User:Jeffrotter
Jeffrey Rotter was raised in South Carolina. He has served society in many ways. He packed teabags in Boulder and assembled office furniture at NORAD. In Austin, Texas, he worked for Reading Is FUNdamental, where he enjoyed dressing up as Clifford the Big Red Dog and hanging around libraries. After moving to New York City he began writing for numerous publications including The New York Times, Spin magazine, ESPN, McSweeney’s, The Literary Review and The New York Observer. Marilyn Manson once borrowed his rental car and got a parking ticket. Rotter played guitar and toured the country with a punk band that included a 9-year-old and a 12-year-old. They sang about vitamins.
In 2006 he completed his MFA in fiction at Hunter College, where he studied under Peter Carey, Colson Whitehead, Colum McCann, and Andrew Sean Greer. At Hunter he was awarded a Hertog Fellowship to perform research for Jennifer Egan. A longtime Brooklyn resident, he lives with his wife and their small boy, Felix.
His first novel, The Unknown Knowns, was published by Scribner on March 17th 2009. The book is about a guy called Jim Rath. It’s part prison memoir, part congressional testimony, and part kooky feminist sci-fi. Rath’s wife has grown tired of his hobbies, especially his strange underwater experiments and his dreams of building a museum based on the Aquatic Ape theory of human evolution; on the night that she leaves him, Jim thinks he has spotted an emissary from a lost aquatic race called Nautikons. He is wrong. In truth the man is Les Diaz, a low-level agent of the Department of Homeland Security. Les has been unstable since his wife’s drowning and the department has relegated him to a harmless and under-funded project inspecting hotel swimming pools and water slides for terrorist vulnerabilities. When he realizes that he’s being tailed by Jim, his intelligence instincts are awakened. Agent Diaz is certain that Jim Rath is a domestic terrorist. He’s wrong too.
Booklist has called The Unknown Knowns a “Vonnegut-esque tale of delusion, violence and homeland security … a hyperintelligent, surrealistic tale with a wackiness factor worthy of Kilgore Trout.” And Douglas Coupland calls it a “wonderful book - smart, tight, and funny - Confederacy of Dunces meets Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin.”
http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Jeffrey-Rotter/47186235/author_revealed
http://www.museumoftheaquaticape.com/