About

Photo credit, Julie Patterson Photography

Matthew Specktor’s books include the novels That Summertime Sound and American Dream Machine, which was long-listed for the Folio Prize; the memoir-in-criticism Always Crashing in The Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California, and The Golden Hour, forthcoming from Ecco Press. Born in Los Angeles, he received his BA from Hampshire College in 1988, and his MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College in 2009. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, The Paris Review, Tin House, Black Clock, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. He is a founding editor of the Los Angles Review of Books.

Praise for American Dream Machine:

“This is the novel about Los Angeles that I’ve been waiting for—a mythical LA full of longing and distances and illusion. Specktor has captured the LA I know, the one all around me and the one in my head, a city of invention and grit, surface and underbelly. Funny, poignant and gorgeously written.”

—CHARLES YU, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and Sorry Please Thank You

“American Dream Machine was exactly what I wanted: a book so vast, compelling, and gorgeously written that Specktor’s Los Angeles became more real to me than my own living room. Nate Myer’s narration tracks fluidly between the interior life of his family and the exoskeleton of the city, and I fell completely under the spell of Beau Rosenwald. Specktor juxtaposes the movie industry’s sham glamour with Nate’s painfully real (and hilarious) coming-of-age story. Ghosting backwards through his childhood and even further, into the early life of his father, Nate Myer resurrects an entire era.“

—KAREN RUSSELL, author of Vampires in the Lemon Grove

“The sweeping American Dream Machine by Matthew Specktor is . . . one of the best novels about Los Angeles I have ever read.

—Bret Easton Ellis

“American Dream Machine has a feline watchfulness and a poetic sensibility that echoes Bellow’s and Updike’s prose rhythms along with their voracious, exuberant intelligence.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Specktor’s great achievement is to make familiar territory original, the Hollywood novel born anew. It’s bold, weird, and unforgettable, as startling as a poke in the eye.”

—The Sunday Telegraph Magazine