Tom Grimes

Short Biography

Tom Grimes is, for my money anyway, the greatest living underground novelist in America today. (A label which, at various points during the last hundred years, would’ve applied equally to Nathanael West, John Fante, even Richard Yates.) Throughout each of his novels–A Stone of the Heart (1990), Season’s End (1992), City of God (1995), [email protected] (2003), and Redemption Song (2006)–Grimes has proven himself to be as jaw-droppingly, balls-out brilliant as he is outrageously authentic. His characters are lost souls, generously drawn–men and women (white, black, Latino; straight and gay) forced to the margins during the last days of the American Empire. A true writer’s writer, Grimes is often the subject of effusive praise from his contemporaries. In recent years, National Book Award-finalist Thom Jones has hailed Grimes as “one of the best writers of dialogue we have, ” while Barry Hannah has declared Grimes deserving of “enormous prizes and a horde of wealthy sycophants.”Perhaps most impressive, though, is that during an era when most writers seem content to parody themselves ad nauseam (if you’ve read one...) Grimes appears to have embraced the mantra: never the same novel twice. Case in point, [email protected] features a loquacious, wise-cracking laptop computer named Spunky, while Redemption Song showcases a pair of ne’er-do-wells posing as doctors at a free health clinic in the East Village.And when one is so heartbreakingly original that the Big Five Publishers no longer know what do with him–he’s arrived. He’s bona fide. Legit. At long last, for the ages. Like Tom Grimes.