Alice and Oliver (Bock) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where—Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Bennington College
• Awards—Sue Kaufman Award; Silver Pen Award
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York


Charles Bock is an American writer whose debut 2008 novel Beautiful Children was selected by the New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year for 2008. The book also won the 2009 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His second novel, Alice & Oliver was published in 2016. He lives with his wife, Leslie Jamison, and daughter in New York City.

Bock was born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada, which served as the setting for Beautiful Children. He comes from a family of pawnbrokers who've operated pawn shops in Downtown Las Vegas for more than thirty years. On his website, he reflects upon his upbringing as a source of inspiration for the novel:

Sometimes, when my siblings and I were little, my parents, for various reasons, used to have us stay in the back of the shop..... I’d sometimes stare out of the back of the store and watch the people in line and take in their faces. Lots of times my parents would be put in the position of having to tell these people that their wedding ring was only worth a fraction of what they’d paid for it, or that, say, the diamonds in that ring were brown and flawed. From the back of the store, I’d watch as the customers exploded and called my parents dirty Jews and cursed at them and threatened them at the top of their lungs. It’s impossible in situations like that not to feel for everybody involved—to be horrified, sure, but more than that, to be saddened by the spectacle, to want so much more than that out of life for everyone.

Bock earned a Master's of Fine Arts in fiction and literature from Bennington College and has taught fiction at the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City.

Novels
Bock's first novel Beautiful Children, published in 2008, is about the interwoven lives of homeless teenage runaways, whose lives intersect in Las Vegas, Nevada. It is an unflinching tale of lost innocence.

Bock's second novel Alice & Oliver, published in 2016, was inspired by the death of his first wife, Diana Colbert, who was diagnosed with leukemia in 2009. Following a pair of bone marrow transplants, Diana died in December 2011, three days before their daughter's third birthday. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/5/2016.)

See the author's interview with Tom Perrotta.