He and his band, the Texas Jewboys, won acclaim for their satirical takes on American culture. He later wrote detective novels and ran for governor of Texas. Read more
Category: Obituaries
Caleb Carr, Author of Dark Histories, Dies at 68
Caleb Carr, a military historian and author whose experience of childhood abuse drove him to explore the roots of violence — most famously in his 1994 best seller, “The Alienist,” a period thriller about the hunt for a serial killer in 19th-century Manhattan — died on Thursday at his home in Cherry Plains, N.Y. Read more
Alice Munro, Nobel Laureate and Master of the Short Story, Dies at 92
Alice Munro, the revered Canadian author who started writing short stories because she did not think she had the time or the talent to master novels, then stubbornly dedicated her long career to churning out psychologically dense stories that dazzled the literary world and earned her the Nobel Prize in Literature, died on Monday night at her home in Ontario. Read more
Paul Auster, the Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn, Dies at 77
Paul Auster, the prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who rose to fame in the 1980s with his postmodern reanimation of the noir novel and who endured to become one of the signature New York writers of his generation, died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn on Tuesday evening. He was 77. Read more
C.J. Sansom, Best-Selling Author of Historical Mysteries, Dies at 71
C.J. Sansom, who transported millions of readers to 16th-century England with his erudite, psychologically complex mystery novels about Matthew Shardlake, a hunchbacked lawyer turned investigator navigating political intrigue during the Tudor era, died April 27 at a hospice center near his longtime home in Brighton, England. Read more
Daniel C. Dennett, Widely Read and Fiercely Debated Philosopher, Dies at 82
Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers, whose prolific works explored consciousness, free will, religion and evolutionary biology, died on Friday in Portland, Maine. He was 82. Read more
John Barth, Writer Who Pushed Storytelling’s Limits, Dies at 93
Mr. Barth was 30 when he published his sprawling third novel, the boisterous “The Sot-Weed Factor” (1960). It projected him into the ranks of the country’s most innovative writers, drawing comparisons to contemporaries like Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. Read more
Vernor Vinge Has Died at Age 79
As a sci-fi author, Vinge won Hugo Awards for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep (1993), A Deepness in the Sky (2000), and Rainbows End (2007). He also won Hugos for the novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) and The Cookie Monster (2004). As Mike Glyer’s File 770 blog notes, Vinge’s novella True Names (1981) is frequency cited as the first presentation of an in-depth look at the concept of “cyberspace.”
Vinge first coined the term “singularity” as related to technology in 1983, borrowed from the concept of a singularity in spacetime in physics. When discussing the creation of intelligences far greater than our own in an 1983 op-ed in OMNI magazine, Vinge wrote, “When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.” Read more
Frans de Waal, Who Found the Origins of Morality in Apes, Dies at 75
Frans de Waal, who used his study of the inner lives of animals to build a powerful case that apes think, feel, strategize, pass down culture and act on moral sentiments — and that humans are not quite as special as many of us like to think — died on Thursday at his home in Stone Mountain, Ga. Read more
British Novelist Christopher Priest Has Died
Acclaimed novelist best known for The Prestige whose large body of work never fitted into any particular literary mould. Read more