Benjamin Anastas

More recently, Anastas has published articles on the Mayan Calendar 2012 hoax in The New York Times Magazine, the prosperity gospel in Harper's Magazine and a short piece about his father's nude portrait on Granta's website. His essay "The Foul Reign of Emerson's 'Self Reliance' ", also from The New York Times Magazine, was selected for The Best American Essays 2012, guest edited by David Brooks.

His memoir, Too Good To Be True, was published in 2012. The title is taken from a sign that the author was made to wear around his neck by a childhood therapist. It tells the story of his stalled career as a writer, the end of his marriage, and his attempts to rebuild his life again. Anastas published the book with Amazon's fledgling publishing imprint in New York City and numerous bookstores have refused to stock it. Giles Harvey, writing in The New Yorker, groups Too Good to Be True in a category he calls the "failure memoir" and cites F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up essays as an influence.

Anastas's fiction, criticism, essays and journalism have appeared in Story, GQ, The Paris Review, The New Republic online, The New York Observer, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and Bookforum. In 2005, The Yale Review published his novella Versace Enthroned with Saints: Margaret, Jerome, Alex and the Angel Donatella and later awarded it the Smart Family Foundation Prize for Fiction.

Benjamin Anastas (born 1969) is an American novelist, memoirist, journalist and book reviewer born in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He teaches literature at Bennington College and is part of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars.