Real interviews with Real People who know stuff…
People Who Know Stuff: Eric Larsen: Inside Existence
People Who Know Stuff: Eric Larsen: Subversion
Eric Larsen, Publisher and Founder of Oliver Arts and Open Press, is a native of Minnesota who has lived in New York City since 1971. He taught writing and literature for thirty-five years at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. He is now retired and devoting himself full time to writing and to The Oliver Arts & Open Press. Up through the 1980s he published fiction, essays, and reviews in numerous magazines, from quarterlies like The South Dakota Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Ohio Review through more general-circulation magazines like Harper’s, The New Republic, and The Nation. His first novel, An American Memory, came out in 1988 and received $5,000 as winner of the Chicago Tribune‘s inaugural Heartland Prize for that year’s best novel from or about the middle west. In 1992, his second novel, I Am Zoë Handke, was published, like the first, by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. His third, The End of the 19th Century, was published in a new edition by The Oliver Arts & Open Press in 2012. His completed fourth novel, The Decline and Fall of the American Nation, will appear at a future date, completing a tetralogy of inter-related novels. After four decades of teaching literature, Larsen is embarked on writing a series of volumes about the “great works.” They will appear under the general title of “Great Literature for Regular People.” The first volume, Homer Whole: A Reading of the Iliad, appeared from The Oliver Arts & Open Press in 2009. Larsen is also author of A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit, published by Shoemaker & Hoard in 2006.