The Peter Rock Project

Visiting Writers Series

2008-09-22T11:48:00.001-07:00

Visiting Writers Series: Portland author Peter Rock discusses his work. 7 p.m. Mon, Sept. 22. Pacific University, Taylor Auditorium, 2043 College Way, Forest Grove

Monday, September 22nd at 7pm.

2008-08-27T15:34:00.001-07:00

Visiting Writers Series Kicks Off

By Darlene Pagan

Peter Rock, author of three novels with a fourth, My Abandonement forthcoming (Harcourt) and a story collection, The Unsettling, will read in Taylor Auditorium on Monday, September 22nd at 7pm.

Peter Rock was born and raised in Salt Lake City. He is the author of the novels The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, This is the Place, and Carnival Wolves, and a story collection, The Unsettling. Rock attended Deep Springs College, received a BA in English from Yale University, and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He has taught fiction at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Deep Springs College, and in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. His stories and freelance writing have both appeared widely. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and other awards, he currently lives in Portland, Oregon. His novel My Abandonment will be published by Harcourt in March, 2009.

Excerpt of My Abandonment in current issue of Tin House

2008-05-08T12:23:00.000-07:00

The subject line is everything I needed to say:

Peter Rock AN EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL My Abandonment
People are easy to follow, and it’s amazing the things they do when they think no one can see them.

Rock reading at Driftwood Public Library for Oregon Legacy 2008

2008-01-02T12:46:00.000-08:00

Northwest authors to appear at Driftwood Public Library for Oregon Legacy 2008

Left to right: Cai Emmons, Peter Rock, Lauren Kessler, Matt Love

The Friends of Driftwood Public Library will present the literary series, Oregon Legacy, on four Sunday afternoons in January 2008.

The series opens at 3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 6 with a presentation of reading and commentary on writing by Cai Emmons from Eugene. Her novel, “His Mother's Son,” was published in 2003, winning the Ken Kesey Award for the Novel (an Oregon Book Award). Her second novel, “The Stylist,” was released in October of 2007. Emmons began her career as a dramatist, writing for the stage, film, and television.

Her essays have been published in the Portland Monthly and the Oregon Quarterly, Arts and Letters. She teaches at the University of Oregon's Creative Writing Program, while continuing her own writing.

On Jan. 13, Peter Rock of Portland will present his work. He has written five books: “The Unsettling,” “The Bewildered,” “The Ambidextrist,” “Carnival Wolves” and “This is the Place,” winner of the Hanfield Award in 1996. Rock held the prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship while at Stanford. He draws his material from the gritty underground of urban life where many residents live lives of solitude. His new novel, “My Abandonment,” will be published in the fall of 2008. He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Reed College in Portland.

Lauren Kessler of Eugene is the third author in the 2008 series; she will speak on Jan. 20. She is the author of five works of narrative nonfiction, including “Dancing with Rose,” “Clever Girl,” “The Happy Bottom Riding Club,” “Full Court Press” and the Oregon Book Award winner “Stubborn Twig.” “Stubborn Twig” was also chosen as the book for all Oregon to read in honor of the state's 2009 sesquicentennial.

Her journalism has appeared in periodicals ranging from The New York Times Magazine to O and The Nation. She is the founder of the online magazine, Etude, and directs the graduate program in literary nonfiction at the University of Oregon.

The 2008 Oregon Legacy series finishes on Jan. 27 with a presentation by Matt Love of Nestucca. Love is well known for his “Beaver State Trilogy: Grasping Wastrels vs. Beaches Forever” (2003), “The Far Out Story of Vortex I” (2004) and “Red Hot and Rollin: a Retrospective of the Portland Trail Blazers 1976-77 Championship Season.” His essays have appeared in The Oregonian, his column “Stone Oregon” in several alternative monthlies, and he is the publisher of the Nestucca Spit Press. He teaches English and history in the Lincoln County School District and for nine years has been the caretaker of the Nestucca Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

Fourteen years ago, the Friends of Driftwood Public Library created the Oregon Legacy sereis as a gift for the community to celebrate the library's new home at Lincoln Square Civic Center, and to thank the community for all of its support during the transition to the new library facility.

With little resources beyond the income from their occasional used book sales, the Friends underwrote the first literary series ever presented in Lincoln County, the Oregon Legacy Series. Each year they have renewed that sponsorship, while adding the Inn at Spanish Head as a hospitality partner.

“For 24 hours we treat an Oregon author like a hero, as all authors should be treated,” said Sue Jenkins, library director and series coordinator.

