Paul LaFarge

Paul B. La Farge is an American novelist, essayist and academic. As of 2017, he has published five novels: The Artist of the Missing (1999), Haussmann, or the Distinction (2001), The Facts of Winter (2005), Luminous Airplanes (2011) and The Night Ocean (2017), all of which, particularly Haussmann, have earned positive critical attention. His essays and reviews have been published in outlets such as The Village Voice, Harper's, and The New Yorker.

A native of New York City, La Farge graduated from Yale University and has taught writing at Wesleyan University on and off since 2002. From 2009 to 2010, he was a Visiting Professor of English at Wesleyan. He has taught writing at Columbia. He was the 2005 winner of the fourth annual Bard Fiction Prize bestowed by Bard College, where he is on the MFA faculty. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been chosen as artist-in-residence at artists' colonies MacDowell and Yaddo. From 2016 to 2017, La Farge was the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig's Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, Germany.

La Farge's first novel, The Artist of the Missing, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in May 1999, and illustrated with surrealist images by cubist artist Stephen Alcorn. The novel takes place in an anonymous, modern-day city in which people go missing on a regular basis. Frank, the titular character, paints portraits of the missing, among whom are his parents, his brother James and, eventually, even his romantic interest, enigmatic police photographer Prudence, whose job it was to take pictures of corpses. Reviewers compared the debut work to those of Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges and categorized him among "literary wizards" and "fantasists".

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