Christopher, Nicholas 1951-

PERSONAL:

Born February 28, 1951, in New York, NY; married, November 21, 1980; wife's name Constance (a writer). Education: Harvard College, A.B. (cum laude), 1973. Hobbies and other interests: Travel, film, ancient history.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Agent—Anne Sibbald, Janklow & Nesbit Associates, 445 Park Ave., New York, NY 10022-2606. E-mail—nic@nicholaschristopher.com.

CAREER:

Writer, poet, novelist, and educator. New York University, New York, NY, former adjunct professor of English; Columbia University, New York, lecturer, then associate professor, then professor in writing division of school of the arts.

MEMBER:

PEN, Poetry Society of America.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Amy Lowell Poetry traveling scholarship, 1985; fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts, 1986; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1987; Peter I.B. Lavan Award, Academy of American Poets, 1991; Guggenheim fellowship in poetry, 1993; Poetry Society of America fellowship.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

On Tour with Rita, Knopf (New York, NY), 1982.

A Short History of the Island of Butterflies, Viking (New York, NY), 1986.

Desperate Characters, Viking (New York, NY), 1988.

In the Year of the Comet, Viking (New York, NY), 1992.

Five Degrees and Other Poems, Penguin (New York, NY), 1995.

The Creation of the Night Sky: Poems, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1998.

Atomic Field: Two Poems, Harcourt (New York, NY), 2000.

Crossing the Equator: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2004, Harcourt (Orlando, FL), 2004.

NOVELS

The Soloist, Viking (New York, NY), 1986.

Veronica, Dial Press (New York, NY), 1996.

A Trip to the Stars, Dial Press (New York, NY), 2000.

Franklin Flyer, Dial Press (New York, NY), 2002.

The Bestiary, Dial Press (New York, NY), 2007.

OTHER

(Editor) Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1989.

(Editor) Walk on the Wild Side: Urban American Poetry since 1975, Scribner (New York, NY), 1994.

Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City, Free Press (New York, NY), 1997, new and expanded edition, Shoemaker & Hoard (Emeryville, CA), 2006.

Contributor to anthologies, including New York: Poems, Avon (New York, NY), 1980; The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, Morrow (New York, NY), 1985; The Grand Street Reader, Summit (New York, NY), 1986; Best American Poetry 1988, Scribner-Collier (New York, NY), 1988; Faber Book of MovieVerse, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1993; the Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th edition, Norton (New York, NY), 1996; Norton Anthology of Love, Norton (New York, NY), 1998; Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City, Milkweed, 2000; New York Poems, Everyman Books/Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2002; Snakes: An Anthology of Serpent Tales, M. Evans (New York, NY), 2003; The Music Lover's Poetry Anthology, Persea (New York, NY), 2006; and Poet's Choice, Harcourt (Orlando, FL), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals and magazines, including Grand Street, Esquire, Nation, New Republic, New Yorker, New York Review, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Georgia Review, Paris Review, Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times Book Review.

Author's works have been translated into numerous foreign languages.

ADAPTATIONS:

Author's books have been adapted to audiocassette; Veronica and The Soloist are under option for film.

SIDELIGHTS:

In his first published collection of poems, On Tour with Rita, Nicholas Christopher presents a transcontinental nomad's fleeting glimpses of landscapes ranging from Mexico, Rome, and New Orleans to the Greek islands. Reading like a series of postcards, according to J.D. McClatchy in Poetry, the poems are lucid dreams "in which Rita, the poet's muse and mirror, reflects the life around her." In his attempt to "capture the elusiveness of objects of desire," remarked Bruce Bennett in Nation, Christopher's shimmering, phantasmagorical images provide "little of substance to grasp." Richard Tillinghast in New York Times Book Review, however, stated that though "one may experience a dizziness and exasperation" with some of the poems, "the wit and panache of passages … make reading Mr. Christopher a delight."

A Short History of the Island of Butterflies draws on similar themes and styles as On Tour with Rita. Opting again for exotic settings—Italy and the Greek islands— Christopher "approaches the world with a hedonist's exuberance," commented David Wojahn in New York Times Book Review. Though Christopher's Byronic tone is "apt to become excessive and grandiloquent," claimed Wojahn, "his poems are lushly textured, astutely detailed and above all sensuous," devoid of the "naive sensuality" that marked On Tour with Rita. J.P. White, reviewing the book in Poetry, noted Christopher's "sensualist's eye for detail" and his "profusion of lush pictorial elements," but preferred the "grittier emotional range" of several of the poems ("Winter Night," "The Partisan," "Losing Altitude," and "Notes at Summer's End") that provide "a welcome relief from the tropical narcosis" of the other works.