All Oregon Legacy presentations are free. Each presentation begins at 3 p.m. in the Distad Reading Room of the Driftwood Public Library. The library is located on the second floor of the Lincoln Square Civic Center at 801 SW Hwy 101 in Lincoln City.

For further information about the Oregon Legacy Series, contact Sue Jenkins at 996-1251 or suej@lincolncity.org.

Online Publishing

2007-10-26T11:35:00.000-07:00

From the article, Fast, Free And In Control
Willamette Week - Portland,OR,USA

Peter Rock, a local writer (2006’s The Unsettling) and associate professor of creative writing at Reed College, sees merit in online publishing but wonders if it will ever reach the popularity of a magazine or hardbound book. “Everyone in the publishing industry is trying to find out how virtual content works, if books are going to be around much longer,” he says. “But I don’t know many people—maybe that’s because I’m old—that spend that much time reading fiction online.” Rock may be right: While virtual content has its advantages—websites can print whatever they want without the restrictions of an editor or publisher while remaining free for readers—it’s difficult to imagine a world without books or magazines.

Peter Rock's new novel due out next fall

2007-10-04T15:03:00.001-07:00

I can't believe I haven't posted this....I'm getting lazy.

My Abandonment by Peter Rock will be published by Harcourt in the fall of 2008. This project reunites Rock with the editor Adrienne Brodeur, who founded Zoetrope: All Story with Francis Coppola, and also Tina Pohlman, who published Rock's first two books at Anchor/Doubleday.

A short description of the book from Rock:

My Abandonment is a story of a girl and her father set in Portland and the wilderness of the Northwest. Loosely based on a true story (and informed by the nature diaries of Opal Whiteley and the travails of Elizabeth Smart), it is the first-person narrative of a twelve-year-old girl who is found living in Forest Park (at 5400 acres, the largest forested urban park in the nation) with her father. It chronicles her education, the ingenious ways the two survive in this wilderness, their forays into the city and their interactions with others, homeless and well-established. Ultimately, it is the story of their discovery by authorities, relocation, and further flight, along which many surprises, mysteries and dramas unfold. The novel serves as a further exploration of a question that is important to me: under what conditions is one transformed into a completely different person?

Blogger names Disentangling as a favorite short story

2007-05-11T12:45:00.000-07:00

The list:

“The Bloody Chamber” by Angela Carter
“Call My Name” by Aimee Bender
“Civilwarland in Bad Decline” by George Saunders
“Dirty Wedding” by Denis Johnson
“Disentangling” by Peter Rock
“Floating Bridge” by Alice Munro
“The Hotel Capital” by Olga Tokarczuk
“Planetisimal” by Keri Hulme
“The Toughest Indian in the World” by Sherman Alexie
“White Angel” by Michael Cunningham

“Hunger” by Lan Samantha Chang

Link to post

Newsday's Favorite Books of 2006

2007-01-03T09:03:00.001-08:00

After the fast, scene-jumping pace of "Nimrod," the stories in "The Unsettling" (MacAdam Cage) may seem like novellas. Author Peter Rock's characters are mostly male, mostly hapless, and mostly at a loss to understand the women in their lives. But stark encounters with strangers offer them moments of clarity and passing honesty.
Original link

Newsday's Favorite Books of 2006

2007-01-03T09:03:00.000-08:00

Peter Rock recordings

2006-12-19T13:04:00.000-08:00

These are from the University of Pennsylvania's Kelly Writers House and WXPN in Philadelphia.

Ambulance

Collapse

I highly recommend listening to these....they were recorded on 10/02/2000.

2006-11-30T07:11:00.000-08:00

20th Annual Oregon Book Awards
The Portland Mercury - Portland,OR,USA
Literary Arts brings in essayist extraordinaire Barry Lopez to emcee this year's Oregon Book Awards, which was already sold out by press time. I'm rooting for Matt Yurdana in poetry, Peter Rock for best novel, and shouting out a big "WTF" for Charles D'Ambrosio's exclusion from the short fiction category. Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park, 227-2583, 7:30 pm, $15 (sold out)

2006-07-05T05:56:00.000-07:00

From leafy academia to Portland's gritty underground: a Reed professor does some delving

Sunday, July 02, 2006

JEFF BAKER
The Oregonian

Reed College exhales in early summer. The students are gone, taking their end-of-semester angst and all-nighters with them. There won't be much business at the espresso stand until the chamber music concerts and writing conferences get started.

The campus feels quiet and full of promise, like a library that's just been opened for the day. It's the kind of place where a writer can concentrate and find unexpected connections in his work, connections between electric shock and the need to feel alive, between the Burnside skate park and a PGE substation in Sellwood, between Yukio Mishima's novel "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea" and Playboy magazines from the bicentennial year of 1976.

