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- Evan Dara is an American novelist. He has published four novels and one play, which are concerned with subjects including social atomization, music, political dysfunction, epistemology, ecology, and time. The Times Literary Supplement (London) called Dara "one of the most exciting American novelists writing today." Widely believed to be using a pseudonym, Dara has given no interviews and has issued no photographs, and has chosen to publish his novels through his own press, Aurora. His work has been almost totally unacknowledged by the commercial American literary community—Australian critic Emmett Stinson has called Dara "the best-kept secret in all of contemporary American literature"—but he has received exceptional acclaim from underground and alternative sites. His books have been the subject of numerous scholarly articles and theses, and have been taught in dozens of colleges and universities across the world. Four months after Dara’s first publication in Spanish, his work was included in a Madrid University course on the great American novel, where Dara's work was read alongside that of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison. The only other writer of Dara's generation to be included in this survey was David Foster Wallace. In 1995, his first novel, The Lost Scrapbook, won the 12th Annual FC2 Illinois State University National Fiction Competition judged by William T. Vollmann. Dara's second novel, The Easy Chain, was published by Aurora Publishers in 2008. A third novel, Flee, was published by Aurora in 2013. His fourth novel, Permanent Earthquake, was published by Aurora in June 2021. On July 26, 2018, Dara released his first play, titled Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins. The play was only offered in eBook form (ePub, Mobi, and PDF), and the publisher had originally stipulated that readers should download it for free and only make a donation after they finish it (the copy is no longer available for download on Aurora Publishers' website). In 2020, the critic Daniel Green published the first comprehensive look at Dara's novels, called "Giving Voice: On the Work of Evan Dara." Green writes that: If nothing else, it is obvious once one begins reading these novels that the author wants to subvert any presumptions we might have that the novel we are reading will bear enough family resemblance to those we have read before that it will be explicable according to the “rules” we believe we have learned about how novels should proceed....Indeed, in the challenge they pose to the assumption that the conventional patterns define the novel as a form, Dara’s novels are arguably the most radically disruptive books in American fiction since, say, Gilbert Sorrentino in a work like Mulligan Stew (1979). In the summer of 2021, Dara published his first novel since Flee, called Permanent Earthquake. The novel follows the experience of a young man living on an unnamed island in the Caribbean which has been undergoing a non-stop earthquake for the past few months. In describing the book, n+1 noted: Written in urgent, teetering prose that never once loses its grip on place or reality—however tenuous that reality might be—Permanent Earthquake is a novel that feels at once timeless and eerily well suited to our ongoing moment of permanent instability. In an interview for The Booker Prize, Richard Powers noted some of the writers to whom he was indebted for his 2021 novel, Bewilderment. The book has its roots in two different worlds. It is, in part, a novel about the anxiety of family life on a damaged planet, and for that, I’m indebted to writers as varied as Margaret Atwood, Barbara Kingsolver, Evan Dara, Don Delillo, and Lauren Groff. (en)
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- Evan Dara is an American novelist. He has published four novels and one play, which are concerned with subjects including social atomization, music, political dysfunction, epistemology, ecology, and time. The Times Literary Supplement (London) called Dara "one of the most exciting American novelists writing today." In 2020, the critic Daniel Green published the first comprehensive look at Dara's novels, called "Giving Voice: On the Work of Evan Dara." Green writes that: (en)
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