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Philipp Meyer
The Integrated Global Creative Economy
I CURATE
Network Node
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Name:
Philipp Meyer
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City/Place:
Austin, Texas
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Country:
United States
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Hometown:
Baltimore, Maryland
CURATION
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from this node by:
Matrix
Life & Work
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Bio:
Philipp Meyer grew up in a working class neighborhood in Baltimore, where he dropped out of high school and got a GED. After five years working as a bike mechanic and an orderly in a trauma center, he decided to attend college, attending various local universities before being admitted into Cornell University. He graduated with a degree in English and headed to Wall Street as a derivatives trader. After paying off his student loans, Meyer left Wall Street hoping write full time, but after years of failure and two unpublished apprentice novels, he moved back into his parent’s basement in Baltimore, taking jobs as an EMT and construction worker. Eventually he received a fellowship from the University of Texas's Michener Center for Writers, and moved to Austin, Texas. Shortly after relocating to Austin, Meyer became one of the first EMT's to respond to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, arriving approximately as the eye of the storm was passing through the city, an experience he wrote about in Salon.
In 2009, Meyer published American Rust, which won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was an Economist Book of the Year, a New York Times Notable Book, and a Washington Post Book of the Year. Meyer was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and named as one of the New Yorker magazine’s twenty best writers under forty.
Meyer’s second novel, The Son, has been a bestseller in a dozen countries and was published in twenty-five languages. It was runner up for the Pulitzer Prize. In France, The Son won the Prix Littérature-Monde as well as the Lucien Barrière Prize and in 2017, Meyer was given the title of Chevalier (Knight) in France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Meyer has adapted both his books for Hollywood and is working on various other projects. In 2017, The Son premiered as an AMC original, starring Pierce Brosnan.
Meyer has served as a volunteer firefighter in Baltimore County, Maryland and in rural New York State, and he’s been licensed as an Emergency Medical Technician in several states. He currently lives in Austin, Texas.
Contact Information
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Management/Booking:
Books, United States/Canada
Eric Simonoff, WME
[email protected]
Books, Europe/Asia/Australia/South America/Africa
Peter Straus, Rogers Coleridge & White
[email protected]
Television/Film
Creative Artists Agency
Los Angeles, CA
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
Praise for The Son
"The Son" makes a viable claim to be a Great American Novel of the sort John Dos Passos and Frank Norris once produced…Meyer has given us an extraordinary orchestration of American history…"
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“a work of extraordinary narrative power…remarkable and beautifully wrought.” —The Guardian, UK
“On a par with that classic of the genre, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” —The Telegraph, UK
"The Son" isn't just one of the most exciting Texas novels in years, it's one of the most solid, unsparing pieces of American historical fiction to come out this century."
—Michael Schaub, National Public Radio
"A masterpiece." —Het Parool, The Netherlands
"the stuff of Great American Literature. Like all destined classics, Meyer's second novel...speaks volumes about humanity..."
—Publishers Weekly
"Those damned Americans. The best movies, the best music and now an author like Philipp Meyer. This epic novel…deserves a place in the list of Great American novels." —De Limburger (Netherlands)
“Meyer has written a classic.” —Southern Literary Review
"Meyer is a writer of vast ambition and talent, and he has created nothing less than an American epic."
—Parade
“This is the book you want to read this summer.”
—Esquire
"Utterly absorbing"
—Reader's Digest
“A novel that is an epic in the truest sense of the word: massive in scope, replete with transformations in fortune and fate, and drenched in the blood of war.”
—Huffington Post
“The Son is an epic, heroic, hallucinatory work of art... No one, ever, has done a novel like this…”
—Chris Cleave
"One word—stunning. The Son stands fair to hold its own in the canon of Great American Novels. A book that for once really does deserve to be called a masterpiece."
—Kate Atkinson
“A remarkable, beautifully crafted novel. Meyer tackles large movements of American history and culture yet also delivers page-turning delights of story and character.”
—Charles Frazier
"A true American epic, full of brutal poetry and breathtaking panoramas. Meyer’s characters repeatedly bear witness to the collision of human greed, savagery, and desire with the mute and indomitable Plains landscape. Meyer is a writer of tremendous talent, compassion, and ambition—The Son is a staggering achievement.”
—Karen Russell
“Meyer is an impressive and multitalented storyteller in the old, good sense—the kind that makes me hang on for whatever the next chapter will hold.”
—Richard Ford
“The Son is the story of our founding mythology, of the men and women who tore a country from the wilderness and the price paid in blood by subsequent generations. An epic in the tradition of Faulkner and Melville, this is the work of a writer at the height of his power.”
—Kevin Powers
“Philipp Meyer redrafts humanity’s oldest questions and deepest obsessions into something so raw and dazzling and brutal and real, The Son should come with its own soundtrack.”