"That one surprised me," Peter Rock said. "I had no idea it was there."

It's there, one of the many strange connections in Rock's novel "The Bewildered" (MacAdam/Cage, $13 paperback, 303 pages), the July selection of The Oregonian Book Club. Rock can explain it -- there was a 1976 movie version of "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace From the Sea," and a racy pictorial featuring stars Kris Kristofferson and Sarah Miles appeared in Playboy the same year -- but he swears he didn't plan it and has no deep reason behind it.

"I did not mean it to be a metaphorical book," said Rock, an associate professor of creative writing at Reed. "It was my aim to make it as physically grounded . . . as possible."

"The Bewildered" is grounded in Portland, but not the leafy, intellectual Portland around Reed College. Its settings are grittier: a trailer on a winding dirt road south of Johnson Creek, a hobo jungle in the woods above Forest Park, the "Shanghai tunnels" under Old Town. Rock researched it by riding TriMet -- he doesn't have a car -- and hanging around lower Burnside, where his three teenage characters skate and meet a strange woman who hires them to strip copper wire from telephone poles. One of them gets zapped and becomes forgetful and withdrawn. As his friends try to pull him back, they tap into a subculture that's way off the grid. What happens in the tunnels and on the utility poles is shocking, but Rock said it could happen the way he wrote it.

"I've had questions about whether it's a realistic book," he said. "I think it is, but I respect those who think otherwise."

There's no straight line dividing metaphor and reality in Rock's fiction and no clear path showing how he became, at age 38, a tenured professor at Reed and the author of five books. He's taken chances with his writing and made unusual choices that reflect a restless intelligence and eagerness to experiment.

Rock grew up in Salt Lake City, the son of an economics professor at the University of Utah. As a nonbeliever in a heavily religious community, he found himself on the outside looking in.

"Mormon girls frustrated me and drove me to writing," he said. "They're so attractive and smart and can be so willingly naive."

A year abroad in Australia jump-started Rock's "pretentious quest to be a writer" and taught him some of the discipline necessary to actually produce something. More discipline came at Deep Springs College, a small, all-male school in the California desert near Death Valley that is also a working cattle ranch. Students help set the curriculum and the combination of freedom, hard work and few distractions has developed several notable writers, including William T. Vollmann and Benjamin Kunkel.

After his two years were up, Rock transferred to Yale, "the place most unlike Deep Springs I could find." He graduated and spent two years on a ranch in Montana, working and writing novels that didn't work out. He spent another two years in Ithaca, N.Y., working as a security guard in an art museum, then went back to Utah and worked on what became his first novel, "This Is the Place."

Rock brought the manuscript to Stanford as a Stegner Fellow and one of his advisers, John L'Heureux, told him it was publishable. That book and a second novel, "Carnival Wolves," came out as paperback originals, earning great reviews and small advances.

Rock met his wife, Ella Vining, in California and moved to Philadelphia with her while she attended medical school. He got a job temping for the University of Pennsylvania football coach and after his wife showed him an article about people who participate in drug trials for money, began to research another novel.

"I didn't do any drug trials, for various reasons," Rock said. "The vast majority of the trials I did were neuropsychiatric trials where I was (allegedly) providing a kind of base level of normalcy while undergoing a battery of tests. Sometimes this just involved questioning or riddles or games, but I spent a huge amount of time in MRIs."

Drug trials were intriguing, and that's where the money is, but Rock's wife wouldn't allow it. He came away with material for his third novel, "The Ambidextrist," whose main character wants to be the best drug trial subject he can be.

Research is serious business but also "a form of procrastination" for Rock, who started "The Bewildered" after seeing an article about children in the former Soviet Union being hired to steal copper wire. He strung plenty of wire fences in Montana and was shocked several times but was more interested in challenging himself in writing "The Bewildered" than in shocking himself for the experience.

It was shocking enough that Reed offered him tenure after five years. Rock taught at several other schools, including Penn, Yale, Deep Springs and San Francisco State, but doesn't have an MFA and knows from running faculty searches himself that there are hundreds of qualified candidates who do.

"Reed fancies a vision of itself as a place that would appreciate someone with an unconventional career path, or who had arrived with qualifications that are not exactly the expected ones," he said.

Jeff Baker

Original link

Mention in Philadelphia Weekly

2006-06-04T14:16:00.000-07:00

Check this out:

http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/view.php?id=12249
The Ambidextrist, by Peter Rock
Context Books, 2002

Peter Rock's third novel follows the life of Scott, a drifter who earns money as a medical test subject and resides in the dilapidated Water Works complex, among other places along the Schuylkill River. Scott develops relationships with other interesting characters who live along the waterfront, creating episodes that are sometimes amusing and at other times disturbing.

