JP Gritton

JP Gritton’s awards include a Cynthia Woods Mitchell fellowship, a DisQuiet fellowship and the Donald Barthelme prize in fiction. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Greensboro Review, New Ohio Review, Southwest Review, Tin House and elsewhere. His translations of the fiction of Brazilian writer Cidinha da Silva are forthcoming in InTranslation.

Gritton's new novel, his first, is Wyoming.

From his interview with Mesha Maren for the Chicago Review of Books:

Mesha Maren: Wyoming explores friendship between men in some depth, in particular the relationship between your narrator Shelley and his best friend Mike. Did you set out to write about male relationships, or did this kind of come about as you composed?

JP Gritton: I don’t know that I set out to write a book about male relationships, but in a way it’s exactly what Wyoming is about. One thing that has always fascinated me, both in what I read and in what I write, is the way in which “friendship” can be a sort of shorthand for something murkier and weirder. I think The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood is a classic of this weird sub-genre.

Friendships fascinate me because they can be charged in so many ways — erotically, for instance, or there may be a hidden animus — that we don’t really talk about or own. I think this holds even for “strong” or “close” friendships. The fact is, there’s a certain kind of person who...[read on]

Visit JP Gritton's website.

My Book, The Movie: Wyoming.

The Page 69 Test: Wyoming.

--Marshal Zeringue