Appendix

Notes on the Contributors

 

 

Robert Morace teaches at Daemen College in Amherst, New York. His publications include John Gardner: Critical Perspectives (co-edited with Kathryn VanSpanckeren, 1982), John Gardner: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography (1984), The Dialogic Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge (1989), Irvine WelshÕs ÒTrainspottingÓ (2001) and a study of the ÒIrvine Welsh phenomenonÓ to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2007. His ÒLife and Times of Death and the MaidenÓ won the 1997 Berger Prize for best theater essay. As a Fulbright Lecturer at Warsaw University in the 1980s, Morace found the way a class of fourth-year Polish students responded to Stanley ElkinÕs Magic Kingdom at once humbling and heartening; far from being overwhelmed by its cultural specificity and linguistic density, they found it deeply moving and responded to it with a degree of personal involvement quite unlike their responses to the other contemporary Americans we read that year.

 

 

Kellie Wells was awarded the Flannery O'Connor Award and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for her collection of short fiction, Compression Scars. She is also a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation WriterÕs Award for emerging women writers. Her work has appeared in various journals, including The Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her novel Skin will be published in March 2006 by the University of Nebraska Press, in their Flyover Fiction Series, edited by Ron Hansen.

 

Skip Willman is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of South Dakota, where he teaches courses in Critical Theory and Contemporary American Literature. He has published articles on the work of Don DeLillo in Contemporary Literature and Modern Fiction Studies. He has also contributed an essay on conspiracy theory to Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America (New York: NYU P, 2002). Most recently, he contributed an essay on Ian Fleming, James Bond, and the Kennedys to Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2005), a volume which he co-edited with Edward P. Comentale and Stephen Watt.

 

David Dougherty is professor of English at Loyola in Maryland.  He has from time to time chaired that department and for a decade directed the Graduate Liberal Studies Program. A Woodrow Wilson Dissertation fellow at Miami University, he has published and lectured extensively on modern and post-modern American writers, including book-length studies of James Wright (1986) and Elkin (1991).  He edited the Dalkey Archive casebook on ElkinÕs The Dick Gibson Show and wrote the introductory chapter for that book. The Dalkey edition of ElkinÕs A Bad Man includes his  foreword, ÒMeeting Bad Men.Ó  His journal and reference book essays treat dozens of American and British writers, most recently Elizabeth Bishop, Toni Morrison, Thomas Hardy, detective novelist Ross Macdonald, W. D. Snodgrass, and John Updike. He also completed a series of mini-biographies of sports figures for the ScribnerÕs Encyclopedia of American Lives, and biographical sketches of King Richard II, King Edward IV, and American president Jimmy Carter for Literary Encyclopedia. ÒArchetypal Batters,Ó(2005)  studies baseball as trope in Postmodern American Fiction.  His current project is the authorized biography of Elkin, which is on schedule for publication in late 2008 or 2009.