Norman M. Klein

In 2004, the Beall Center for Art and Technology organized a retrospective of Klein's work.

As layered systems that resemble certain genres of games and other media narrative formats, Klein's novels primarily offer literary alternatives. Having coined the term "scripted space" in 1998, Klein (with Margo Bistis) coined "Wunder roman" in 2012 to characterize a particular kind of picaresque novel whose parts function as a narrative engine.

Since 1974, Klein has been a professor in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, where he is on the faculty of both the Master's Program in Aesthetics and Politics and the Center for Integrated Media.

Klein has written catalog essays for Doug Aitken, Chip Lord, "The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside," "More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness," "Exchange and Evolution: Worldwide Video Long Beach 1974-1999," Simon Denny, Kutluğ Ataman, Karina Nimmerfall, Rossen Crow, Peter Friedl, Christian Jankowski, Bjørn Melhus, George Stone, "Las Vegas Aesthetics," "Animations," "Au-Delà du Spectacle," "Reading California," Martin Kippenberger, and Helter Skelter.

Born in Brooklyn, Klein grew up in an immigrant neighborhood where he regularly heard people tell stories that were partly true and partly not, which informed his view of people's personal histories. In 1966, he earned a B.A. in History at Brooklyn College and then went on to the University of Minnesota, where he earned an M.A. in French Intellectual History in 1968. Soon after, he moved to Los Angeles, where he began teaching at California Institute of the Arts before earning his M. F. A. in Cinema and Professional Writing from the University of Southern California.

Norman M. Klein (born 1945) is an American urban and media historian, as well as an author of fictional works. In 2011, the Los Angeles Times put Klein's 1997 book The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory on its "Best L.A. Books" list.