Scott walks past the dried-out fountain, under the overpass. This is the safest time of the day, when the dealers are gone, wherever they go to get their only sleep of the day. There are no men under the trees, and there are no women here-only the occasional college girl in running shorts, moving too fast to catch, screaming if anyone looks her way. Homeless women stay away, and those who do come around don't last; for them it is safer in the shelters.
A train sits motionless on the tracks, as if resting, deserted. Dipping a rag in the river, he scrubs the front and arms of his jacket as he walks down the gravel of the bank. He slides his pack around and takes out half a bagel from the day before, a jar of baby food. Whipped yams. He's heard people say insanity leads to homelessness, but he knows it's the other way around-the lack of sleep, the poor nutrition, the worrying-all that drives people beyond. He watches himself. Slugging water from a glass jar, he swallows a handful of vitamins.

On a recent day a man in a lime green shirt stands motionless behind drooping leaves just east of the Schuylkill River Park trail, in the area that will soon be a skatepark. He's barely visible to the astute observer. Most of the people jogging, biking and strolling by must not even see him. Other men are also hidden in the brush-a few talking to each other, a few watching the rush hour crowd on the asphalt path.

Still, Rock's gritty 2002 novel about the homeless and transient characters living along the Schuylkill seems like it's from another era. The river trail is attractive and landscaped now, and improvements are steadily pushing forward. The dry fountain near the Water Works that Rock mentions is being renovated.

Changes are happening daily. A once bountiful grove of trees along the river has been felled. A handful of stumps still covered in sawdust remain, surrounded by chocolate colored dirt that leads down to the water's edge. Only a few trees still stand, a blue "S" spraypainted on their trunks.

With new shrubs planted, plaques set in stone and the shiny Cira Centre reflecting the sky in the distance, there's an illusion of safety. (G.W. Miller III)

Reed College professor mines Portland's landscape for chills

2006-05-31T12:05:00.000-07:00

The Unsettling: Stories By Peter Rock
A Reed College professor mines Portland's landscape for chills.
BY SHOSHANNA COHEN

A misreading of the review copy's cover led me to believe the title of local author Peter Rock's newest collection was "The Unsettling Stories." It's not very far off for this bunch of odd, thought-provoking shorts. With eccentric characters caught in unlikely events, The Unsettling (MacAdam Cage, 300 pages, $21) explores the unexpected connections and empty spaces between people, and the enormous capacity for weirdness in the everyday world.

With clean, orderly prose and an ominous, almost spooky tone, Rock lays out cliché settings—a young couple on a camping trip, women walking alone at night—that lead you to constantly brace yourself for something horrible to happen. But Rock's work recalls that of French novelist Patrick Modiano in creating familiar, suspenseful scenes that never deliver the anticipated thrilling conclusion. The action is often vague, confusing or nonexistent. The climaxes in The Unsettling are less sinister and dramatic than you'd expect—more internal, subtle and just plain bizarre. Few of the stories lead to any revealing culmination of facts. The final and longest, "Disentangling," is an exception, as it reveals, deliciously, the identity of a mysterious man and what happened to a dead dog—questions not atypical in Rock's stories.

The women and men who populate his tales are equally unexpected, like the title characters of "The Silent Men," who dine regularly at an expensive restaurant but neither speak nor eat their food. But sometimes Rock tries too hard to be quirky, as with the protagonist of "Signal Mirror," a barefoot pill-popper who feeds tortoises in the Nevada desert. And at times the voices of supposedly gritty, streetwise characters sound suspiciously like that of a fiction writer who teaches at Reed College.

Although originally from Salt Lake City, Rock currently lives here in Portland and fills his stories with familiar local elements, from Oaks Park and basement shows to pompous college students. Not only is it easier to imagine the scene taking place when you've been there, but it's fascinating to see how the city's environment works its way into someone else's subconscious.

Sometimes the themes at play here—loneliness and connections, coincidence and control, social transgression—are readable and close to the surface; sometimes you're left wondering, "Wait, what happened?" As a group, the stories imbue a sense of curiosity and possibility, and the idea that the world is a lot more twisted and unpredictable than you might think. But not necessarily in a bad way.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Originally Published on 5/31/2006

Find this story at www.wweek.com/editorial/3230/7622

Newsday - Male Tales

2006-05-17T07:15:00.000-07:00

THE UNSETTLING, by Peter Rock.

MacAdam/Cage, 300 pp., $21.

