LANGER, Adam

PERSONAL:

Born in Chicago, IL. Education: Vassar College, B.A.; University of Illinois, M.A.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—Marly Rusoff and Associates, Inc., P.O. Box 524, Bronxville, NY 10708. E-mail—adamlanger@aol.com.

CAREER:

Chicago Reader, Chicago, IL, features writer and theater critic; Book, senior editor, 1998—. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, playwright-in-residence; lecturer on writing and journalism at colleges and universities, including Northwestern University, University of Illinois, Columbia College, and Pace University. Has worked variously as a radio news writer and producer, actor, and standup comedian.

AWARDS, HONORS:

National Arts Journalism fellowship, Columbia University, 2000-01.

WRITINGS:

PLAYS

Backstage Pass, 1990.

In the Shadow of a Smile, 1992.

The Blank Page, 1995.

Dark Matter, 1996.

Crime in the City, 1996.

Solo Album, 1997.

Film Flam, 1997.

The Critics, 1998.

(And director) Coaster, 2000.

Suramo, 2001.

OTHER

The Madness of Art: A Guide to Living and Working in Chicago, Chicago Review Press (Chicago, IL), 1996.

The Film Festival Guide: For Filmmakers, Film Buffs, and Industry Professionals, Chicago Review Press (Chicago, IL), 1998, revised edition, 2000.

Crossing California (novel), Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 2004.

Also writer and director of film The Blank Page. Contributor to anthologies, including The Best Men's Stage Monologues 2000 and The Best Women's Stage Monologues 2000, both for Smith & Kraus, and to periodicals, including Salt Hill, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, and Chicago Tribune.

SIDELIGHTS:

Adam Langer is an author and playwright who has written both fiction and nonfiction. Among the latter is his The Film Festival Guide: For Filmmakers, Film Buffs, and Industry Professionals, the idea for which came to him as he was working on his own movie. In the book he lists hundreds of festivals and provides complete contact information, entry deadlines, histories, ticket prices, and number of films screened; he also interviewed six festival directors. A Booklist contributor noted that "everything's here, from the big and famous (Cannes) to the small and specialized (Insect Fear Film Festival)." The critic added, "A final chapter is a guide to the best art-house movie theaters in more than 100 cities worldwide." Library Journal writer Kim R. Holston felt that "this work is well worth the price."

Langer has also written the play Coaster, a romantic satire described as "a small chunk of pure gold" by Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times. Weiss wrote that Langer "has a wicked sense of humor about the lives and delusions of well-educated, artistic, self-involved adults who dance on the surface of their feelings while knowing full well the depth of their emotional pain."

The title of Langer's debut novel, Crossing California, refers not to the state, but to California Avenue, the Chicago street that divides the West Rogers Park neighborhood into subsections that are defined by varying degrees of affluence, with the most prosperous families living to the west. The story begins in the winter of 1979, following the start of the Iran hostage crisis. Families are the focus—the Wasserstroms, Rovners, and Wills. Entertainment Weekly critic Jessica Shaw wrote that Langer "packs in more hilarious and agonizing moments than most writers manage in a lifetime."

One of the plots of Crossing California involves therapist Ellen Rovner's marriage, which is dissolving, while her oversexed son, Larry, is concerned only with whether he should go to Brandeis University, where he has been accepted, or become a rock star. The east-of-California Wasserstrom girls are the independent and somewhat morally lax Michelle and younger sister, Jill, an intellectual seventh grader who stuns her teachers at Hebrew School when she defends the Ayatollah Khomeini, quotes Nkrumah at her bat mitzvah, and has not yet recovered from the loss of her mother to cancer. Muley Wills, the son of a music-producer father he has never met, is a brilliant biracial boy who loves Jill. He expresses his passion through his filmmaking and through his imaginative creation of a Russian cousin named Peachy Moskowitz. Christian Science Monitor reviewer Ron Charles felt that Jill and Muley "make a strange, heartbreaking couple, a locus of angst and spiritual persistence, made all the more poignant by their age and tenderness."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 15, 1998, review of The Film Festival Guide: For Filmmakers, Film Buffs, and Industry Professionals, p. 262; May 15, 2004, Donna Seaman, review of Crossing California, p. 1597.

Chicago Sun-Times, June 28, 2000, Hedy Weiss, review of Coaster, section 2, p. 52.

Chicago Tribune, July 6, 1997, Richard Christiansen, review of The Blank Page, Arts & Entertainment, p. 1; February 22, 1998, Lawrence Bommer, review of Film Flam, Metro Chicago, section, p. 6.

Christian Science Monitor, June 1, 2004, Ron Charles, review of Crossing California, p. 15.

Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, IL), July 14, 2000, Jack Helbig, "Time Out!," p. 22.

Entertainment Weekly, June 18, 2004, Jessica Shaw, review of Crossing California, p. 90.

Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2004, review of Crossing California, p. 351.

Library Journal, September 15, 1998, Kim R. Holston, review of The Film Festival Guide, p. 82; April 15, 2004, Robin Nesbitt, review of Crossing California, p. 124.

People, June 7, 2004, Kyle Smith, review of Crossing California, p. 49.

Publishers Weekly, April 26, 2004, review of Crossing California, p. 37, Roger Gathman, "Crossing Genres," p. 38.*