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Max Zimmer
Called "a raw new voice in American fiction" by Rolling Stone magazine, Pushcart Prize winning author Max Zimmer was born in Switzerland, brought across the Atlantic at the age of ...view moreCalled "a raw new voice in American fiction" by Rolling Stone magazine, Pushcart Prize winning author Max Zimmer was born in Switzerland, brought across the Atlantic at the age of four, and raised in Utah in the take-no-prisoners crucible of the Mormon faith. He earned a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Utah and was teaching fiction writing, working on a doctorate, when he was invited east for a summer at Yaddo, the writer's retreat in the upstate New York town of Saratoga.
He never intended to stay in the East. He was there to finish a sprawling novel about the West and return home in the fall to Utah. But one reason for staying kept leading to another. From Yaddo he took a job teaching fiction in the Writing Arts Program at the State University of New York in the town of Oswego. It was there that "If Where You're Going Isn't Home" was first conceived as a love story. From Oswego, he gravitated toward the city, lived and tended bar in Manhattan, and wrote for the power industry while he kept working on his craft. After seven years he moved to the northwest corner of New Jersey where he married his wife Toni and settled in to write "If Where You're Going Isn't Home" from the beginning. The East had become his home. Utah had become a place he wrote about.
Success came quickly once Max started writing. Following its nomination by Ray Carver, his first published story "Utah Died for Your Sins" was awarded the Pushcart Prize. He has read at venues ranging from coffee shops to SUNY writers' conferences to the Pen New Writers Series. His novels and stories have been taught in college courses. E. L. Doctorow, John Cheever, Jack Cady, Grace Paley, Lewis Turco, and John Gardner are among the established writers who have championed his writing and storytelling talent. On a coast-to-coast tour following the publication of "Ragtime," E. L. Doctorow read his work in Utah, and called it the best work he'd seen his entire tour. After meeting Max on a similar tour after "Falconer" was released, John Cheever enthusiastically promoted his work for the last five years of his life.
Aside from the three novels that constitute "If Where You're Going Isn't Home," Max has written and published poems, stories, reviews, magazine articles, short biographies, and liner notes for jazz albums. He is also the author of "Actual Mileage," a collection of 47 human interest columns he wrote over seven years for an automotive magazine with an international readership.view less