In Desperate Characters, Christopher alters his previous poetic style and combines it with a novelistic narrative to create what a Virginia Quarterly Review contributor dubbed "an absurdist's detective fiction." The story is summarized by Jane Mendelsohn in Village Voice: "The noir victim hangs out. He waits. Before he can say Maltese Falcon, people lie to him, the police suspect him, and women, for no apparent reason, fling themselves at him." Robert B. Shaw in Poetry commented that the stylized situations knowingly parody the film noir genre to create "a sense of purgatory with no exit and no redemptive purpose." Declaring the urban setting in Desperate Characters "vapid" but possessing an "irresistible neon intensity," New York Times Book Review critic Andy Brumer stated that the "punkrococo imagery" is "a phantasmagorical collage reminiscent of the film Blade Runner." Mendelsohn lauded Christopher's "cool melancholy voice" that conveys "a remarkable mix of accessible outrageous humor with subtle psychological insight."

Harriet Zinnes, reviewing the collection of poems In the Year of the Comet, in the Washington Post Book World, noted that Christopher's "language is always accessible, and though his internal structures can be calculating … he writes with a contemporary conscience." Poetry critic J.D. McClatchy placed Christopher in good company when he summarized that the poet "has a style in which are folded strands of Apollinaire, Frank O'Hara, James Tate, and Nanzia Nunzio." David Baker in Poetry further described Christopher's style as approaching "contemporary neoclassicism" in his use of "erudition to express experience."

In Christopher's 1995 collection, Five Degrees and Other Poems, the titular work is actually an interlinked series of thirty-five poems with allegorical elements, all centered in a single night in an imaginary permutation of New York City where the current temperature is five degrees. It explores themes of magic, history, and spiritual transcendence, and features a quirky cast of characters and situations—among them, Harry Houdini as an aviation pioneer who performs magic only as a hobby, Arctic adventurer John Davis, the historian Herodotus, the friendship of painters Van Gogh and Gauguin, the occupation of an Aegean island by the Nazis, the goddess Inanna's descent into the underworld down a flight of slippery, razor-sharp steps, and an angel who, with blue light, writes a man's signature on a black wall. Twenty-five additional, primarily lyrical poems, set in milieus from Bosnia to Vietnam, round out the book. Booklist contributor Elizabeth Gunderson said of the title poem: "For the most part, the ambitious sequence succeeds, and Christopher's language is as bewitching as the inhabitants of his fantasized metropolis," and stated of all the poems, "Christopher beautifully combines empathy and distance, mystery and exploration." And a Publishers Weekly critic deemed the title poem "a dense and stunning, often elliptical sequence … each [segment] shimmering with immediacy."

Individual interpretations of the structure of Christopher's sixth collection, The Creation of the Night Sky: Poems, vary widely from reviewer to reviewer, no doubt due to the poet's nonlinear approach, which presents individual pieces that can be recontextualized, puzzle-like, as a cohesive whole, creating and illuminating the experiences of a single night, or be perceived as separate, unrelated units. Some perceive the book as beginning with a number of individual poems and concluding with another lengthy, interlinked poem sequence, "Night Journal: January 1-September 24," which weaves together the parallel lives of three characters whose physical and psychic paths cross in the passage of a single night, linked by, in the words of a Publishers Weekly contributor, "clinical snapshots of an anonymous physician's death." Others see "Night Journal" as a centerpiece to which the other poems, which flow from New York City to Naxos, the Kyi Valley of Tibet, Las Vegas, and, finally, back to New York City, in a rush of fantasy, dream, memory, and simultaneous realities, all relate. The Publishers Weekly contributor found the poems "full of apocalyptic foreboding" and felt that, although "Christopher's noirish manner … won't convince everyone…. Fans of his five previous collections … will find the mix of deadpan detail and mystical wonder familiar and welcome." Melanie Rehak wrote in the New York Times that "his poems document a recurring awareness of another world toward which the human spirit is ultimately directed," and found "Night Journal" to be a "haunting, multifaceted work filled with astonishing, surreal images."

