Lance Olsen (born 14 October 1956; Englewood, New Jersey) received a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin—Madison (1978, honors, Phi Beta Kappa), an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop (1980), and an M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) from the University of Virginia. For ten years he taught as associate and then full professor at the University of Idaho; for two he directed the University of Idaho's M.F.A. program. He has also taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, the University of Kentucky, on summer and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Finland, and at various writing conferences. Currently he teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah and serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at FC2, or Fiction Collective Two; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities. He is Fiction Editor at Western Humanities Review.
Olsen is author of ten novels, one hypermedia text, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and a textbook about fiction writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, Hotel Amerika, and Best American Non-Required Reading.
He is an N.E.A. fellowship and Pushcart prize recipient, and former governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist (Permeable Press,1994) was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, and his work has been translated into Italian, Polish, Turkish, and Finnish.
The hypertext version of his novel 10:01, created in collaboration with multimedia artist Tim Guthrie, was published by the Iowa Review Web in 2005 and included in the Electronic Literature Organization Collection.
Asimov's writes: "Ever since the untimely death of Kathy Acker, experiments in form and voice and subject matter in the speculative genre have been all too rare. Luckily for us, however, a few brave authors remain willing to push ahead into uncharted literary territory. One of the finest is Lance Olsen."
In his 2006 novel, Nietzsche's Kisses, the most radical and influential of nineteenth-century German philosophers spends his last night alive locked in a small room on the top floor of a house in Weimar, hovering between dream and wakefulness, memory and hallucination, the first person, second, and third, past and present. He relives his brief love-affair with feminist Lou Salomé, his stormy association with Richard Wagner’s musical genius, and his conflicted relationship with Lisbeth, his rabidly anti-Semitic sister dedicated to assuring her brother’s legacy by distorting his philosophy into a cult attractive to the rising proto-Nazi movement. The American Book Review called Nietzsche's Kisses "a brilliant achievement, a seamless, precise, marvelously affecting novel that must be read by everyone who appreciates the best of today's fiction."
"Following Nietzsche's Kisses," Publishers Weekly writes about Anxious Pleasures, "Olsen treats another great modernist to postmodernist investigation, this time retelling Kafka's Metamorphosis from the supporting cast's points-of-view. Olsen hews closely to the original, and his additions, excursions and elaborations are simultaneously stimulating and entertaining. . . . Intricately woven and richly imagined, Olsen's novel is a cerebral treat unto itself and a fine companion to Kafka's original."
His latest book, Head in Flames, is a collage novel composed of chips of sensation, observation, memory, and quotation shaped into a series of narraticules told by three alternating voices, each inhabiting a different font and aesthetic/political/existential space. The first belongs to Vincent van Gogh on the day he shot himself in Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890. The second to Theo van Gogh (Vincent's brother's great grandson) on the day he was assassinated in Amsterdam in November 2004. The third to Mohammed Bouyeri, Theo's murderer, outraged by the filmmaker's collaboration with controversial politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali on a 10-minute experimental short Submission that critiques Muslim subjugation and abuse of women. Rain Taxi writes that "Head in Flames has set a new standard for the social consciousness of postmodern narrative," while The Quarterly Conversation claims: "Recalling the radically condensed novels of David Markson, the fragmented storytelling of Alain Robbe-Grillet, and the high-velocity jump cuts of an action movie...or maybe an MTV music video...Head in Flames is the rare novel that satisfies equally as an exploration of personality, character, novelistic form, and narrative potential."
Olsen's wife, assemblage-artist Andi Olsen, and he divide their time between the mountains of central Idaho and Salt Lake City.
