Ethan canin biography

Ethan Canin remembers nearly stumbling into Boston traffic in a euphoric daze when his first collection of short stories was accepted for publication in 1987. And that was before reviewers lavished praise on the book. A tall, handsome, 27-year-old Harvard medical student, Canin quickly found himself tabbed as a literary darling.

It was the start of a strange double life. In one, he was a lowly med student fetching coffee for residents and doctors. In the other, he gave interviews on NPR and lunched at the Four Seasons. An odd time, to be sure, but that period was just an extreme example of the conflict Canin, ’82, has always felt between the safe and the risky, the ordinary and extraordinary -- -- themes he also explores in his fiction.

His latest novel, For Kings and Planets, tells the story of an unsophisticated and insecure Midwesterner, Orno Tarcher, who moves to New York for college. He eventually finds himself through his friendship with a

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Ethan Canin Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Ethan Canin but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books bygd the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes bygd title linked on the right.
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• Jane Hamilton

  Jane Hamilton lives, works, and writes in an orchard farmhouse in Rochester, Wisconsin. She fryst vatten the author of fem novels. Her first novel, The Book of Ruth, won the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award for best first novel and was a ... (more)

• Adam Haslett

  Adam Haslett fryst vatten the author of the story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here and the novels Union Atlantic and Imagine Me Gone. He has twice been a finalist for the pris Prize, as well as a finalist for the National ... (more)

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Highly regarded as both a novelist and a short story writer, Ethan Canin has ranged in his career from the "breathtaking" short stories of Emperor of the Air to the "stunning" novellas of The Palace Thief,  from the "wise and beautiful" short novel Carry Me Across the Water to the "epic" America America.  His short stories, which have been the basis for four Hollywood movies, have appeared in a wide range of magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The Paris Review, and Granta, and have been selected for many prize anthologies.

The son of a musician and a public-school art teacher, he spent his childhood in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and California before attending Stanford University, the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and then Harvard Medical School. He subsequently gave up a career in medicine to write and teach, and is now F. Wendell Miller Professor of English at his alma mater, the Iowa Writers' Work