—Téa Obreht
Praise for American Rust
"John Steinbeck is alive and well today . . . and his name is Philipp Meyer"
—Geordie Williamson, chief literary critic, The Australian
“everything about this story seems essentially American…in the tradition that stretches from Ernest Hemingway to Cormac McCarthy. Meyer knows how to create heartbreakingly real female characters, too. [His] tone is less polemic than John Steinbeck's, but he's working on the same broad scale."
—The Washington Post
"Meyer is already being compared with John Steinbeck, and with very good reason."
—Esquire UK
"Do people still think in terms of the Great American Novel – a work of fiction that exactly captures the contemporary spirit of the union? If so, American Rust has GAN stamped all over it. In racing terms it’s by Of Mice and Men, out of Huckleberry Finn, ridden by Cormac McCarthy, and trained by Salinger and Kerouac. "
—The Daily Telegraph (UK)
“the social detail and emotional verisimilitude of Richard Russo ... a keen, Salinger-esque empathy. American Rust announces the arrival of a gifted new writer."
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"The comparisons other reviewers have made to Steinbeck are unavoidable and in large part justified, as are those to Cormac McCarthy….uniformly brilliant."
—The Times UK (Saturday Review Supplement)
“remarkable…introduces a novelist worth celebrating and watching.”
—USA Today, Bob Minzesheimer
"Like Upton Sinclair’s "The Jungle" and George Orwell’s "Down and Out in Paris and London," American Rust documents the psychological and moral tangle that comes with poverty… In stylistic terms, Meyer’s clipped, stream-of-consciousness narration brings to mind not only the modernists (Hemingway, Woolf, Joyce) but also Cormac McCarthy."
—The Millions
"assured...crackles with narrative tension...masterfully painted."
—The Economist
"a New Classic"
—Tatler (UK)
"stunningly portrayed...a novel rich in scope and ambition."
—The Guardian
“reminiscent of William Faulkner...Meyer knows more about the meaning of redemption than most other contemporary American novelists. He also knows how to write a compelling story.”
—The Baltimore Sun
"This psychological novel about guilt and redemption has been compared to writers such as Steinbeck, Faulkner and Salinger. Flattering as that may be, the biggest recommendation about Meyer's work is that he sounds like no one, except himself. It is the unique sound of a surprising new American talent. Roest is a brilliant novel."
—TROUW , The Netherlands
"Meyer punches in the same heavyweight division as John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy. He's that good."
—Qantas
"a novel which you finish feeling hopeful for the future. Because as long as American literature brings forth debut novels of this standing, we do not have to worry about the demise of the generation of post-war literary giants."
—NRC, The Netherlands
"[a] skillful debut...both affecting and timely."
—The New Yorker
"powerful insight...captivating...compelling."
—The Observer (UK)
“Novelists spend entire careers trying to write even one classic book. Philipp Meyer has accomplished that feat on his first attempt. American Rust might one day be recognized as one of our great American novels.”
— The Dayton Daily News
"American Rust impresses...this is a new writer who clearly knows what he's doing."
—The Times (London), Douglas Kennedy
"brilliant...a documentarist's eye for an uncertain, self-destructing world, the lyrical style to nail a friendship in a sentence and an almost effortless devotion to a page-turning story."
—Metro UK (five star review)
"a fine acheivement...moving between the panoramic and the personal with engaging confidence"
—The Sunday Times UK
"A masterly hybrid of stream of consciousness prose and expertly paced, thrilling narrative."
—The New Zealand Listener
"a bold, absorbing novel...moves deftly from the panoramic to the microscopic — from sweeping views of a dying valley to the quiet ruminations of a mind behind bars."
—The New York Times Book Review (Lewis Robinson)
“a literary thriller…lives up to the hype.”
—Austin American-Statesman
"a hardboiled debut that seems particularly apt during the financial crisis"
—The Wall Street Journal
"poetic...virtuosic...masterful"
—The New Statesman UK
“immediate and compelling, and signals the arrival of a new literary voice.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“American Rust has been described as recalling the Depression-era novels of John Steinbeck...a distinctive story full of a sorrowful hope graced by a profound respect for struggle and the unrelenting courage necessary to carry on.”
—The Miami Herald and The Kansas City Star
"In Philipp Meyer a new American master is born. American Rust is a beautiful, bleak, and ultimately redemptive masterpiece. The best book to come out of America since The Road."
—Chris Cleave, author of The Little Bee
"impeccable, even prescient timing ... startling and recognizable insight ... a talent of great promise."
