About

I write about memory, literature, money, and music. Sometimes I work in creative nonfiction and fiction; some problems require academic methods. I believe that literary style isn’t decoration but a form of knowledge.

My creative books include a novel (Pan, forthcoming from Penguin in Summer 2025), and a work of creative nonfiction, Gamelife (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). The tenth anniversary edition of my memoir White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin appeared in 2023 from McNally Editions.

My most recent critical book is A Defense of Judgment (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Other monographs include Writing Against Time (Stanford University Press, 2013) and American Literature and the Free Market (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

My essays have appeared in Harper’s—where I am a contributing editor—Critical Inquiry, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The Atlantic, Best American Essays, PMLA, and elsewhere. My work has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim and Mellon Foundations, and my books have appeared on “best of the year” lists from The New Yorker, NPR, and elsewhere.

Download / View CV