why me?

Surface issues . . .

Edward Cowan’s stories have been published in Ideomancer, The First Line, Atomjack, and Thieves Jargon. He is now prepared to unleash his novel My Life as the Source of All Evil, a black comedy appraising our everything/all the time culture, on an unsuspecting world. (Why not read this excerpt?) He lives in Athens, Georgia, where he contributes the occasional political and/or pop-culture column to Flagpole, Athens’ alternative weekly paper.

To contact Edward, please email him at info@edwardcowan.com.

 

. . . and then the deep stuff.

Edward Cowan was born in Greenville, South Carolina in 1977, his birth heralding the new, post-Elvis era of American history. His family migrated to the Atlanta suburbs in 1983, where the magic of cable, vectored through MTV, taught the young Edward valuable life lessons concerning strip clubs, motorcycles, and binge-drinking.

With the collapse of glam rock, Edward gleefully joined the national gloom of the early 90s, which was auspiciously timed to coincide with his teenage years. It was during this morose epoch that Edward decided he wanted to be a writer. And woe to the trees for his decision! Many a ream of paper knew the lash of his id.

Edward graduated with a Journalism degree from the University of Georgia in 1999. Then . . . oh, there was some finding-oneself time . . . a lot of Bond-Marathon-on-TBS-watching . . . and, finally, a graphic design job at one of the world’s largest balloon- and gift-product companies, where he is currently employed.

 

. . . and if you’re still reading, how about some homework?

A.k.a., authors I admire. If you took all these books, crammed them in a blender, and drank the resulting slurry . . . you still wouldn’t have a book half as good as mine.

Kidding! Kidding! Sheesh. Come on, now. These are incredible books by amazing writers I’ve tried to emulate. If you haven’t read them, you should. NOW.

Saul Bellow: The Adventures of Augie March.

Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination.

Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary.

Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

Philip K. Dick: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov.

James Ellroy: American Tabloid.

Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections (bonus points for withstanding Oprah’s wrath).

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, Part I.

Dashiell Hammett: Red Harvest.

Joseph Heller: Catch-22.

Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises.

Robert E. Howard: The Conan stories.

John Krakauer: Under the Banner of Heaven.

Erik Larson: The Devil In the White City.

Mark Leyner: Et Tu, Babe?

David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas.

David Quammen: Monster of God.

Philip Roth: The Plot Against America.

Salmon Rushdie: Midnight’s Children.

Barbara Tuchman: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14^th Century.

Kurt Vonnegut: Cat’s Cradle.