Odds Against Tomorrow (Rich)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 5, 1980
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Currently—lives in New Orleans


Nathaniel Rich is an American novelist and essayist. He is the author of the 2013 novel, Odds Against Tomorrow, the 2008 novel, The Mayor's Tongue and the 2005 nonfiction book, San Francisco Noir: The City in Film Noir from 1940 to the Present. Rich has written essays and criticism for the New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Slate.

Rich is an alumnus of Yale University, where he studied literature. After graduation he worked on the editorial staff of the New York Review of Books. He moved to San Francisco to write San Francisco Noir, which the San Francisco Chronicle named one of the best books of 2005, the same year he was hired as an editor by the Paris Review.

The Mayor's Tongue was described by Carolyn See in the Washington Post as a "playful, highly intellectual novel about serious subjects—the failure of language, for one, and how we cope with that failure in order to keep ourselves sane." A number of prominent artists and book designers, as well as readers, have contributed to an ongoing project to design cover art for books by the fictional Constance Eakins, a central character in the novel.

NPR's Alan Cheuse called Odds Against Tomorrow a "brilliantly conceived and extremely well-executed novel...a knockout of a book." Cathleen Schine wrote, in the New York Review of Books, "Let's just, right away, recognize how prescient this charming, terrifying, comic novel of apocalyptic manners is.... Rich is a gifted caricaturist and a gifted apocalyptist. His descriptions of the vagaries of both nature and human nature are stark, fresh, and convincing, full of surprise and recognition as both good comedy and good terror must be." (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/4/2013.)