Rick Moody

His second memoir, The Long Accomplishment will be published in 2019.

Reviews of Moody’s novel Purple America continued in this vein. Salon commented: "Reading Purple America can feel like dancing a quadrille with four very different partners. On we go, propelled from consciousness to consciousness by Moody's prodigious gift for ventriloquism and large, supple vocabulary." Details was also positive: "You come up gasping on the last page." Publishers Weekly called it "ambitious, stylistically dazzling and heartfelt." Booklist states: "Closely interknitting his narrative with the lyrical, soaring monologues of all the key players, Moody effortlessly moves from one striking passage to the next....it's the characters' voices, so full of urgency and distress, that are unforgettable." And The Paris Review wrote that it was with Purple America that "Moody’s reputation as a prose stylist began to be cast. Purple America’s surgically deft formal construction, its loping, labyrinthine sentences and stunning ear for both the comic and dramatic (often within the same breath) press the reader through a weekend in the life of the Raitliffes, a Connecticut family—foremost, Billie Raitliffe, late-term victim of a degenerative nerve disease and mother of Hex, the alcoholic, stuttering hero. As the novel asserts at the end of the first chapter: “if he’s a hero, then heroes are five-and-dime, and the world is as crowded with them as it is with stray pets, worn tires, and missing keys.”

The Washington Post reviewed Moody’s collection of novellas Right Livelihoods, describing "The Albertine Notes" as “one of the best stories to appear in the new millennium; it underscores that Rick Moody is one of our best writers.” Irish weekly The Sunday Business Post called the story “a symbolic reaction to the crisis of instability in American identity today” and remarked that the collection as a whole “brilliantly reflects the unease and baroque insecurities of the post-9/11 nation."

Moody's music writing has also drawn criticism. In the online journal The Rumpus, Moody slammed pop-country star Taylor Swift and her music, labeling her lyrics "artificial and repellent" and equating its interest to that of Olestra-based products, Swiffers, tiered Jell-O dessert products, home cosmetic surgery, and rectal bleaching. After commentors objected to Moody's anti-Swift screed, Moody took to Salon and wrote "I am happy, in the end, that a lot of young women like Taylor Swift. I am glad they have music they love, even if I believe they will be bored of her ultimately, just as I once was happy about the Bay City Rollers, or Sweet, or Alice Cooper, or, differently, Kiss, even though I recognized that music was kitsch...But it’s the job of the critic to sort through the collision of contemporary music with the history of the form and to assess music based on more enduring values, which are, it’s true, partly subjective, but which also come to rest on an understanding of what music has been".

His most recent novel, 2015's Hotels of North America, received widespread critical praise. Dwight Garner wrote in The New York Times that "this is Mr. Moody’s best novel in many years. It’s a little book, a bagatelle, but it’s a little book of irony and wit and heartbreak. It is insightful on topics like the joy of stockpiling hotel hair-care products while also asking the big questions, such as, “Which man among us is not, most of the time, possessed of the desire to curl himself into a fetal ball.". Hotels of North America was described by the Washington Post as "formally daring, often very funny and surprisingly moving. It should earn Moody new fans from a millennial cohort that was still in diapers back when he was basking in his early critical acclaim."

Moody's memoir The Black Veil (2002) won the NAMI/Ken Book Award and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. The Diviners was released in 2005. Little, Brown and Company, the publisher of The Diviners, changed the cover after the galleys came out because women reacted negatively to it. The original cover showed a Conan the Barbarian-type image in technicolor orange; the new cover uses that same image, but frames it as a scene on a movie screen. The Diviners was followed in 2007 by Right Livelihoods, a collection of three novellas published in Britain and Ireland as The Omega Force. The Four Fingers of Death was released July 28, 2010 by Little, Brown and Company. In 2012, he won Italy's Fernanda Pivano Award. 2015's Hotels of North America, his most recent novel, was named a best book of the year by NPR and the Washington Post.

His 2005 novel The Diviners received praise as well. "If you like watching the smartest kid in the room do his stuff," The Washington Post wrote, "The Diviners is like a Broadway musical filled with nothing but showstoppers, as Moody performs one bravura set piece after another. Brooke Allen, writing for The Wall Street Journal, said that "Rick Moody is one of the most prodigiously talented writers in America...like a master ventriloquist, Mr. Moody fills "The Diviners" with stunning little monologues...In the novel's most impressive display of technical prowess, Mr. Moody even puts himself inside the head of an autistic boy—and makes us feel that he has gotten it right."

The Review of Contemporary Fiction, in their June 2003 issue, says of Moody's writing:

2001's Demonology, a short story collection, received particular attention for its title story, of which Nicci Gerrard wrote: "It is about the death of a sister, whose life he offers to us in snapshots: her childhood, her motherhood, her sudden death. 'I should have a better ending,' he says. 'I shouldn't say her life was short and often sad, I shouldn't say she had her demons, as I do too...' It is tempting to think of this beautiful and melancholy coda to Rick Moody's stories as the appearance of the author, stepping out of the shadows at last, particularly since the first story in the collection is also, though much more obliquely, about the death of a beloved sister."

In 2001, Rick Moody co-founded the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award with Ethan Hawke, Hannah McFarland, and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh.

Lydia Millet, in a 2001 article for The Village Voice, described Moody as "equipped with subtle but powerful typographic tools—the vibrant and pervasive Bernhardian italic phrase, pregnant with meaning, the elegant Joycean em dash denoting dialogue—Moody strikes me as a self-styled avenging angel of highbrow literary cool. Underneath the Clark Kentish exterior lurks a crypto-Superman schooled in semiotics and steeped in pop culture, one eyebrow permanently raised at the unsightly stupidity of the masses."

Janet Burroway, in a 2001 article for The New York Times, wrote that Moody "has been compared to John Cheever, with ample justification. He has the same knockabout whimsy careering into keen lament. But Mr. Moody's work has a distinctive rawness; it's more steeped in rage. He's also funnier, and to that degree less reconciled to the world as he finds it. Cheever had less to forgive; the waterfall of language here is full of toxic sludge. Perhaps this is only to say that John Cheever belonged to midcentury, while Rick Moody is a chronicler of the middle class for the millennium."

In addition to his fiction, Moody is a musician and composer. He belongs to a group called the Wingdale Community Singers, which he describes as performing "woebegone and slightly modernist folk music, of the very antique variety." Moody composed the song "Free What's-his-name," performed by Fly Ashtray on their 1997 EP Flummoxed, collaborated with One Ring Zero on the EP Rick Moody and One Ring Zero in 2004, and also contributed lyrics to One Ring Zero's albums As Smart As We Are, Memorandum, and Planets. In 2006, an essay by Moody was included in Sufjan Stevens's box-set Songs for Christmas. In 2013, he published the first interview with David Bowie after the release of The Next Day. In 2016, he co-wrote three songs with Tanya Donnely on her new Swan Song Series album.

Moody's second novel, 1994's The Ice Storm, was his critically praised breakthrough. Adam Begley, writing for the Chicago Tribune, called it "A bitter and loving and damning tribute to the American family.... This is a good book, packed with keen observation and sympathy for human failure" His third novel, 1997's Purple America also received praise. Occurring over a single weekend, the story of Hex Radcliffe's visit to suburban Connecticut was described by the New York Times as "breathtaking...The novel is wonderfully convincing about the contrary, almost arbitrary shifts that seem to lie at the heart of human feeling.".

He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University in 1986; nearly two decades later he would criticize the program in an essay in The Atlantic Monthly. Soon after finishing his thesis, he checked himself into a mental hospital for alcoholism. Once sober and while working for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, he wrote his first novel, 1992's Garden State, about young people growing up in the industrial wasteland of northern New Jersey, where he was living at the time. In his introduction to the 1997 reprint of the novel, he called it the most "naked" thing he has written. Garden State won the Pushcart Editor's Choice Award.

When asked by the New York Times Book Review what he thought was the best book of American fiction from 1975 to 2000, Moody chose Grace Paley's The Collected Stories.

Hiram Frederick Moody III (born October 18, 1961) is an American novelist and short story writer best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought him widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into the film The Ice Storm. Many of his works have been praised by fellow writers and critics alike, and in 1999 The New Yorker chose him as one of America's most talented young writers, placing him on their "20 Writers for the 21st Century" list.