Christopher Bollen


Christopher Bollen is a novelist and magazine writer/editor who lives in New York City.
Describing his novels, The Daily Telegraph notes that "Bollen writes expansive, psychologically probing novels in the manner of Updike, Eugenides and Franzen, but he is also an avowed disciple of Agatha Christie."

Early life

Raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia College of Columbia University in 1998.

Career

He was the Editor in Chief of Interview Magazine from early 2008 to mid-2009, after serving as Editor in Chief of V Magazine. After stepping down as Editor in Chief, Bollen continued on as Editor at Large of Interview Magazine. On May 21, 2018, the publication ceased operations completely after nearly 50 years.
Bollen also writes about art and culture at other publications like Artforum and The New York Times.

Novels

He published his first novel, Lightning People in 2011. Lightning People is about downtown New York City in 2007.
Bollen's second novel is titled Orient, a thriller published in May 2015 by HarperCollins named after Orient, New York. The Los Angeles Times writes that Orient "might well be this summer's most ambitious thriller or this summer's most thrilling work of literary fiction." The Times further describes it as a "juicy mystery at the tip of Long Island at summer's end, when the season's fleeting pleasures have blown away, revealing the fractured and fractious year-round community that remains behind when the casual visitors have returned to the relative safety of New York City."
Bollen's third novel, The Destroyers was published on June 27, 2017, by HarperCollins, and was honoured with the Bad Sex in Fiction Award in 2017. His fourth novel, A Beautiful Crime, was published in January 2020 by HarperCollins. The novel deals with two young gay men involved in a heist in contemporary Venice, Italy.