User:Marc Wehrs/Rick Harsch

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Rick Harsch (born May 17, 1959) is a writer from the United States, living in the Adriatic city of Izola, Slovenia. His first three novels comprised a trilogy: "The Driftless Zone," "Billy Verite," and "The Sleep of Aborigines." The poor-selling novels were called by some metafictional, by others hyper-realism. "The Driftless Zone" has been taught in a course on American film and literature at the University of Tasmania, and all three books of the trilogy were translated into French by a publishing house that went bankrupt soon after the translation of "The Sleep of Aborigines." Harsch's latest work, a literary memoir called "Arjun and the Good Snake, being an Ophidiological Account of Six Weeks in India without Alcohol," was published by a Slovene publisher, Amalietti & Amalietti. Harsch has a particular distaste for agents, manifest in the second appendix to "Arjun and the Good Snake," in which Harsch reproduces the final missive written to his last New York agent, the retraction of a death threat ... a retraction more threatening than the fictional death threat it refers to. Harsch's antics include taunting disclaimers: For instance, in "The Sleep of Aborigines" he warns: "This novel is a work of fiction. People who resemble these characters should find some way to change that." Perhaps his most indelible literary crime was this: After winning the Michener/Copernicus award and signing a note promising to give the Michener Foundation an appreciative nod for its $12,000 in support of the already finished "Billy Verite," he so savagely mocked the award in his acknowledgements that the foundation asked for its money back. "Arjun and the Good Snake" marked a return to publishing for Harsch (with the odd exception of a chapter in a baseball anthology, "The Anatomy of Baseball") after nearly 10 years of silence, during which he compiled what he refers to as "The Adriatic Tales," which will be released one at a time through his Slovene publisher, beginning in 2012 with "Kramberger with Monkey, or Still Life," a satire about politics in the form of assassination, the eponymous Ivan Kramberger being Slovenia's most prominent assassinated politician since the dawn of Slovene independence.