Atomic Field: Two Poems "consists of two autobiographical sequences that are essentially snapshots of the author, first at eleven, then at twenty-one," noted Sandra M. Gilbert in Poetry. Christopher sets his poetic sequences in two decades, 1962 and 1972, each sequence consisting of a long, narrative, thematically linked forty-five-paragraph poem. By doing so he "signals a further documentary ambition: to contextualize the texts of his protagonist's individual history with the social history of two decades crucial to his growing up." Childhood pleasures of watching distant aircraft land and take off from the airport in "Four-Story Building" give way to the freedom and exploration of counterculture hippie life as a young adult. "All the old obsessions—stars, ice, girls, lost eras—are rekindled in Christopher's seventh book of poems," commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Within this work, Christopher recalls important individual and cultural milestones, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, the death of Marilyn Monroe, and the very first James Bond movie, as well as intensely personal events such as shooting a bird with a pellet gun, reading comic books, and interacting with neighbors in the city. In the 1972 sequence, Christopher describes the free-and-easy life of a young man in the waning years of the hippie generation, experimenting with drugs, traveling with little concern for destination, and finding willing sexual partners aplenty. Ray Olson, in a Booklist review, commented favorably on Christopher's "concrete language and skill at conjuring a scene."

Crossing the Equator: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2004 presents an approximately three-decade retrospective of Christopher's poetic output, with a selection of new poems from recent years. Harvard Review critic William Doreski observed that "dispassion is the dominant tenor of Christopher's earlier poems," such as in the poem "Scarlet Lake," in which a man finds himself in an Alpine hotel in the wake of his wife's suicide. An approaching storm leaves a nearby lake undisturbed on the surface but slowly turning a deep red underneath, symbolically representing the outside calm but inward turmoil faced by the man after his wife's death. The work in this collection "showcases an impressive diversity" of poetic output, remarked Barbara Hoffert and Mirela Roncevic in Library Journal. Doreski concluded: "While all of Christopher's work in this generous selection is elegantly composed and highly readable, it's good to see his recent poems take a vital new direction, and I hope that he continues exploring this compelling voice."

Christopher trades in the lush tropical settings of his poetry for the backdrop of the classical music scene in his first novel, The Soloist. Max Randal is a former child prodigy who, at age thirty-three, attempts to revive his stalled career as a concert pianist. Surrounded by all the trappings of his early success—beautiful women, eccentric friends, and excessive luxury—Max seeks solace for his tortured soul by maintaining an arduous rehearsal schedule, hoping to recover his inspiration in time for his Carnegie Hall comeback. It is "not character … that provides motive and momentum for The Soloist," stated Isa Kapp in the New York Times Book Review, "but music."

Veronica, Christopher's second novel, although nominally set in Manhattan, as New York Times contributor David Guy stated, "really unrolls in its author's wild mind." What at first appears to be merely another story about a young man (Leo—named by his mother for her zodiac sign) who meets a mysterious and enticing woman (the titular Veronica), albeit at the "dragon-point" intersection where Waverly Place crosses Waverly Place, soon develops into a far stranger tale when we learn she is the daughter of a famous magician whose act incorporated time travel. It is a kaleidoscope of odd visions, including a perhaps fatal fall from the top of the Empire State Building, triangular mirrors that peer into other worlds, Tibetan restaurants, Elizabethan England, a Manhattan apartment with an aquarium in which the surrounding room is duplicated down to the single blind fish paralleling the room's sole, blind occupant, and chalk with which one can sketch a ship and then use it to sail off into another dimension. The story is a quest, wherein Leo and Veronica search for her lost father, who disappeared into a rift in time when his act was sabotaged by a villainous rival. Guy found that "Mr. Christopher has … done his homework: on magic, British history, Tibetan mysticism, feng shui. Veronica is a hip, sexy, trendy fantasy novel." Janet St. John, writing in Booklist, noted that while there may be perceived similarities to novelist Daphne Du Maurier's "disorienting blurring of time" in House on the Strand, the "chess-game strategizing and breathtaking pace" of Catherine Neville's The Eight, and the "strongly visual, rhythmic transitions, both jarring and elliptical," found in such films as Strange Days, Jacob's Ladder, and Blink, "Christopher reconfigures, stretches, and reenvisions such techniques with grace and ingenuity, making this no copycat novel but a fresh and innovative novel for our times." She further praised: "This is an alchemist's fiction … creating a novel of great force, a nonstop, exciting page-turner, and more."

