Richard Hoffman (CNF, Fiction, Poetry) | Boston, MA

Richard Hoffman is author, most recently, of the memoir Love & Fury, a finalist for the New England Book Award from the New England Independent Booksellers Association. He is also author of the celebrated Half the House: a Memoir, just reissued in a new 20th Anniversary Edition in 2015, with an introduction by Louise DeSalvo. His poetry collections are Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the 2008 Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club; and Emblem. A fiction writer as well, his Interference & Other Stories was published in 2009. A past Chair of PEN New England, he is Senior Writer in Residence at Emerson College in Boston.

Books

Press & Reviews

Love & Fury
“Masterful and necessary…. What makes Hoffman so good at the memoir form is a rare combination of honest self-scrutiny, fairness, intellectual rigor, and emotional bravery. But what makes this book so important is what Hoffman excavates here layer by layer: how shaped and often shackled we are by the past, one that is bloody, racist, patriarchal, and as class- stratified as ever.
—Andre Dubus III, author of Townie: A Memoir

Emblem: Poems
“An extraordinary book. Hoffman knows poetic forms, and he handles them deftly. His poems move beyond form to inhabit the places where our human selves reside, the country of the heart, the city of the mind. I admire this poet for his verve, and I follow where he leads.
—Pablo Medina, author of The Man Who Wrote on Water

Interference & Other Stories
“The stories in Interference are moving, wise, and bracingly unsentimental. Richard Hoffman writes about male sadness and vulnerability with unusual insight and tough-minded compassion.”
–Tom Perrotta

Interference & Other Stories
“These stories of ordinary and extraordinary heartbreak investigate centuries-old themes with details that are at once familiar and surprising. Humorous or brutal, transgressive or redemptive, each story is full of wisdom and beauty.”
—Kyoko Mori

Without Paradise: Poems
“Richard Hoffman’s poems are quietly daring. In an era dominated by the ‘plain style’, he achieves formal elegance without stooping to mere facility. In an age of sometimes ponderous confessionalism, he dares to be funny (but never sardonic or facetious). Still these are poems of high aspiration and accomplishment, that contemplate large and deep issues with power and conviction.”
—John Hildebid

Half the House: A Memoir
“Hoffman makes very clear the complex encounter of his old life and his new one. There are no easy wrap-ups, no comforting bromides. But in the generational panorama we suddenly discern that a hard, brave victory has been achieved. The family saga has come full circle. Hoffman, sober, a father, has not only lived to tell the tale. He has worked to understand it and fashion it into art.”
—Sven Birkerts in The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again

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