Prize-winning author Brock Clarke '90 has published his fourth book of hilarious, page-turning fiction, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (Algonquin; Sept. 4, 2007). Based on a previously written short story from his award-winning collection What We Won't Do, Clarke's novel has received extensive praise since its release.
The original story, “She Loved to Cook but Not Like This,” was about a character named Brady who decides to burn down the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Mass. And what inspired all of this? The story—and now the novel—are in fact rooted in Clarke's years as a Dickinson student.
“It was based on an actual trip,” Clarke noted in a 2003 article in Dickinson Magazine. “It was a senior seminar on Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. We went to the house. The story isn't really about the trip, but that's where it came from.”
The Washington Post Book World hailed the author's novel as a “straight-faced, postmodern comedy [that] scorches all things literary, from those moldy author museums to the excruciating question-and-answer sessions that follow public readings. There are no survivors here: women's book clubs, literary critics, Harry Potter fans, bookstores, English professors, memoir writers, librarians, Jane Smiley, even the author himself—they're all singed under Clarke's crisp wit.”
The novel has also received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Publisher's Weekly, which said it was “a multilayered, flame-filled adventure about literature, lies, love and life … [a] bighearted and wily jolt to the American literature legacy.”
Clarke grew up in Little Falls, N.Y. At Dickinson, he majored in English; he received his Ph.D. in American literature from the University of Rochester. Now he is associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Cincinnati.
Clarke's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in New England Review, Mississippi Review, Brooklyn Review, South Carolina Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Twentieth Century Literature and Southwestern American Literature. His first novel, The Ordinary White Boy, was published by Harcourt in 2001; his first collection of stories, What We Won't Do, won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction in 2002, while his third book, Carrying the Torch, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize for Short Fiction in 2005.
Clarke cites among his influences Flannery O'Connor, Padgett Powell, John Cheever and Saul Bellow.
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Written by Spencer Bailey '08
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