A Precarious Man

STEFAN MATTESSICH has written three novels: Point Guard, a coming-of-age story set on the Northern California coast of Mendocino; East Brother, a satire about gentrification in a fictional California beach town; and The Riverbed, about intelligent young people coming to understand the darker sides of the suburbia where they live. He went to Yale College and has a PhD in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he wrote a monograph on the fiction of Thomas Pynchon entitled Lines of Flight, published by Duke University Press. He has also written a wide variety of literary criticism and cultural theory. He teaches English at Santa Monica College and lives in Los Angeles.