eleven stories, LaSalle explores how everyday life for many—an FBI agent, a study-abroad student, a drug dealer's chic girlfriend, a trio of Broadway playwrights, among others—can often take on something much larger than that, almost the texture of a haunting dream. Marked by stylistic daring and a rare lyricism in language, this is intense, thoroughly moving fiction that probes the contemporary American psyche, portraying it in all its frequently painful sadness and also its brave and unflagging hope.

What I Found Out About Her: Stories of Dreaming American, winner of the 2014 Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, reaffirms Peter LaSalle's reputation as one of the most startlingly original writers working in the short fiction genre today.In this collection of eleven stories, LaSalle explores how everyday life for many—an FBI agent, a study-abroad student, a drug dealer's chic girlfriend, a trio of Broadway playwrights, among others—can often take on something much larger than that, almost the texture of a haunting dream. Marked by stylistic daring and a rare lyricism in language, this is intense, thoroughly moving fiction that probes the contemporary American psyche, portraying it in all its frequently painful sadness and also its brave and unflagging hope.

The World Is a Book, Indeed chronicles in eleven rich personal essays the ongoing quest of award-winning writer Peter LaSalle to embark on offbeat, often startlingly revelatory literary travel. A summer spent roaming the lesser-known quarters of Paris finds LaSalle haunted by the work of the French surrealists. In Hanoi, he meets for beers with the editors - two military men - of the Army Literature and Arts Magazine while investigating Vietnam's acknowledged great modern novel, Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War. A strange nighttime drive with a dear friend through the streets of sprawling Sao Paulo, searching for landmarks associated with modernist Brazilian poetry, takes on grave weight when he learns of his friend's death shortly afterward. The outright adventure of bouncing around Africa to interview writers there when very young - looked back on now - moves toward a theory of the perhaps dreamlike tenor of any travel, especially when done alone. An account of Jorge Luis Borges's stay in Texas explores how the place made such a lasting impression on the Argentinian writer. Additional pieces bring LaSalle to Istanbul, Lisbon, Tunis, and elsewhere, as he considers major writers amid the settings that produced their works, all the while contemplating larger ideas engendered by travel, from issues of international politics to metaphysical understandings of time. Deeply felt and replete with insight into literature and life, this is a collection for readers who love books and want to learn more about the places they originated, presented by a well-traveled guide with an intimate voice and a gift for the essay form.

"LaSalle's [stories] transcend their particulars to show people with dreams, dilemmas, and disappointments that will move any reader." --Jhumpa Lahiri, Harvard Review "Haunting and evocative...LaSalle's prose is lyrical, at times rhapsodic, and his characters memorable." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) The twelve stories of Sleeping Mask, written in propulsive, fluid prose, introduce readers to remarkable characters. They include a child soldier sent to raid a girls' boarding school, a Virginia Woolf scholar surviving cancer, a desperate writer living under fascism in a futuristic Latin America, the spirits of recently deceased college students on a tour of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, and a middle-aged man transported back to his childhood, where he is led out to sea by his mother's ghost. LaSalle's tantalizing "fictions" are evocative of many of the great innovators of postmodern literature, from Borges to Nabokov, while charting a path entirely their own.Through all of their stylistic pyrotechnics these stories never forsake rich characterization and plotting to probe the deepest parts of the contemporary human condition, such as the nature of erotic desire, the legacy of art and artistry, the power of grief and fear, and the horror of war and violence. Peter LaSalle is the author of several books of fiction, including the story collections Tell Borges If You See Him, recipient of he Flannery O'Connor Award, and What I Found Out About Her, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Texas, and Narragansett, in his native Rhode Island.