Eckhard Gerdes

Eckhard Gerdes is an American-born novelist & editor. He earned his MFA in creative writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

He’s author of eight published novels:

Projections (Depth Charge 1986)

Ring in a River (Depth Charge 1989)

Truly Fine Citizen (Highlander 1992)

Cistern Tawdry (Fugue State 2002)

Przewalski’s Horse (Red Hen Press 2006)

The Million-Year Centipede, or, Liquid Structures (Raw Dog Screaming 2007)

Nin & Nan (Bizarro 2008)

My Landlady the Lobotomist (Raw Dog Screaming 2008)

His work reflects experimental technique, sometimes ignoring time, space, or causality in the service of stories of individuals struggling to transcend fear and limitation. His recent work has been associated with the Bizarro Fiction movement, of which he is one of the leading proponents.

Reviews of his work have appeared in Rain Taxi, Notre Dame Review, Cream People, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and elsewhere.

Eckhard Gerdes is the editor of the Journal of Experimental Fiction, issues of which are usually Festschrifts on a single writer (e.g. John Barth, Raymond Federman, Harold Jaffe). He has also written on modern and post-modern literature for the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Hyde Park Review of Books, and other magazines.

Gerdes has twice been the recipient of the Richard Pike Bissell Creative Writing Award for excerpts from Przewalski’s Horse. The Million-Year Centipede was selected as one of the top ten mainstream novels of 2007 in the annual Preditors and Editors Readers Poll. He has also been a finalist for both the Starcherone and the Blatt fiction prizes for his unpublished manuscript White Bungalows. For Cistern Tawdry, Gerdes was nominated for the Georgia Author of the Year Award in the fiction category. He lives near Chicago. He has three children.