Marisha Pessl

Author profile

born

October 26, 1977 in Detroit or Clarkston, Michigan, The United States

gender

female

website

http://www.calamityphysics.com

genre

Literature & Fiction

About this author

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Marisha Pessl is an American writer best known for her debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

Pessl was born in Clarkston, Michigan, to Klaus, an Austrian engineer for General Motors, and Anne, an American homemaker. Pessl's parents divorced when she was three, and she moved to Asheville, North Carolina with her mother and sister. Pessl had an intellectually stimulating upbringing, recalling that her mother read "a fair chunk of the Western canon out loud" to her and her sister before bed, and entered her in lessons for riding, painting, jazz, and French. Pessl started high school at the Asheville School, a private, co-educational boarding school, but graduated from Asheville High School 1995. She attended Northwestern University f...more Marisha Pessl is an American writer best known for her debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

Pessl was born in Clarkston, Michigan, to Klaus, an Austrian engineer for General Motors, and Anne, an American homemaker. Pessl's parents divorced when she was three, and she moved to Asheville, North Carolina with her mother and sister. Pessl had an intellectually stimulating upbringing, recalling that her mother read "a fair chunk of the Western canon out loud" to her and her sister before bed, and entered her in lessons for riding, painting, jazz, and French. Pessl started high school at the Asheville School, a private, co-educational boarding school, but graduated from Asheville High School 1995. She attended Northwestern University for two years before transferring to Barnard College, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in English Literature.

After graduating, she worked as a financial consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, while writing in her free time. After two failed attempts at novels, Pessl began writing a third in 2001 about the relationship between a daughter and her controlling, charismatic father. Pessl completed the novel, titled Special Topics in Calamity Physics, in 2004, and it was published in 2006 to "almost universally positive" reviews, eventually becoming a New York Times Best Seller and being published in thirty languages.

Pessl's second novel, Night Film, a "psychological literary thriller[...]about a New York filmmaker looking into an apparent suicide", will be published by Random House in Fall 2010.

Pessl married Nic Caiano, a hedge fund manager, in 2003, and they lived in New York City. She filed for divorce in August 2009.

Pessl was also a contributing musician to The Pierces' third studio album, Thirteen Tales of Love and Revenge, released in 2007: she is credited in the liner notes as having played the French horn on track 9 titled "The Power Of..."

In April 2008 Marisha Pessl and her husband sued the AKA Sutton Place hotel for $50,000 after their three cats were allegedly poisoned by rat poison. They were staying in the hotel after a fire damaged their Tribeca apartment.

(from Wikipedia 6-24-10)
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Books by Marisha Pessl

Average rating: 3.67 · 16,402 ratings · 3,111 reviews · 2 distinct works

	Special Topics in Calamity Physics 3.67 avg rating — 16,395 ratings — published 2006 — 38 editions	My rating:
	Night Film 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — expected publication 2012 — 7 editions	My rating:

* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.

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Quotes by Marisha Pessl

“But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better.”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

41 people liked it

“Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

tags: epic , stories

36 people liked it

“Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging - not enlightenment but enleadenment.”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

34 people liked it

See all Marisha Pessl's quotes »

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