Steven Brust

On April 3, 2015, Brust performed as part of Cats Laughing in a reunion concert at the Minicon 50 science fiction convention in Bloomington, Minnesota. In March 2016, Cats Laughing released a double CD of their 2015 reunion, A Long Time Gone, as well as a DVD by the same title with documentary concert footage.

Brust does not have nicknames for collaborations out of respect for his collaborators, stating "It's one thing to not want to take myself seriously, and another thing to—I want to take them seriously."

Brust has written 15 published novels in the series, which is proposed to run to nineteen novels – one named for each of the Great Houses, one named for Vlad himself (Taltos), and a final novel which Brust has said will be titled The Final Contract. The first three novels resemble private-eye detective stories, perhaps the closest being Robert B. Parker's Spenser series. The later novels are more varied than the first three. Though they read like fantasy, there are science-fictional explanations for some things.

Further, as the writing of the Taltos novels has spanned over three decades, they have been influenced by events in Brust's own life. A fascination with the Mafia – subsequently brought into a somewhat shocking perspective by the murder of a friend – profoundly influenced his storylines, as did the breakup of his marriage. The events and arguments of his books, especially Teckla, are acknowledged by Brust to be influenced by his lifelong interest in Marxist theory and practice. Brust's parents were activists in the Workers League, the predecessor to the Socialist Equality Party, and he continues to identify as a "Trotskyist sympathizer," linking to the SEP-affiliated World Socialist Web Site on his personal website. He has endorsed the SEP's presidential candidates in the 2016 US elections.

Brust discovered in August 2006 that he had made the New York Times extended bestseller list at number 30 with Dzur. He mentioned his ambivalence on this subject online. SciFi Wire posted an interview with Brust after Dzur came out.

Brust's short story "When The Bow Breaks" was nominated for the 1999 Nebula Award, although it did not reach the final ballot.

Dragon was a finalist for the 1999 Minnesota Book Awards in the Fantasy & Science Fiction category. Freedom and Necessity was a 1998 finalist for the same category, while The Phoenix Guards was a finalist in 1992.

The 1995 enhanced CD Songs from The Gypsy, by the band Boiled in Lead, featured songs written by Brust and Adam Stemple, as well as the full text of Brust's novel The Gypsy.

Conversely, a critical review by AllMusic's Roch Parisien emphasized that "Songs from The Gypsy represents a failure of multimedia integration. As an audio CD, the disc serves up ten songs, ranging from acoustic trad to bluesy rockers, that ironically form a less cohesive whole than previous Boiled in Lead releases. The better numbers (like the title track) incorporate Celtic rock with Hungarian, Middle Eastern and other interesting worldbeat influences." Parisien found the album's integration with the novel unsuccessful, in that the novel's 17 chapters were presented as "scrollable text only, which also intersperse some 80 song lyric excerpts that you can play from hot buttons. Annoyingly, you must flip back to a main menu index to move from one chapter to the next." Parisien concluded, "Despite Brust's engrossingly poetic, impressionist story inspired by Hungarian folk tales and revolving around three Gypsy brothers, the project does not overcome the primary limitation of bringing literature to the computer screen, that being that the computer offers an inhospitable environment for viewing literature-length text." The review, written in 1995, predated a wave of popular e-book readers that began to emerge about ten years later.

Five Hundred Years After was nominated for the 1995 Locus Poll Award (Best Fantasy Novel). Other novels nominated for various Locus Poll Awards were Brokedown Palace, The Gypsy, Agyar, and Freedom & Necessity.

Brust also co-wrote two songs on the 1994 album Antler Dance by the band Boiled in Lead, as well as many of the songs on BiL's 1995 multimedia CD Songs from The Gypsy.

A Rose for Iconoclastes, a folk (or folk pop) album released in 1993, is Brust's only solo album. The title is a reference to "A Rose for Ecclesiastes", a short story by Brust's literary hero and mentor Roger Zelazny.

As a drummer and singer-songwriter, Brust has recorded one solo album and two albums as a member of Cats Laughing. Brust also co-wrote songs on two albums recorded in the mid-1990s by the band Boiled in Lead.

Cats Laughing released two albums with Brust as drummer, in 1988 and 1990. Brust also contributed as a songwriter and vocalist. The 1990 album Another Way to Travel features cover art that depicts the band members and a vehicle known as the Catmobile, the band vehicle for Cats Laughing. The car, owned by Brust, was a Cadillac ambulance, painted yellow, light blue, and dark blue, with murals.

Steven Karl Zoltán Brust (born November 23, 1955) is an American fantasy and science fiction author of Hungarian descent. He is best known for his series of novels about the assassin Vlad Taltos, one of a disdained minority group of humans living on a world called Dragaera. His recent novels also include The Incrementalists (2013) and its sequel The Skill of Our Hands (2017), with co-author Skyler White.