Paul B. La Farge was an American author, essayist, and scholar who lived from 1970 to 2023. He authored five books during a 20-year period: “Night Sea” (2011), “Luminous Airplane” (2011), “The Artist of the Missing” (1999), “Hausmann or the Brilliant” (2001), and “The Truth of Winter” (2005). (2017). All deserving of favorable critical notice, but notably Housman. Publishers including The Village Voice, Harper’s, and The New Yorker have published his essays, fiction, and reviews.
La Farge is a Yale University graduate who is a resident of New York City. He had residencies at Yaddo (1999), MacDowell (2002), the Guggenheim Fellowship (2002), the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and other institutions (2012). In addition to the Bard Award for Fiction (2005), which is granted each year by Bard College, where he teaches MFA courses, he has also received two California Book Awards. He served as a visiting English professor at Wesleyan University from 2009 to 2010. Additionally, he instructs writing at Columbia University. He served as a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers from 2013 to 2014. At the Leipzig, Germany-based American Institute of the University of Leipzig, LaFarge held the position of Picardo Visiting Professor of Literature from 2016 to 2017. He finished his stay at the American Academy in Berlin in 2019. [4] From July 2020 until his death from cancer in January 2023, he was a professor at Bennington College.
The Artist of the Missing, La Farge’s debut book, was released by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in May 1999 and includes bizarre illustrations by Cubist artist Stephen Alcorn. In the faceless modern metropolis where the novel is set, persons are frequently reported missing. Frank, the main character, paints images of the missing, such as his parents, his brother James, and finally even his sweetheart, the enigmatic police photographer Prudence, whose duty it is to document dead bodies. Critics labeled the debut book as a “literary magician” and a “fantasist,” equating it to the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garca Márquez.