With four novels already under his belt, Peter Rock has just published "The Unsettling," his first collection of stories. The book's title doesn't come from any of the stories, but instead conveys the author's preoccupation with stray events that disturb the flow of our lives. The 13 stories gathered here have two things in common: the majority of Rock's characters are lonely and the stories typically involve the sudden appearance of a stranger or ghost who dishevels their otherwise mundane lives.

It isn't always clear what impact this intrusion has. In some cases, it's fraught with danger. In "Stranger," when a couple is out camping and a woman shows up in their cabin in the middle of the night, demanding help, the interaction turns ominous. But in other instances, the appearance of a stranger is a more consoling presence.

In "The Silent Men," a waitress at a French restaurant is beset by two strange events. Two thin men who may be German show up at her restaurant every Friday evening and order wine and expensive meals, but never touch what they order and never speak. When the waitress' two dogs disappear, she suddenly begins receiving middle-of-the-night phone calls from a woman who has seen her missing dog posters and understands how lonely she is. Instead of alarming her, the presence of all these familiar strangers becomes reassuring. In many of these enigmatic stories about chance encounters, the stranger who shows up - in person or on the phone - is the secret sharer Rock has sent to look out for his solitary characters.

link

Dreamlike episodes unfold in plain sight -- San Francisco Chronicle

2006-05-01T06:23:00.000-07:00

A sense of mystery both macabre and marvelous keeps creeping into "The Unsettling," 13 deceptively conventional, quirkily magical, finely unsettling stories by Peter Rock, the author of "Carnival Wolves" and "The Ambidextrist." Inexplicable scenes are described as if they were self-evident; people emerge and vanish with shimmering speed, leaving turbulence in their wake.

A Japanese American on a solitary fishing trip meets a distraught Japanese woman in a wood, weeping near the pond of an abandoned mill from which she mysteriously emerged; she vanishes in the twilight when he tries to take her in his arms. An aging man running a gas station in the Nevada desert meets a tawdry, pert young woman who drives up one day; bizarrely, she re-enacts with him the greatest loss of his past. An overly refined urbanite has a series of chance encounters that might have led to a violent end; instead they conclude in a wholly unexpected and morally dubious bliss. A youthful husband turns into the ghost of a strange neighbor who many years before had, with uncanny accuracy, predicted his wife's future. A young girl befriends a dreamer on a train and is slowly absorbed into his dream.

The stories, for all their dedicated realism and easily recognizable characters and milieux -- as banal as a motel lobby, common as an irritating dog -- are dreamlike. Ghostlike characters emerge and vanish or behave as if they were disembodied from their flesh:

"Three men in hard-hats, one half-submerged in a manhole, watch her pass; next to them, a metal heater shaped like a torpedo blows steam into the night. The men disappear and surface in the cloud."

"He checked sideways, to see Jonas's agreement, and in that moment the black sky behind Jonas sliced open, in sections, and slowly folded around him. First his feet were taken, so he seemed to be levitating, and then both arms at once, and finally his head, until he had completely disappeared. ... When he looked again to his side, once again, Jonas was standing there, calmly, exactly as he had been before."

Rock's deliberately low-key style creates a credible framework for his spectral episodes. It is as though he were telling us (a bit as Fellini did in his early movies) that there is nothing that can surprise more grandly or gently than what happens in "the light of common day."

As the mysterious caller puts it in "The Silent Men":

" 'I think it's underrated,' the woman said, 'the daylight; it's every bit as mysterious when the sun's out, all sorts of surprises happening. I close my eyes a little and look through my eyelashes. That helps me see some of the mysteries, it really cuts down on all the distractions, closes them out. You understand.' "

Rock explores how we haunt one another, and not only after our bodies perish, and the reader is kept rapt by the resonances of his clear-eyed, humane, cunningly poetic, earthily mythic vision.

One of Rock's influences is, not surprisingly, Edgar Allan Poe, though there are also nods to the surprise-reversal endings of O. Henry, the grotesques of Flannery O'Connor and the bleak humanity of Chekhov. In fact, the longest (if weakest) story in the collection is an overly complicated homage to Poe, in which a risibly eccentric Philadelphian seeks to act out a vision of true brotherly love in a story that throws off allusions to "The Black Cat," "The Tell-Tale Heart" and the crinkling cadences of Poe's verses.

But that story reads as what it probably is: the payment of a debt. In the rest, when Rock yields to his own obsessions, his intellectual conscience, honesty, imagination and compassion -- to say nothing of his subtle and winning talent -- he makes the rest of us debtors.

Christopher Bernard is the author of the novel "A Spy in the Ruins."