—The Austin Chronicle
“In contemporary fiction, Meyer…most resembles Andre Dubus, Dennis Lehane or Richard Price.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“With the recent passing of John Updike and the loss of Kurt Vonnegut last year, the American literary landscape is faced with a gaping void… fortunately for us, as readers, there are occasional reasons to hope. Philipp Meyer's debut novel, "American Rust," is one of those reasons.”
—Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star
“I admire his [Meyer’s] writing so much….The same way, frankly, that I do Hemingway. He ought to win the Pulitzer.”
— Patricia Cornwell
“[A] ruthless and powerful book….” (five star review)
—Time Out New York
"an engrossing drama..."
—Marie Claire
"Meyer builds his characters so strongly and so realistically that they are characters who stay with readers long after they finish this compelling novel."
—Binghampton Press & Sun Bulletin
“Already drawing comparisons to Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy, Philipp Meyer paints a dark and timely vision of small-town life in his ambitious debut novel, American Rust….combines the muscular pleasures of a Dennis Lehane thriller with a far-reaching meditation about where we’re headed as a country.”
—The Daily Beast
"As Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath charted the plight of American families during the 1930's Great Depression, American Rust may well be the seminal work for the current one."
—Otago Daily Times New Zealand
“a brilliantly realized story…Philipp Meyer is a fine writer and he has nailed [it].”
—The Morning News, Robert Birnbaum
“Meyer has a thrilling eye for failed dreams and writes uncommonly tense scenes of violence . . . Fans of Cormac McCarthy or Dennis Lehane will find in Meyer an author worth watching.”
—Publishers Weekly
"Meyer's greatest strength as a novelist lies in his poignantly well-rounded characters…strongly recommended for all…fiction collections."
—Library Journal
"Meyer does a terrific job capturing the tone and ethos of his setting…the alternating narrators are compellingly drawn…a grimly powerful hybrid: provocative literary fiction crossed with a propulsive thriller."
—Kirkus
"a great read...has the feel of a true classic...highly recommended."
—Monsters & Critics
Clips (more may be added)
What's Been Happening?
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WELCOME TO THE INTEGRATED GLOBAL CREATIVE ECONOMY
→ from Brazil: 
vai em português galera!
From the duct flute player below to Quincy Jones to you. And vice versa... pathways throughout a creative world united via the enchanted mathematics of the small world phenomenon, that "magic" which positions billions of us around the planet within some 6 or so steps of each other, those inside this matrix tending to within potentially discoverable steps of all others within, & without.
"At the handle of my hoe..."
Here the matrix was born. And so our official theme: A Massa by Raymundo Sodré & Jorge Portugual
Image: Sebastião Salgado
Sprawled across broad equatorial latitudes…
Stoked and steamed and sensual in the broadest sense of the word…
Limned in prosody & cadenced song…
Conceived in a conundrum wrapped in a smile inside an irony…
Dear friend,
The Recôncavo of Bahia, Brazil (the fertile crescent around the great Bay of All Saints) was final port-of-call for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Africans fleeing into the sertão (backlands) were joined by Indigenous fleeing slavery and the possession of their lands, and by Sephardim fleeing the Inquisition in Europe. Three cultures from three continents running for their lives, their confluence forming an unprecedented fourth. Nowhere else but here.
And it is exactly here that our story begins...
You're on a matrix (the transcendent artists below are within it) — in the word's original sense of "source" — of recommendations-in-series concatenating around the planet — this matrix (as odd as this might sound) having begun life as a record shop in Brazil. I'm below left, in the shop, with David Dye for World Café/U.S. National Public Radio...
"Matrixed!"
—founding member Darius Mans (economist, PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) / Ex-president & president-elect of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
"I'm truly thankful ... Sohlangana ngokuzayo :)"
—Nduduzo Makhathini (piano, Blue Note recording artist)
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
—Alicia Svigals (klezmer fiddle; founder of The Klezmatics)
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
—Clarice Assad (composer; piano)
"Many thanks for this – I am touched!"
—Julian Lloyd Webber (cello)
Our logo is a cane cutter, designed by Walter Mariano of the Federal University of Bahia
I opened the shop in Salvador, Bahia in 2005 in order to create an outlet to the wider world for magisterial Brazilian musicians. Our online shop/matrix "radio" — featured in The Guardian — www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/apr/17/10-best-music-radio-station-around-world — was set up and organized on the laptop barely visible there behind me. The interview itself is online at www.npr.org/2013/07/16/202634814/roots-of-samba-exploring-historic-pelourinho-in-salvador-brazil.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar found us (he's a huge jazz fan), David Byrne, Oscar Castro-Neves... Spike Lee walked past the place while I was sitting on the stoop across the street drinking beer and listening to samba from the speaker in the window...
But we weren't exactly easy for the world-at-large to get to. So in order to extend the place's ethos I transformed the site associated with it into a network wherein Brazilian musicians I knew would recommend other Brazilian musicians, who would recommend others...
