about the author
Barry Bergman is a New York City refugee, long ago replanted in the SF Bay Area. He’s been a newspaper reporter, a magazine writer/editor—with scores of bylined stories in Sierra, California, and Mother Jones magazines—and a communications pro at UC Berkeley and assorted nonprofits. Before earning his journalism degree at San Francisco State University he worked in a variety of industrial settings, including two years in an Arizona copper smelter, an experience he would reimagine, eventually, as the fictional background for Proles, his first completed novel.
A slow learner and a late bloomer, Bergman long nurtured a childhood dream to one day become the world’s oldest emerging author. He’s currently working on a new novel, Mr. Pitiful, in a house he shares with his journalist wife and two cats, Mookie (above) and Cosmo (below), in Berkeley, California.
about ‘mr. pitiful,’ a work in progress
My second novel, tentatively titled Mr. Pitiful, follows the misadventures of Desmond Strunk, a man who, bent low by circumstance, nonetheless believes the privilege he enjoys as a white American male gives him an unfair (and unwanted) advantage in the eternal race for happiness—a state which, in any case, he’s no more able to define than he is to achieve.
Conversely, he views his estranged father’s insistence on wallowing in bourgeois joylessness as a contemptible exercise in unearned self-regard. Disgusted by his father’s pleas to be relieved of his low-grade misery, he struggles with homicidal ideation even as he wrestles with what it means to live one’s best life on a planet beset by hunger, disease, and desperation, and in which First World dissatisfaction must look, for much of the globe, like paradise on earth.
But I’ve already said too much…
Questions? Cavils? Complaints? Get in touch via email: barryj.bergman@gmail.com
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