Link: SF Chronicle

Portland Mercury Review of "The Unsettling"

2006-04-01T06:24:00.000-08:00

The Unsettling is quietly acclaimed local author Peter Rock's first collection of short stories. They are a strange lot—beautifully written, dreamlike, but like dreams, frequently ambiguous, brimming with eerie, colorful details that are rarely, if ever, fully explained. [more]

Time Out - Chicago

2006-03-22T04:58:00.000-08:00

Time Out - Chicago has a review of "The Unsettled" this week. I can't get to it without buy a subscription, but I'll try to post it after it's released on their archives.

Rock has a reading tomorrow at Reed. If anyone takes any photos, please send them my way.

Book Review-Monsters & Critics (KIRKUS)

2006-03-02T08:05:00.000-08:00

Book Review: The Unsettling by Peter Rock
By Kirkus
Mar 1, 2006, 19:00 GMT

Curiously dry, unsympathetic short stories by Utah novelist Rock (The Bewildered, 2005, etc.). Nameless, untamed landscapes form the backdrop for most of these 13 tales featuring random collisions between regular people. \'Do I know you?\' is a perennial refrain here.

\'Disappeared Girls\' depicts a chance meeting on a train between 15-year-old Miranda, headed for a visit to her grandmother in New Jersey, and 31-year-old Edward, sporting braces and a see-through backpack, who is traveling back to his childhood neighborhood. \'Are you trying to have sex with me?\' Miranda boldly asks Edward, but the poor guy turns out to be a harmless naïf, an artist more engaged with his dreams than with the girl.

Meanwhile, the strangely disembodied tale \'Disentangling\' shows Dr. Ralston Bender, a Philadelphia medical examiner steeped in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, conducting a series of quasi-sexual experiments involving strangers in a hotel room. The experiments bring together a motley group, including a feral street boy, a sad legal secretary and a sympathetic black man named Sylvester, all gathered to fulfill Bender`s creepy aim of \'spreading hope.\' In \'Gold Firebird,\' the aged owner of a highway gas station finds the visit of a sad young wife in a fabulous old car so resonant of his own emotional history—she is fleeing an unfaithful husband—that he doesn`t mind when she can`t pay for the gas and steals his stuff. Rock seems to take perverse delight in bringing his characters close to the louche and seedy.

A solid representation of this writer`s mature work, notable for its detached intensity, but his stories` brevity and randomness will leave many dissatisfied.

© 2006 Kirkus. All Rights Reserved

Rock at Lake Effect Writer's Conference

2006-02-03T10:40:00.000-08:00

10th ANNUAL LAKE EFFECT WRITER'S CONFERENCE
Teachers and high school writers are invited to attend this conference from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at Salt Lake Community College South City Campus, 1575 S. State St., featuring Peter Rock, Nick Flynn and Mark Conway. No charge, but donations accepted. At 7 p.m., the public is invited to a free reading at the campus. For information, call Joel at 801-484-6286.

Rock Reading at Reed on March 23

2006-02-01T09:39:00.000-08:00

Media Advisory

Peter Rock reading March 23

WHAT
Reed College creative writing instructor Peter Rock reads from his first collection of short stories, The Unsettling; afterwards, there will be a book signing. Rock has written four novels, The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, Carnival Wolves, and This Is The Place. He is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, and is a recipient of a 2000 NEA Fellowship.

WHEN
5:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 23

WHERE
Psychology auditorium, room 105, Reed College, Portland (Use east parking lot off of SE Woodstock Blvd.)

COST
Free and open to the public

CONTACT
For more information, the public is asked to visit the Reed events website at events.reed.edu or call the Reed events line at 503/777-7755.

###

The Unsettling Cover

2006-01-24T12:19:00.000-08:00

This is a great cover. Very cool.

http://www.macadamcage.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=pubs_product_book_info&products_id=357

THE UNSETTLING
Stories by Peter Rock

San Francisco, CA—MacAdam/Cage is pleased to announce the publication of acclaimed novelist Peter Rock’s first story collection, The Unsettling (March 15, 2006.) Twelve of the thirteen stories included in this collection – haunted tales told through Rock’s imaginative and wholly original voice – have already been published in leading literary journals such as Zoetrope, Tin House, and One Story.

A lonely man saving library books from an outbreak of mold listens to a coworker’s tale about a blind woman and imbues it with his own sense of romance; a woman drives a Gold Firebird through the desert with a television playing “Rockford Files” reruns on the passenger seat; a girl returns to her childhood home to spy on its new inhabitants, not realizing they are aware of her surveillance; and a Poe-obsessed medical examiner constructs ornate scenes in an attempt to provoke hope in the forgotten lives of a dark and desperate city.

