Nick Mamatas
An editor has nominated this article for deletion. You are welcome to participate in the deletion discussion, which will decide whether or not to retain it. |
Nick Mamatas | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Novelist, Short Story Author, Essayist, Editor |
| Nationality | United States |
| Genre | horror, fantasy, science fiction, personal essay |
Nick Mamatas (born February 20, 1972) is an American author and editor. His third novel, Sensation, will published in May 2011 by PM Press, and in July a collaboration with Brian Keene, The Damned Highway will be released..
Biography
Nick Mamatas was born on Long Island, New York and attended the State University of New York at Stony Brook and New School University. He is also a graduate of the MFA program in creative and professional writing at Western Connecticut State University, which he attended only after publishing a number of books, short stories and articles.
Mamatas funded his early writing career by producing term papers for college students.[1][2]
Mamatas' work has appeared in Razor Magazine, The Village Voice, and various Disinformation Books and BenBella Books' Smart Pop Books anthologies.
His short novel Northern Gothic (Soft Skull, 2001) was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction in 2002. In 2007, a signed/limited hardcover edition, illustrated and with a slipcase, was published in German by Edition Phantasia.
His first full-length novel, Move Under Ground (Night Shade Books, 2004/Prime Books, 2006), combined the Beat style of Jack Kerouac with the cosmic horror of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. This novel was nominated for both the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel and the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel in 2005, and made the Locus Magazine Recommended Reading List for books published in 2004.
In 2006, Move Under Ground was one of the first books to be published in paperback by the German publisher Edition Phantasia. In early 2007 he decided to distribute it online for free under a Creative Commons license.
His most recent novel Under My Roof (Soft Skull, 2007) has been published in both Germany and Italy in addition to its American publication. The German edition was nominated for the Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis for science fiction originally published in a foreign language. It came in last place in the voting.
In August 2006, Mamatas was named co-fiction editor of Clarkesworld Magazine. In August 2008, he left Clarkesworld and began working for Viz Media to edit the firm's forthcoming line of Japanese science fiction, fantasy, and horror in translation. Clarkesworld's 2008 issues earned it a nomination for the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine. Mamatas, along with editor Sean Wallace and publisher Neil Clarke, were named as the magazine's principals. The three were also nominated for the World Fantasy award for Clarkesworld in the nonprofessional special award category, also for the 2008 issues.
Mamatas edited the posthumous collection of short fiction, Queen of the Country, by dark fantasist dgk goldberg in 2008.
A collection of short fiction, You Might Sleep..., including a new novella, was published in March 2009.
"The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft," written by Mamatas and Tim Pratt, was nominated for the Stoker award for achievement in Short Fiction in March 2009.
Mamatas co-edited the original horror anthology Haunted Legends with Ellen Datlow in 2010; the book won the Black Quill Award in the anthology category, and has also been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award.
Mamatas was nominated for the Hugo award in the category of Best Editor, Long Form in 2010 [3], for his work with the Haikasoru imprint of VIZ Media.
Major influences
Mamatas is most known for his horror and dark fiction, but claims broad influences.[4] Writer Laird Barron described the short fictions in You Might Sleep... as running "the gamut of science fiction, fantasy, metafiction, horror, generic lit, to the realms of the effectively unclassifiable."[5] The Internet Review of Science Fiction, reviewing You Might Sleep, contends that "J.D. Salinger" is "an obvious but unacknowledged influence" and also compares the work of Mamatas to "Lewis Carroll with an ISP, Mishima hammering out his death poem on a Blackberry or Harlan Ellison hyped up on crystal meth..." while suggesting a certain immaturity to Mamatas's themes: "Despite his tremendous gifts, Mamatas dares little. One wonders how he would handle more profound materials, how his narrative sorcery might encompass (for example) bereavement, real tragedy or loss of self through enlightenment or love." [6]
A number of his short works, such as the novelette "Real People Slash" and the flash fiction "And Then And Then And Then", explicitly combine Lovecraftian themes with the autobiographical motifs and transgressive fiction of New York's "downtown" literary scene of the 1970s and 1980s. The short story "That of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable", first published in the anthology Lovecraft Unbound is a pastiche of Lovecraft and several of the works of Raymond Carver. The Damned Highway combines a character based heavily on Hunter S. Thompson and Lovecraftian themes.
Major works
Novels
- Northern Gothic (2001)
- Move Under Ground (2004)
- Under My Roof (2007)
- Sensation (2011)
- The Damned Highway (2011)
Short story collections
- You Might Sleep... (2009)
Anthologies
- The Urban Bizarre (2004)
- Spicy Slipstream Stories (with Jay Lake) (2008)
- Haunted Legends (with Ellen Datlow) (2010)
Non-Fiction
- Kwangju Diary (1999)
- Insults Every Man Should Know (2011)
Poetry
- Cthulhu Senryu (2006)
Editor
- Phantom Magazine, Issue #0 (November 2005)
- Clarkesworld Magazine (August 2006-August 2008)
- Viz Media (August 2008–present)[7]
References
- ^ "The Term Paper Artist", article in The Smart Set by Nick Mamatas
- ^ "The Paper Market". On the Media. 2008-11-28.
- ^ "The 2011 Hugo nominees". Renovation SF: The 69th Annual Hugo Awards.
- ^ "A Career In Thrashing Around All Night". Apex Book Company. April 2009.
- ^ "On You Might Sleep by Mamatas (or I come not to praise Caesar but deliver the goods on Caligula)". Imago1, Laird Barron's LiveJournal. September 2009.
- ^ "With Cautious Anticipation A review of You Might Sleep... by Nick Mamatas)". The Internet Review of Science Fiction. May 2009.
{{cite web}}: line feed character in|title=at position 27 (help) - ^ Nick Mamatas's Livejournal Entry about editorial job at Viz Media