BIOGRAPHY
I was born in 1969, the son of two English professors, and grew up in Lexington, MA, a placid little suburb of Boston. I graduated from Harvard in 1991 with a degree in literature, spent several aimless years wandering around reading and temping and trying and failing to learn various foreign languages, then went on to the Ph.D. program in comparative literature at Yale. I left after three years without finishing my degree, once I realized that
a career in comparing literatures was not for me.
Instead I set about gradually turning myself into a journalist. I worked for a string of dot-coms while writing free-lance articles about books, technology and culture in general for various magazines, newspapers and websites, including Lingua Franca, the Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, Salon and the New York Times. In 2002 I was hired by Time and became the magazine's book critic as well as one of its lead technology writers. The New York Times says I'm “among this country's smartest and most reliable critics.”
I published my first novel, Warp, in 1997. My second novel, Codex, came out in 2004 and became an international bestseller. My new novel, The Magicians, was published in August of 2009 and became a New York Times bestseller. I currently live in Brooklyn, NY.