A Trip to the Stars begins in 1965, when ten-year-old orphan Loren is kidnapped while celebrating his birthday by visiting a planetarium with Alma Verell, his twenty-year-old adoptive aunt—a classics major in college, and herself an orphan. Loren is taken to meet Junius Samax, his benevolent and wealthy uncle. His uncle transports him to Las Vegas, where he resides in the luxurious Hotel Canopus. Loren learns his true name is Enzo. He lives a privileged life there, receiving a unique and varied education from his contacts with distinguished scholars visiting Uncle Samax, not only a patron of the arts but a tireless seeker of arcane knowledge. Meanwhile, frantic about Loren's disappearance, Aunt Alma alerts the police; however, their investigation hits a dead end. Alma then flees to New Orleans, assumes the name Mala Revell, and lets herself be bitten by a rare Stellarum spider, whose venom imbues her with psychic ability. These are only some of the initial, convoluted twists and turns of plot. A Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote: "As background to this intricate narrative, Christopher interweaves erudite details of such subjects as arachnology, vampire lore, quincuxes, architecture, celestial navigation and space exploration, Zuni legends, Greek philosophy—to touch on only a few." In the words of this same Publishers Weekly reviewer: "Breathtaking coincidences, magical occurrences, dramatic confrontations, mystical beliefs, the influence of astrological phenomenon and the intriguing confluence of fate and chance are plot elements that bubble like champagne in Christopher's … brilliantly labyrinthine new novel."

Christopher's novel Franklin Flyer is a "whirlwind tale of ordinary men contending with a worldwide Nazi conspiracy," noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Set in the 1930s and 1940s during the Depression and World War II, Christopher puts together a far-ranging adventure story reminiscent of the pulp era. The eponymous title character, Franklin Flyer, is named for the train in which he was born. An inventor and adventurer, Flyer grows up under the influence of his mother, a single parent, and his suffragette aunt. When Harvard becomes too dull to interest him, he drops out and becomes a successful inventor and an illustrator for a pulp magazine empire run by Otto Zuhl. Soon, he finds himself involved in espionage and intrigue involving a valuable metal called zilium, and the search for deposits of the material by American representatives and Nazi sympathizers. Complicating matters even more is Flyer's deep romantic interest in Zuhl's mysterious secretary, Persephone Eckert, who carries a deep fund of knowledge about Egypt and its myths and lore. Real-life historical figures have cameo roles in the story, including Rita Hayworth, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, espionage pioneer Bill Donavan, and Josephine Baker. In making a final assessment of the book, a Kirkus Reviews critic observed: "Much of this sophisticated hoo-hah is highly enjoyable, but it whizzes by too quickly: the story's calculated hit-and-run structure distracts almost as much as it entertains." However, Booklist reviewer Michael Spinella named the book a "lovely blend of fantasy and history."

The Bestiary is a novel containing "a marvelous hybrid of intellectual quest and well-plotted adventure," commented a Kirkus Reviews critic. The novel's protagonist, Xeno Atlas, is a lonely, bookish lad who is raised in New York during the 1950s by his grandmother. His mother died when he was born, and his sailor father, inwardly blaming Xeno for his wife's death, appears in the boy's life only rarely. The fantastic enters Xeno's consciousness early; his grandmother claims an Italian ancestor who possessed the talent of talking to animals, and she herself appears to have the abilities of a shape-shifter. Xeno soon develops a strong interest in both real and imaginary animals. At fifteen, he learns of the existence of an extremely rare book called the Caravan Bestiary, which describes a host of strange and fantastical animals that failed to find acceptance on Noah's Ark, and that perished in the Great Flood. Xeno undertakes an intense, life-changing quest to find the Bestiary, lost in history yet tantalizingly real. Along the way, he makes discoveries about his family's history, becomes caretaker of much esoteric knowledge, and dares to make the grasp for true love.

"The history and historical references are deep in The Bestiary, and for those with any interest in lost books, mythology or animal legends, this novel is going to be a delight from beginning to end. But as much as it is about a determined man's hunt for a historical mystery, it also just as much about him coming to grips with his own lost family and the manner in which the missing text manages to help him find himself," commented Bookslut Web site reviewer Colleen Mondor. Library Journal contributor Barbara Hoffert named the book a "charmed and charming read, compelling in its knowledge, graceful prose, and underlying concern for the animal world." Christopher's "evocative prose yields a narrative loaded with fascinating arcana and intriguing characters," observed a Publishers Weekly critic. The Kirkus Reviews contributor found the novel to be a "literary thriller in which—unusually—neither ‘literary’ nor ‘thriller’ seems an afterthought." A reviewer on the Fantasy Book Critic Web site commented that "virtually every aspect of The Bestiary is skillfully executed by Nicholas Christopher, and because of that, the book is an absolute joy to read."

In Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City, Christopher sets out to prove that film noir, rather than simply being a style, is a Weltanschauung, a "dark mirror reflecting the dark underside of American urban life," an "utterly homegrown modern American form" that "inevitably appears in, and emblematizes, times of deep stress." Christopher's research included viewing over 350 films. In the typical noir formula, Christopher writes, "it is night, always. The hero enters a labyrinth on a quest. He is alone and off balance." The object of this solitary hero's quest "is elusive, often an illusion," and during this quest, he is inevitably joined by a seductive, Circean figure of a woman, "at a critical juncture, when he is most vulnerable," as he descends "downward, into an underworld, on a spiral." Unlike the heroes of earlier mythologies, they rarely return from the quests into this underworld intact—if not destroyed, the hero "is left a burnt-out case." Christopher also explores the symbolic, contextual meaning of the places and objects the hero meets along his way—the cars, telephones, casinos, night clubs, and office buildings.

Michiko Kakutani noted in the New York Times that "Mr. Christopher also argues that film noir mythologized the American city as a kind of modern-day Babylon, a Darwinian jungle where crime pays, and killers, conmen and extortionists prey upon the vulnerable and weak." Kakutani stated: "Such movies turn the labyrinthine streets and office corridors of the city into a metaphor for the psychological mazes their heroes travel in search of self-knowledge, and in doing so, create a potent image of the modern American metropolis as a forbidding (and alluring) den of iniquity and sin. The noir city is a place devoid of the small-town consolation of neighborliness and compassion, a place where misfits and malcontents lead lives of sullen desperation, eager to use whatever means necessary to get their crack at the American dream." Kakutani cautioned that "this tendency on Mr. Christopher's part to try to fit a vast array of films into a single schematic formula can warp his reading of individual films." A Booklist reviewer found that, "throughout, Christopher moves fluidly from the films to the real world and back again, ruminating suggestively on the appeal of film noir to psychically wounded postwar Americans and on why the genre is currently enjoying a renaissance." And a Publishers Weekly critic lauded: "Christopher writes with the mind of a scholar and the heart of a poet—incisive, metaphorical, illuminating, and artful, yet without conceit or grandiosity. This fascinating book will be a treat for film buffs, film professionals and everyone in between."

Walk on the Wild Side: Urban American Poetry since 1975, edited by Christopher, provides a thematically ar- ranged collection of 120 poems that are propelled by the evocative sights, sounds, experiences, and extremes of city life. Poets such as Amy Clampitt, Edward Hirsh, Garrett Hongo, Philip Levine, and Carol Muske evoke the urban landscapes of New York, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other large cities, where emotions and desires large and small come into daily contact with huge buildings, oversized structures, and kindnesses and cruelties in the streets. Critic Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, assessed the book as "an incandescent and powerful volume."

Christopher once told CA: "I write daily, whether at home or traveling."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 1, 1994, Donna Seaman, review of Walk on the Wild Side: Urban American Poetry since 1975, p. 1418; December 15, 1994, Elizabeth Gunderson, review of Five Degrees and Other Poems, p. 731; December 15, 1995, Janet St. John, review of Veronica, p. 686; March 15, 1997, Bill Ott, review of Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City, p. 1218; March 1, 1998, Janet St. John, review of The Creation of the Night Sky: Poems, p. 1086; March 15, 2000, Ray Olson, review of Atomic Field: Two Poems, p. 1313; March 1, 2002, Michael Spinella, review of Franklin Flyer, p. 1089; June 1, 2007, Jennifer Baker, review of The Bestiary, p. 33.

Harvard Review, December, 2004, William Doreski, review of Crossing the Equator: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2004, p. 169.

Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2002, review of Franklin Flyer, p. 205; June 1, 2007, review of The Bestiary.

