Andrew Ridker

Andrew Ridker was born in 1991. His first novel, The Altruists, is out now from Viking/Penguin. It will be published in seventeen other countries. He is the editor of Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Guernica, Boston Review, The Believer, St. Louis Magazine, and elsewhere. He is currently an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

From Ridker's Q&A with Rebekah Frumkin at Full Stop:

Rebekah Frumkin: There is certainly no shortage of books about middle-aged white men, but The Altruists stands apart in its thoughtful and frequently comic exploration of Arthur Alter’s contradictory thinking. How did you choose this character to be at the center of your novel’s orbit?

Andrew Ridker: Growing up, I read a lot of these great postwar novelists – the Great American Narcissists as David Foster Wallace would call them – and it’s just a very interesting thing to read those books and be a twentysomething in 2019. I find the artistry to be phenomenal, they had a huge impact on me, but there’s no question that some facets of those books haven’t aged super well. And now we find ourselves living in very different times with different people around us. For me, Arthur was a chance to take a character you’d find in one of those books and place him in a context that was alienating to him, to decenter that patriarchal figure without completely jettisoning him. I wanted to drag that kind of writing...[read on]

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--Marshal Zeringue