Stern was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1947, the son of a grocer. He left Memphis in the 1960s to attend college, then to travel the US and Europe — living, as he told one interviewer, “the wayward life of my generation for about a decade,” and ending on a hippie commune in the Ozarks. He went on to study writing in the graduate program at the University of Arkansas, at a time when it included several notable writers who’ve since become prominent, including poet C.D. Wright and fiction writers Ellen Gilchrist, Lewis Nordan, Lee K. Abbott, and Jack Butler.
Books in order of publication:
Isaac and the Undertaker’s Daughter (Lost Roads Publishers, 1983)
The Moon & Ruben Shein (August House, 1984)
Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (Viking, 1986)
Mickey and the Golem (St. Lukes Press, 1986) (children’s book)
Hershel and the Beast (Ion Books, 1987) (children’s book)
Harry Kaplan’s Adventures Under Ground (Ticknor & Fields, 1991)
A Plague of Dreamers: Three Novellas (Scribner’s, 1994)
The Wedding Jester (Graywolf Press, 1999)
The Angel of Forgetfulness (Viking, 2006)
The North of God (Melville House Publishing, 2008)
The Frozen Rabbi (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2010)
The Book of Mischief (Graywolf Press, 2012)
The Pinch (Graywolf Press, 2015)
The Village Idiot (2022)
Oak Lawn Library Friends 