ABOUT TYPICAL

"Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked."
1Q84, by Haruki Murakami

Typical explores the collective Gen X experience of growing up in the culture of spectacle through the lens of novelist Jaime Clarke’s ambitions and adventures coming of age in Arizona and eventually moving east to New York City.

Anthony Michael Hall promo for TYPICAL


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Jaime Clarke is a graduate of the University of Arizona and holds an MFA from Bennington College. He is the author of the novels:

We’re So Famous, (the first and worst review + WSF 20th anniversary video by Malcolm McDowell + praise for),

Vernon Downs, (praise for + book trailer narrated by Academy Award-winning actor Chris Cooper + alternate trailer),

World Gone Water, (praise for + book trailer narrated by Thora Birch),

and Garden Lakes, (praise for + book trailer narrated by the author),

and the memoirs Poor Man’s Gatsby (praise for) published as Bookmarked: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, in IG Publishing’s Bookmarked series,

and Typical of the Times: Growing Up in the Culture of Spectacle, which is the basis for his microcast, Typical (Anthony Michael Hall promo), available on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and elsewhere.

His Charlie Martens trilogy–Vernon Downs, World Gone Water, and Garden Lakes–is published in an omnibus by Roundabout Press to celebrate the story collection Minor Characters, (ToC), featuring original stories about the minor characters in the trilogy by Mona Awad, Christopher Boucher, Kenneth Calhoun, Nina de Gramont, Ben Greenman, Annie Hartnett, Owen King, Neil LaBute, J. Robert Lennon, Lauren Mechling, Shelly Oria, Stacey Richter, Joseph Salvatore, Andrea Seigel, and Daniel Torday. The collection features a foreword by Jonathan Lethem, and an introduction by Laura van den Berg.

Clarke is also the editor of The Last Novel Ever Published, as well as the anthologies Don’t You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes, and Talk Show: On the Couch with Contemporary Writers; and co-editor of the anthologies No Near Exit: Writers Select Their Favorite Work from Post Road Magazine (with Mary Cotton), (ToC) and Boston Noir 2: The Classics (with Dennis Lehane and Mary Cotton).

His apprentice work is collected as The Last Lemonade Stand on the Block, and his unpublished novel is called Scavengers.

Under the pseudonym J.D. West, he is the author of the Golden Age detective novel, The Disappearance of Swenson’s Secretary: A Harold Ober Mystery. (Harold Ober with his wife and Scottie Fitzgerald)

He is a founding editor of the literary magazine Post Road, now published at Boston College, and co-owner, with his wife, of Newtonville Books, an independent bookstore in Boston. (Newtonville Books’s 20th anniversary video) (Anniversary video by Mona Awad and Kenneth Calhoun) (Newtonville Books video: “Where do you hold your events?”)