Matt Fullerty writes novels about chess, crime and conmen, namely a chess prodigy, a murderess and an art forger.

Paul Morphy's story is a rites of passage tale about a boy who becomes famous by playing chess. It is also a cautionary tale about New Orleans, family pride and a mind who cannot cope with the real world....The Knight of New Orleans, The Pride and the Sorrow of Paul Morphy is a cross between Josh Waitzkin's Searching for Bobby Fischer (about a chess prodigy) and Vladimir Nabokov's The Luzhin Defense (about chess causing madness). Paul resists gambling and dueling and despite Morphy family rivalries he takes on the Europeans at their own game. But the red-light district and temptations on the other side of New Orleans are never far away...

The Pride and the Sorrow: Interview, June 2008

A 23-minute interview with Matt is now available at this link with Clare Tanner of the Bookhabit Show. "Every month over 20,000 listeners download our podcasts for The Bookhabit Show where we tell the author's story behind the story."

For more details about my academic work in British and American literature, specifically my PhD dissertation about the "academic novel," please follow this link.

 

Taking my Ph.D. at George Washington University, I became interested in fiction with professors and students as central characters. I undertook a historical study of the academic genre, from the comic novels of David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury, as well as Kingsley Amis, to specific studies such as Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita (1955), and modern fiction by writers including Willy Russell, Tom Sharpe, Michael Chabon, Margaret Edson, Tim O'Brien, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Don DeLillo, Bernard Malamud, Richard Russo and J. M. Coetzee. It has been a great experience to write about all these writers and the academic tropes they draw on and re-shape! My dissertation is entitled The British and American Academic Novel: The Professorromane, The Comic Campus, The Tragic Self.