“[Helen DeWitt] tunes into the contemporary American idiom and its corporate-speak with perfect pitch.”
— The Rumpus on Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods
“[Helen DeWitt] tunes into the contemporary American idiom and its corporate-speak with perfect pitch.”
— The Rumpus on Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods
Helen DeWitt is the author of The Last Samurai, which has been translated into twenty languages. She lives in Berlin.
Helen DeWitt was born in a suburb of Washington, D.C. in 1957. Her father joined the Foreign Service in 1960, and she grew up primarily in South America. She has a B.A. in Literae Humaniores and a D.Phil. in Greek and Latin Literature from the University of Oxford. Her first novel, The Last Samurai, was published in 2000 by Talk Miramax Books and subsequently in nineteen other countries. A Guggenheim Fellowship (2006-7) supported work on Risk, a novel incorporating the information design of Edward Tufte (in progress). She has collaborated with the painter Ingrid Kerma on the show "Blushing Brides," with journalist Ilya Gridneff on the novel Your Name Here, with photographer Emily Horne on "Sexual Codes of the Europeans" for Photography & Prose (under curation), and with artist Elizabeth McAlpine on "Plantinga" for Photomonth Krakow.
Lightning Rods
photo credit: Aileen Son
Helen DeWitt, “Springtime for Hitler”, and Game Shows“This is excellent: cold and crazy...The jokes are like hammers.”
— The New Yorker on Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods
“DeWitt is a brutal humorist...uproariously funny.”
— The Wall Street Journal on Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods
“Lightning Rods is an exercise in novel as extrapolation. It’s an appealingly practical way to think about writing fiction, and one that ignores any distinction between realism and fantasy.”
— The New York Observer on Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods
“The basic premise for Lightning Rods is so audacious that it might be hard to get past its general conceit, but its true brilliance lies in DeWitt’s careful deployment of language so common that we no longer see it. As any million-dollar litigation lawyer or two-cent literary critic will tell you, the devil is in the details.”
— Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review on Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods
“It so emphatically aces the tasks it sets for itself, and delivers such a jolt of pleasure along the way, that it reminds me of just how major a minor work can be... At any rate, as one of her endearingly flummoxed characters might say, I literally cannot wait to see what she does next.”
— Garth Risk Hallberg, The Millions on Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods
“DeWitt’s wickedly smart satire deserves to be a classic.”
— Bookforum on Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods
