New Short Fiction Series alum, Dan Akst, can be heard today at 1 pm PST on KPCC’s Patt Morrison show. Akst is a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Slate and other leading publications. His latest book is We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess (Penguin Press). He recently became a member of the editorial board at Newsday, where he also writes a weekly column. His novel St. Burl’s Obituary (New Short Fiction Series 1996), about a fat man who becomes unrecognizably thin (and takes up the chance to re-inhabit his former life), was short-listed for the PEN/Faulkner prize for best work of fiction by an American. Akst is a contributing editor at the Wilson Quarterly, where he has written about the historical impact of plummeting food prices, the reasons looks should matter, our changing attitudes about thrift, and the problem of self-control. He has been a Koret Fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC, and a public policy fellow at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and lives in New York’s bucolic Hudson Valley, where temptation is easily avoided.
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Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
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