Populated by strangers, ghosts, and other shadowy figures whose intentions may or may not be sinister, The Unsettling attends to those startling moments when what we have understood as familiar is suddenly revealed to be mysterious and foreign.

“These stories are driven by my obsessions and confusions, my desires and hopes. They are the
effects of the strange provocations the world has thrown in my path, demonstrations of how I’ve bent and combined them.” – THE AUTHOR, PETER ROCK

Peter Rock grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the author of the novels The Bewildered, The
Ambidextrist, Carnival Wolves, and This Is the Place. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and recipient of a 2000 NEA Fellowship, he now lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches at Reed College.

MacAdam/Cage was founded as an independent trade publisher in 1998 with the aim of publishing new books of quality fiction and non-fiction, and remains committed to bringing new and talented voices to the literary marketplace. The Unsettling is one of twenty-three titles from MacAdam/Cage’s Spring 2006 catalog.
####
The Unsettling by Peter Rock
March 15, 2006  Hardcover  $21.00  5 x 8  ISBN: 1-59692-171-4

Rock in Wikipedia

2006-01-20T09:43:00.000-08:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rock

Rock getting props from Lemony Snicket

2006-01-18T11:33:00.000-08:00

DANIEL HANDLER (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, author of A Series of Unfortunate Events)Peter Rock’s The Bewildered (MacAdam/Cage) is a book that took me for a walk around my neighborhood, pointed out nineteen things I’d never noticed, led me to a bar with a great jukebox, listened while I blabbed all my secrets, got me into a fight, let me sleep it off on the lawn, put a slab of meat on my black eye, made me a big, greasy breakfast and sent me on my merry, bleary way. If you want anything more from a writer than Peter Rock gives you, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/06/07/culture-excellent.php

Milestone

2005-12-20T13:54:00.000-08:00

The Peter Rock Project has reached 1000 hits. Thank you for looking.

The Unsettling on Amazon

2005-12-14T07:49:00.000-08:00

Peter's book of short stories, The Unsettling, is listed on Amazon.com as coming out in March 2006. You can preorder it there. Unfortunately, there is no cover art available yet, but I'll keep trying and will post it here.

From what I understand, the book will be a compilation of stories, which have been previously published in zoetrope, tin house, etc. I'm sure there's probably a few new ones.

Call for artwork and papers etc.

2005-10-28T14:12:00.000-07:00

I need some new artwork. And I'm looking for some novice scholarly papers about Pete's work as well as anything else you might have sitting around on a hard drive. Except viruses, of course. I could use some new banners or even photos from readings etc. Please send any and all material to news@peterrockproject.com.

The Silent Man - short story by Peter Rock

2005-10-28T12:46:00.000-07:00

This story is set in Philly. Read on...

The last diners left the restaurant around midnight, and it was usually after one o’clock before Kristine, a waitress, headed home. Some nights she caught a cab, but it was better to walk, to unwind the pressures—the timing, the money changing hands, all the expectations and personalities—so that she would be able to sleep. Tonight, as she walked past the Liberty Bell, down through Old City, she could hear trucks rattling off the Ben Franklin Bridge, crossing the Delaware, and distant sirens, ignored car alarms. The darkness made the hot, thick air feel dirty.

Complete story

SuicideGirls > Words > The Bewildered author Peter Rock

2005-10-03T11:11:00.000-07:00

An interview...

Peter Rock’s novel The Ambidextrist gained a cult following upon its release in 2002. Now his latest novel, The Bewildered, has just been released from Macadam/Cage. It’s about three outsider pubescent kids, Kayla, Chris, and Leon. The kids set out to find something real among all the bullshit. They run into Natalie, an adult consumed by the obsessive study of 1970’s Playboy Playmates. Natalie hires the three kids to harvest copper wire from telephone poles in clandestine raids.

Read the interview [LINK]

Beattie Wins Short Story Writing Prize - Yahoo! News

2005-09-28T09:36:00.000-07:00

Ann Beattie, whose terse prose and dispassionate eye made such fiction as "Weekend" and "Vermont" classics of 1970s disillusion, has won the Rea Award for the short story.
[Story]

NarrativeMagazine.com

2005-09-28T08:03:00.000-07:00

You may have to register to view this article on Narrative Magazine. Sign up is free and easy.

This is the editor's note for the most recent issue: http://narrativemagazine.com/content/ednote.php

The Bewildered by Peter Rock
(MacAdam/Cage, 2005)

Maybe the adolescents of Peter Rock’s fourth novel are searching with the same everyday, garden-variety teenage resentment for a world less ordinary than the one breaking before them as they near the end of their high school years in Portland, Oregon. Then again, maybe their search is slightly more authentic, their intention just a bit truer, which is why they come to discover the people they’ve been looking for. A separate breed with a common lust, “the affected” have been electrocuted almost to death. The Bewildered could be read as a play on the adolescent search-for-meaning novel (substitute fatal voltage for love, drugs, sex, art ...), but it’s far more enjoyable if taken for what it is: a novel about a half-crazy world written in straightforward literary prose.

