To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (Ferris)

Author Bio
• Birth—1974
• Raised—Florida and Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Iowa; M.F.A., University of
   California, Irvine
• Awards— PEN/Hemingway Award
• Currently—lives in New York, New York


Joshua Ferris is an American author best known for his debut 2007 novel Then We Came to the End. Ferris graduated from the University of Iowa in English and Philosophy in 1996. He then moved to Chicago and worked in advertising for several years before obtaining an MFA in writing from UC Irvine.

His debut novel Then We Came to the End is a comedy about the American workplace. It takes place in a fictitious Chicago ad agency experiencing a downturn at the end of the '90s Internet boom. The novel was greeted by positive reviews from the New York Times Book Review, New Yorker, Esquire, and Slate. It received the 2007 PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

An August, 2008, issue of The New Yorker published his short story "The Dinner Party," which earned him a nomination for a Shirley Jackson Award. Other short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Best New American Voices 2007 and New Stories from the South 2007. Ferris's nonfiction has appeared in the anthologies State by State and Heavy Rotation. The New Yorker included him in its 2010 "20 Under 40" list.

His next novel The Unnamed was published in 2010. Fiametta Rocco, Editor of Books and Arts at The Economist, called it "the best new novel I have read in the past ten years." His third novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour came out in 2014.

Joshua Ferris lives in New York (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/8/2014.)