Profile of Jonathan Carroll on Famous Like Me

Jonathan Samuel Carroll (January 26, 1949 - ) is an American author of fantasy fiction.

Carroll was born in New York City to Sidney Carroll, a film writer whose credits included The Hustler, and June (née Sillman), an actress and lyricist who appeared in numerous Broadway shows and two films. His parents were Jewish but Carroll was raised in the Christian Science religion. A self-described "troubled teenager," he finished primary education at the Loomis School in Connecticut and graduated with honors from Rutgers University in 1971, marrying artist Beverly Schreiner in the same year. He relocated to Vienna, Austria a few years later and began teaching at the American International School, and has made his home in Austria ever since.

His first novel, The Land of Laughs (1980), is indicative of his general style and subject matter. Told in a very realistic first-person, the novel portrays a young schoolteacher searching for meaning through researching the life of a favorite children's book author of his youth. Warmly, and strange to his expectations, greeted by the author's grown-up daughter, everything seems fine until the dog begins talking to him, as the line between the fantasy world created by his research subject and the reality of the schoolteacher's life, while the reader begins to wonder just how much trust can be placed in this narrator. Subsequent novels would expand on these themes, but often contain unreliable narrators in a world where magic is viewed as natural. (One commentator claimed that Carroll would have been considered a magic realist had he been born in South America and had a Spanish surname.)

His short story, "Friend's Best Man," won a World Fantasy Award, and Carroll's work has frequently been short-listed for that award and the Bram Stoker Award for horror literature. His collection of short-stories, The Panic Hand, won the Bram Stoker Award in 1995 for Best Fiction Collection. Both The Land of Laughs and From The Teeth of Angels won the French "Prix Imaginaire." Outside the Dog Museum won The British Fantasy Award for best novel.

Other works include:

• Voice of Our Shadow (1983)
• The Rondua Trilogy
  • Bones of the Moon (1987) (a slightly different version was published in the U.S. in 1988)
  • Sleeping in Flame (1988)
  • A Child Across the Sky (1989)
• Black Cocktail (1990) (a novella)
• Outside the Dog Museum (1991)
• After Silence (1992)
• From the Teeth of Angels (1993)
• The Panic Hand (1995) (a collection of short stories originally published in 1989 in Germany)
• The Crane's View Trilogy
  • Kissing The Beehive (1997)
  • The Marriage of Sticks (2000)
  • The Wooden Sea (2001) A New York Times Notable Book
• The Heidelberg Cylinder (1999-2000) (1000 copy limited edition, all signed by Jonathan Carroll and Dave McKean. Some leftover copies without the autographs were sold as well.)
• White Apples (2002)
• Glass Soup October 2005

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