It was before dawn. Kayla sat alone at the skatepark under the Burnside Bridge, reading Chesterton’s notebook, which she kept folded inside her own. As she read, she wrote questions, recorded her own thoughts. Some sections she read twice, three times; she did not allow herself to turn a page until she had understood. She paused longest over the diagrams—the dark lines that were copper wires, stretched from body to body, attached through copper plates, the people flat on their backs, faces hastily sketched in, eyes two black pinpricks, staring out at her.

She would take it all further, interpret things more clearly than Chesterton could, her mind less clouded; though was quite taken by the logic and language of his writing, she also suspected it. After all, he was an adult, and adults deluded themselves in every direction.

She checked around herself, careful of discovery. It was gray, rainy, and the air smelled of wet ashes, some homeless campfire nearby. Atop the chain-link fence, a line of crows was perched, folding and unfolding their wings for balance. Kayla bent her neck back and looked up slightly, shaken by the cars and trucks she could hear but couldn’t see. Then she looked back into the notebook, reading. To access what is most electric in us, most alive. She thought of Leon, as she read, and also of Natalie. As she had suspected, Leon was onto something, whether he realized it or not. And that was the question: how to get there. She too wanted to live another, better way, and in the stolen notebook, she knew she had a key.

http://narrativemagazine.com/905/firstsecond.htm#rock

Reed Magazine: News of the College

2005-09-12T06:13:00.000-07:00

Reed Magazine: News of the College

One Story - Issue #56

2005-08-23T09:11:00.000-07:00

One Story - Issue #56

I know this link is around here somewhere but this is a good interview about a really good story...One Story is an interesting concept, every month a story is sent to you. It's a nice neat little package and better than getting anything involving a credit card in the mail. You can also order back issues from them. I don't know if this story is going to be issued with "The Unsettling."

Pickings Thin for 2005 Literary Fiction

2005-08-19T08:03:00.000-07:00

An article...

Pickings Thin for 2005 Literary Fiction - Yahoo! News

Authors Let Bidders Name Characters

2005-08-17T11:06:00.000-07:00

I posted this because it's dealing with contemporary literature or writing in some cases...I understand it's to raise money for a cause, but what does this do to the finished product? Does a character's name really make a difference?

What if Hemingway decided to name Santiago Bob?

Yahoo! Top Stories - Authors Let Bidders Name Characters

Portland Mercury - Readings Listings

2005-08-15T13:12:00.000-07:00

Portland Mercury - Books - Readings Listings - Readings Listings: "Loggernaut"

A little props on the Logger naut reading...

The cool people behind the newish Loggernaut group present yet another stellar reading event (the last one with Ben McGrath and Peter Rock was packed to the gills).

NPR : NPR Live Concert Series

2005-08-11T09:39:00.000-07:00

NPR : NPR Live Concert Series

Some really good stuff on here.

The Stranger - Books - Feature - Rock's Humanity

2005-08-10T14:57:00.000-07:00

This appears to be an updated link, different than the one in the Novel section. It's an interview about the writing of The Ambidextrist.

The Stranger - Books - Feature - Rock's Humanity

"I had this vision of myself as the proud new groom," says Portland author Peter Rock says over coffee. "Freshly married, the new book's just out and the next one is on the way. And then everything just fell apart."

ZYZZYVA, Peter Rock

2005-08-09T11:16:00.000-07:00

This is an old link that I don't think I have posted anywhere on the site. It's a bit of a tease...

ZYZZYVA, Peter Rock

Kerouac film 'gets green light'

2005-08-05T08:05:00.000-07:00

BBC NEWS Entertainment Film Kerouac film 'gets green light'

Francis Ford Coppola will film Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road with The Motorcycle Diaries director Walter Salles, it has been reported.

New Story postings

2005-08-05T06:15:00.000-07:00

I was doing nothing more than updating this page when I realized that, in one form or another, this site has been up for more than a year. And when I really think about it, the last time I saw Pete read was just after The Amibidextrist came out. He read at Hollins University no too long ago and I regret not going to see him there.

I feel like I'm leaning towards a depressed confessional -- so the real reason for the update is to say that I've posted two stories from Rock that I found in google's thrift shop -- around page 20 or so of a search.

Disappeared Girls is one of my favorites.