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Nathaniel Rich (born March 5, 1980) is an American novelist and essayist. He is the author of a novel, The Mayor's Tongue (ISBN 978-1594489907), which was published by Riverhead in 2008. A work of nonfiction, San Francisco Noir: The City in Film Noir from 1940 to the Present (ISBN 978-1892145307), was published by The Little Bookroom in 2005. Rich has written essays and criticism for The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Nation and Slate.

Rich is an alumnus of Yale University, where he studied literature. After graduation he worked on the editorial staff of The New York Review of Books. He moved to San Francisco to write San Francisco Noir, which The San Francisco Chronicle named one of the best books of 2005. That year he was hired as an editor by The Paris Review.

The Mayor's Tongue was described by Carolyn See in The Washington Post as a "playful, highly intellectual novel about serious subjects -- the failure of language, for one, and how we cope with that failure in order to keep ourselves sane." A number of prominent artists and book designers...including Rodrigo Corral, David Rees, and Zach Dodson of Featherproof Books...as well as readers have contributed to an ongoing project to design cover art for books by the fictional Constance Eakins, a central character in The Mayor's Tongue.

Reviews

• New York Times review of The Mayor's Tongue
• Washington City Paper review of The Mayor's Tongue
• The Guardian review of The Mayor's Tongue
• The Washington Post review of The Mayor's Tongue

Interviews and profiles

• NPR interview with Rich
• Interview Magazine profile
• New York Times web interview

Other Writing

• List of Rich's essays for The New York Review of Books
• List of Rich's writings for Slate
• Essay on Brooklyn for The New York Times
• Interview with Stephen King for The Paris Review

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Nathaniel Rich", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0