Mark Sarvas
Mark Sarvas is the American Book Award-winning author of the novels MEMENTO PARK (FSG) and HARRY, REVISED (Bloomsbury). MEMENTO PARK has been called “gripping” by Salman Rushdie and “ceaselessly intelligent” by Joseph O’Neill. The Washington Post called it “a fundamentally thoughtful and meditative story” and Newsday called it “... a psychologically rich portrait of family discord.” Winner of a 2019 American Book Award, it was also a finalist for the prestigious Sami Rohr Prize, and won the 2019 Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award. It was shortlisted for the JQ Wingate Literary Prize, and longlisted for the Sophie Brody Medal. Sarvas was also longlisted for the 2020 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize. His debut novel, HARRY, REVISED, was published in more than a dozen countries around the world, earning raves from Le Monde to The Australian. His book reviews and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Threepenny Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Bookforum, The Huffington Post, The Dallas Morning News, The Barnes and Noble Review, Truthdig, The Modern Word, Boldtype and the Los Angeles Review of Books (where he is a contributing editor). He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and PEN America, and has judged the PEN Center USA Fiction Award, the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the Kirkwood Prize and The Tournament of Books. He was a recipient of a 2018 Santa Monica Arts Fellowship, and he teaches advanced novel writing in the UCLA Extension Writers Program. He has been a Guildhall Artist-in-Residence and holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Literature from Bennington College.
Mark can be found at marksarvas.com.
Charitable Organization: Hurston Wright Foundation
Praise
"Sly, searching . . . Sarvas is astute in portraying how relationships can calcify in childhood, and the exquisite pain of attempting to repair them in adulthood . . . [He] tackles big questions―about what constitutes restitution, the nature of faith, the essential role of storytelling in our lives. A twist at the end, the book’s ultimate con, is too good to spoil, and left me rethinking the characters and the story. It’s a testament to Sarvas’s skill that such a trick felt like a gift." ―Ellen Umansky, The New York Times Book Review
"While Sarvas’s book is full of cunningly prepared surprises, it is also a fundamentally thoughtful and meditative story, whose real plot is Matt’s achievement of a kind of perspective on his past . . . While Memento Park is very much a book about the Hungarian Jewish experience, the dynamics it portrays are common to any immigrant family, where history is the thing everyone is trying to forget, even though it is present in every word." ―Adam Kirsch, The Washington Post
"An absorbing drama . . . this second novel is more polished and heartfelt . . . Memento Park is ultimately about the mutability of memories and understanding, and an exhortation to really pay attention ― while realizing how much you may miss regardless." ―Heller McAlpin, NPR.org
