Author of the week: George Dawes Green

last updated 8 January 2015

Best-selling thriller writer George Dawes Green won’t apologize for letting 14 years slip by between books, said Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg in The Wall Street Journal. The award-winning author of The Juror and The Caveman’s Valentine hasn’t been idle. “I was mostly interested in living,” says the Savannah, Ga., native. “I played a lot of poker, traveled, and spent a lot of time with people I care about. It didn’t seem that long to me.” That answer doesn’t tell the whole story, though. Green spent some of the intervening years writing for Hollywood, including contributing to film adaptations of his hit books. In 1997, the former poet also founded a “raconteuring club” called the Moth, which now stages popular storytelling performances in cities around the world.

Green understands that both book writing and oral storytelling go against the grain of this decade’s quick-hit culture, said Dick Donahue in Publishers Weekly. People “text and Twitter and Google a lot—anxiety reading—but they’re too jumpy for books,” he says. His own ardor for long-form storytelling, though, hasn’t interfered with his desire to entertain. Green’s latest, Ravens, is pure dark fun. “Too much ‘literary fiction’ is what Thomas De Quincey called the ‘literature of knowledge,’” he says. “A brilliant writer—Dickens or Dickey or Dostoyevsky—sweeps the reader out of this world into one where the author rules absolutely. I can’t imagine a writer who wouldn’t enjoy that position.”