Library Journal, May 1, 1989, Thom Tammaro, review of Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets, p. 80; March 1, 1994, Ellen Kaufman, review of Walk on the Wild Side, p. 91; March 15, 1997, Neal Baker, review of Somewhere in the Night, p. 65; February 15, 1998, Tim Gavin, review of The Creation of the Night Sky, p. 145; July, 2004, Barbara Hoffert and Mirela Roncevic, review of Crossing the Equator, p. 87; May 1, 2007, Barbara Hoffert, review of The Bestiary, p. 70.

Massachusetts Review, March 22, 1990, Sharon Dunn, review of Under 35, p. 287.

Nation, March 26, 1983, Bruce Bennett, review of On Tour with Rita, p. 374; June 13, 1994, Matthew Flamm, review of Walk on the Wild Side, p. 839.

New York Times, February 11, 1996, David Guy, review of Veronica; March 28, 1997, Michiko Kakutani, "A Nation's Nightmares Hurled onto the Screen"; May 3, 1998, Melanie Rehak, review of The Creation of the Night Sky; May 25, 1997, Patricia Ryan, review of Somewhere in the Night.

New York Times Book Review, May, 1 1983, Richard Tillinghast, review of On Tour with Rita, p. 15; April 20, 1986, Isa Kapp, review of The Soloist, p. 26; June 8, 1986, David Wojahn, review of A Short History of the Island of Butterflies; February 11, 1990, Andy Brumer, review of Desperate Characters, p. 16; August 6, 2000, Megan Harlan, review of Atomic Field, p. 17; April 21, 2002, "Action Hero: A Protagonist Named for a Train Travels the World in Search of Really Big Adventure," review of Franklin Flyer, p. 16; August 5, 2007, Ligaya Mishan, "Lost Pets," review of The Bestiary.

Poetry, December, 1983, J.D. McClatchy, review of On Tour with Rita, p. 167; December, 1986, J.P. White, review of A Short History of the Island of Butterflies, p. 176; August, 1989, Robert B. Shaw, review of Desperate Characters, p. 283; November, 1992, David Baker, review of In the Year of the Comet, p. 99; December, 1995, Bruce Murphy, review of Five Degrees and Other Poems, p. 160; July, 2001, Sandra M. Gilbert, review of Atomic Field, p. 216.

Publishers Weekly, March 3, 1989, Penny Kaganoff, review of Under 35, p. 98; January 31, 1994, review of Walk on the Wild Side, p. 77; February 27, 1995, review of Five Degrees and Other Poems, p. 98; November 6, 1995, review of Veronica, p. 82; February 17, 1997, review of Somewhere in the Night, p. 204; March 30, 1998, review of The Creation of the Night Sky, p. 78; December 6, 1999, review of A Trip to the Stars, p. 51; March 6, 2000, review of Atomic Field, p. 106; March 11, 2002, review of Franklin Flyer, p. 51; May 21, 2007, review of The Bestiary, p. 33.

Reference & Research Book News, September, 1994, review of Walk on the Wild Side, p. 43.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), March 2, 2003, review of Franklin Flyer, p. 6.

Village Voice, September 27, 1988, Jane Mendelsohn, review of Desperate Characters, p. 54.

Virginia Quarterly Review, autumn, 1994, review of Walk on the Wild Side, p. 134; winter, 1989, review of Desperate Characters, p. 26; winter, 2001, review of Atomic Field.

Washington Post Book World, February 16, 1992, Harriet Zinnes, review of In the Year of the Comet, p. 11; July 22, 2007, "Where the Wild Things Are," p. 8.

ONLINE

Blogcritics,http://www.blogcritics.org/ (August 30, 2007), Lynda Lippin, review of The Bestiary.

Bookslut,http://www.bookslut.com/ (February 12, 2008), Colleen Mondor, review of The Bestiary.

Columbia University Creative Writing Program Web site,http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing/ (February 12, 2008), biography of Nicholas Christopher.

Curled up with a Good Book,http://www.curledup.com/ (February 12, 2008), Midge Bork, interview with Nicholas Christopher; Midge Bork, review of The Bestiary.

Fantasy Book Critic Web log,http://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/ (June 13, 2007), review of The Bestiary.

Harcourt Books Web site,http://www.harcourtbooks.com/ (February 12, 2008), biography of Nicholas Christopher.

Loaded Shelf,http://www.loadedshelf.com/ (February 12, 2008), Kelly Hewitt, "Loaded Questions," interview with Nicholas Christopher.

Nicholas Christopher Home Page,http://www.nicholaschristopher.com (February 12, 2008).