Bruce Benderson

Bruce Benderson (born August 6, 1946) is an American author, born to Jewish parents of Russian descent, who lives in New York. He attended William Nottingham High School (1964) in Syracuse, New York and then Binghamton University (1969). He is today a novelist, essayist, journalist and translator, widely published in France, less so in the United States.

In 2004, Benderson's lengthy erotic memoir Autobiographie érotique, about a nine-month sojourn in Romania, won the prestigious French literary prize, the Prix de Flore. The book was published in the United States (Tarcher/Penguin) and the United Kingdom (Snow Books) in 2006 under the title The Romanian: Story of an Obsession.

Benderson's book-length essay, Toward the New Degeneracy (1997), looks at New York’s Times Square, where rich and poor once mixed in a lively atmosphere of drugs, sex, and commerce. Benderson argues that this kind of mingling of classes has been the source of many modern avant-garde movements, and he laments the disappearance of that particular milieu. His novel User (1994) is a lyrical descent into the world of junkies and male hustlers. He is also the author of James Bidgood (Taschen, 1999), about the maker of the cult film Pink Narcissus.

A book-length essay by Benderson, Sexe et Solitude, about the extinction of urban space and the rise of the Internet, was published in French in 1999. A collection of his essays, published under the title Attitudes, appeared in French in 2006. These essays, along with 'Sexe et Solitude' and 'Toward the New Degeneracy,' were printed in America in a nonfiction anthology of Benderson's writings entitled Sex and Isolation (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), which was cited as one of the 10 best university press books of the year by the magazine Foreword. The year 2007 also saw the publication in French (Editions Payot & Rivages) of a new novel by Benderson called "Pacific Agony," a caustic satire of life in America's Pacific Northwest, as well as Benderson's personal illustrated encyclopedia of the 60s and 70s, Concentré de contreculture (Editions Scali), published in French only. The novel Pacific Agony was published in English by Semiotext(e)/MIT Press in fall 2009. In 2014, Semiotext(e))/MIT Press also published Benderson's controversial 60-page essay, Against Marriage, as part of a collection exhibited at the 2014 Whitney Museum Biennial. A French edition of the book has been planned.

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