Charles Bock

"Sometimes, when my siblings and I were little, my parents, for various reasons, used to have us stay in the back of the shop. This would be after school or during summer vacation, when there wasn’t summer camp, or they didn’t have anybody to watch over us and we were too small to be alone. We’d occupy our time with sodas from a nearby casino’s gift shop, comic books, and a television that got wavy reception, and we’d do small chores, rolling coins or filing the previous day’s pawn tickets. The store often had a line of people waiting to pawn their goods, local customers who worked in casinos and also spent all their spare time playing blackjack and slot machines, and also tourists who had blown all their cash, and maybe their plane tickets home, and now were desperate, and hung over, and needed loans on their wedding rings, so they could go back into the casinos and win back their money. I’d sometimes stare out of the back of the store and watch the people in line and take in their faces. Lots of times my parents would be put in the position of having to tell these people that their wedding ring was only worth a fraction of what they’d paid for it, or that, say, the diamonds in that ring were brown and flawed. From the back of the store, I’d watch as the customers exploded and called my parents dirty Jews and cursed at them and threatened them at the top of their lungs. It’s impossible in situations like that not to feel for everybody involved — to be horrified, sure, but more than that, to be saddened by the spectacle, to want so much more than that out of life for everyone."

Bock is a 2009 recipient of the Silver Pen Award (Nevada Writers Hall of Fame), which was established in 1996 to recognize mid-career writers who have already shown substantial achievement.

In 2009, Bock's first wife, Diana Colbert, was diagnosed with leukemia. The couple's daughter, Lily Star, was six months old at the time. Following a pair of bone marrow transplants, Diana Colbert died in December 2011, three days before Lily Star's third birthday. He subsequently married writer Leslie Jamison, with whom he has a daughter. They are no longer married, and share custody of their daughter.

Charles Bock (born 1969) is an American writer whose debut 2008 novel Beautiful Children (published by Random House) was selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year for 2008, and won the 2009 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.