And as I anticipated, the chalky hand of God-as-mathematician intervened: In human society — per the small-world phenomenon — most of the billions of us on earth are within some 6 or fewer degrees of each other. Likewise, within a network of interlinked artists as I've described above, most of these artists will in the same manner be — or tend to — at most a handful (or so) of steps away from each other.
So then, all that's necessary to put the Brazilians within possible purview of the wide wide world is to include them among a wide wide range of artists around that world.
If, for example, Quincy Jones is inside the matrix, then anybody on his page — whether they be accessing from a campus in L.A., a pub in Dublin, a shebeen in Cape Town, a tent in Mongolia — will be close, transitable steps away from Raymundo Sodré (guitar & leather hat, below), even if they know nothing of Brazil and are unaware that Sodré sings/dances upon this planet. Sodré, having been knocked from the perch of fame and ground into anonymity by Brazil's dictatorship, has now the alternative of access to the world-at-large via recourse to the vast potential of network theory.
...to the degree that other artists et al — writers, researchers, filmmakers, painters, choreographers...everywhere — do also. Artificial intelligence not required. Real intelligence, yes.
Years ago in NYC (I've lived here in Brazil for 30 years now) I "rescued" unpaid royalties (performance & mechanical) for artists/composers including Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Mongo Santamaria, Jim Hall, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, Led Zeppelin, Ray Barretto, Philip Glass and many others. Aretha called me out of the blue vis-à-vis money owed by Atlantic Records. Allen Klein called about money due the estate of Sam Cooke. Jerry Ragovoy (Time Is On My Side, Piece of My Heart) called just to see if he had any unpaid money floating around out there (the royalty world was a shark-filled jungle, to mangle metaphors, and I doubt it's changed).
But the pertinent client (and friend) in the present context is Earl "Speedo" Carroll, of The Cadillacs. Earl went from doo-wopping on Harlem streetcorners to chart-topping success to working as a custodian at PS 87 elementary school on the west side of Manhattan. Through all of this he never lost what made him great.
Greatness and fame are too often conflated. The former should be accessible independently of the latter.
Beyond beaches and carnival and tragedies urban and ecological, Brazil contains an Incandescent Country analogous in many ways to the Mississippi Delta and Deep South. This is the Brazilian Nordeste (Northeast), a place unique in the world, into which entered through the great Baía de Todos os Santos (Bay of All Saints) more enslaved human beings than any other port-of-call throughout the history of mankind. From coastal rainforest into a harsh interior humanity bled into a hot cauldron of Indigenous and Sephardic peoples likewise running from destruction.
And in astounding irony amidst this suffering, music was born: the primordial samba — chula — which journeyed south to Rio de Janeiro to evolve into the national music of Brazil; hinterland manifestations danced in pairs upon pounded earth by the light of lanterns and the moon (“chula” is a Portuguese-language word meaning something of no value, now transmuted into a term of pride).
No time machine is necessary to hear this abiding art. It’s still out there. People who were raised in it, before the arrival of electricity, radio and records, still live. Paramount among these are João do Boi (John of the Ox; clip below) and Raymundo Sodré (image above). Sodré was yanked from poverty and rocketed to national fame in Brazil: a major label deal, a huge hit blasting from every radio from the Amazonian jungle to the urban jungles of Rio and São Paulo. The hit in question was A Massa, Sodré’s defense of the “little” people, the powerless, Sodré’s people. During the dictatorship Sodré career was destroyed. He fled the country to avoid death. He returned nine years later.
Sodré and João are among the last in a great lineage of masters of the moving music of the Recôncavo and the Brazilian Nordeste’s hardscrabble backlands...
Music which is a powerful, passionate distillation of the genius of a multi-stranded culture born in strife and struggle, in a little-known and less understood part of Brazil. Music to assuage suffering by (dis)virtue of the evil that men do.
Music that the entire world could use right now.
Question: Why do matrix media page headers bear an aleph, first letter of the Hebrew alphabet?
Answer: The Matrix was inspired in (the kabbalah-inspired fiction of) Borges' (marvelous short story) El Aleph, that in the pillar in Cairo's Mosque of Amr, where the universe in its entirety throughout all time is perceivable as an infinite hum from deep within the stone...
This "all-seeing" Brazilian "aleph" doesn't hum, however...it dances and sings...
...potent forces derived from its native ground, the Recôncavo proper, where Bahia's primordial samba is danced to upon pounded earth, under moonlight broken by banana, palm and mango leaves, lifting the souls of its participants almost like something religious, which it was, and gods aside, is (João do Boi, black hat right below, with family & friends in São Braz, Bahia):
Create your own media matrix page from the top of this or any matrix page
