Benjamin Kunkel
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Benjamin Kunkel is an American novelist. He co-founded and is a co-editor of the journal n+1. His first novel, Indecision, was published in 2005.
He grew up in Eagle, Colorado and was educated at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, studied at Deep Springs College in California, graduated from Harvard University, then got his MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia University.
In an interview on NPR, Kunkel was asked if he was articulating a problem for this generation in his novel Indecision. He responded, "Well, it's obviously not an affliction for everybody in the world, it's only a small segment of the world. But I think for a number of people of my generation, there's been an explosion of freedom without any sort of similar capacity to handle the opportunities that spread themselves before us."
[edit] Career
In addition to regularly writing for The New York Times, Kunkel has written for the magazines Dissent, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker.
Indecision, published by Random House, garnered a lot of attention. On the cover of the New York Times Book Review (unusual for a first novel), Jay McInerney dubbed it "the funniest and smartest coming-of-age novel in years," but only after Michiko Kakutani's odd, ambiguous review written completely in the voice of Holden Caulfield. Publishers Weekly spoke for a lot of critics when it called the novel "annoying but accomplished."
Indecision begins with the acknowledgment, "For n+1." Kunkel has written two short stories and one book review for the print journal he started with friends from college and graduate school. In the Fall 2004 issue, he published the short story "Horse Mountain," about an aging man. In the Spring 2005 issue, he published a review of J.M. Coetzee's works, imitiating Coetzee's recent novel Elizabeth Costello. In the Fall 2005 issue, he published a short story "Or Things I Did Not Do or Say," about a man determined to kill another man.
The success of n+1 provoked a backlash, such as a blistering critique in The New Criterion that it is nothing more than "the latest overhyped, must-have accessory of the self-styled 'smart set.'" However, New York Times Magazine film critic A. O. Scott lauded the journal for its venerable ambitions and sophisticated prose. (At the time of the article's publication, Scott and Kunkel shared literary agents, a fact that Scott acknowledged.)
[edit] External links
- Metacritic Reviews - A compendium of reviews on Indecision available through the internet on metacritic.com.
[edit] Writings and interviews
Archives of his articles for other magazines
- Archive of Kunkel's writings for The Nation (1999-2005).
- Archive of Kunkel's writings for The Believer (2003).
Reviews
- "The Ideal Husband" - A review of D.H. Lawrence's The Lost Girl. Published in the New York Review of Books (February 24, 2005).
- "The Unreal World" - A review of Don DeLillo's The Body Artist, (February 14-20, 2001).
- "The Sea of Love" - A review of Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson, in The New York Times (May 1, 2005)
Interviews
- "Benjamin Kunkel's Tale of Indecision" - Kunkel reads from his novel on NPR, (September 17, 2005).
- "Welcome to the political world" - Interview with Benjamin Kunkel in The Observer, (November 20, 2005).
- "Attack of the listless lads" - Half-flippant, half-serious conversation with Kunkel about dating, relationships, and more theoretical gender relations in Salon, (September 20, 2005).
- Writings featured in n+1
- "Failure" - Fiction about a man's encounter with Failure.
- "On Susan Sontag" - Obituary for Susan Sontag.
