Marisha Pessl
| Marisha Pessl | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 26, 1977 Clarkston, Michigan |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Nationality | American |
| Website | |
| www |
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Marisha Pessl (born October 26, 1977) is an American writer best known for her debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics.
Life and career
Pessl was born in Clarkston, Michigan, to Klaus, an Austrian engineer for General Motors, and Anne, an American homemaker. Pessl's parents divorced when she was three, and she moved to Asheville, North Carolina with her mother and sister. Pessl had an intellectually stimulating upbringing, recalling that her mother read "a fair chunk of the Western canon out loud" to her and her sister before bed, and entered her in lessons for riding, painting, jazz, and French.[1] Pessl started high school at the Asheville School, a private, co-educational boarding school, but graduated from Asheville High School in 1995. She attended Northwestern University for two years before transferring to Barnard College,[2] where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in English Literature.
After graduating, she worked as a financial consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, while writing in her free time. After two failed attempts at novels,[3] Pessl began writing a third novel in 2001 about the relationship between a daughter and her controlling, charismatic father.[1] Pessl completed the novel, titled Special Topics in Calamity Physics, in 2004 and it was published in 2006 by Viking Penguin to "almost universally positive" reviews, translated into thirty languages, and eventually becoming a New York Times Best Seller.[1]
Pessl's second novel, Night Film, a psychological literary thriller about a New York investigative journalist looking into an apparent suicide of the daughter of a renowned filmmaker, was published by Random House on August 20, 2013.
Pessl married Nic Caiano, a hedge fund manager, in 2003, and they lived in New York City. Pessl and Caiano divorced in 2009.[4]
Pessl was also a contributing musician to The Pierces' third studio album, Thirteen Tales of Love and Revenge, released in 2007. She is credited in the liner notes as having played the French horn on track 9 titled "The Power Of..."
Works
Novels
- Special Topics in Calamity Physics Penguin, 2006, ISBN 9781101218808
- Die alltägliche Physik des Unglücks: Roman, translated by Adelheid Zöfel, Fischer E-Books, 2013, ISBN 9783104029887
- Fördjupade studier i katastroffysik, translated by Eva Johansson, Natur och kultur, 2007, ISBN 9789127114364
- (French) La Physique des catastrophes, translated by Laetitia Devaux, Gallimard, 2007, 614 p., ISBN 978-2-07-077620-7
- Night Film: A Novel Random House, 2013, ISBN 9780307368225
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- Nachtfilm, Ambo/Anthos B.V., 2013, ISBN 9789041420084
References
External links
- Articles with French-language external links
- 1977 births
- Living people
- 21st-century American novelists
- American women novelists
- Barnard College alumni
- People from Asheville, North Carolina
- Writers from North Carolina
- People from Oakland County, Michigan
- Writers from Michigan
- American people of Austrian descent
- 21st-century women writers
