Michael Frank

Author, writer, & critic

Michael Frank’s essays, articles, book reviews, and short stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Slate, The Yale Review, Salmagundi, and The TLS, among other publications, and his fiction has been presented at Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story.  He served as a Contributing Writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review for nearly eight years.

Frank is the author of What Is Missing, a novel; The Mighty Franks, a memoir, which was awarded the 2018 JQ Wingate Prize and was named one of the best books of the year by The Telegraph and The New Statesman; and One Hundred Saturdays, which was selected as one of the ten best books of 2022 by The Wall Street Journal and received a Natan Notable Book Award, two National Book Awards from the Jewish Book Council, and the Sophie Brody Award for outstanding achievement in Jewish literature.

A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Frank is at present co-adapting his memoir as a play.  He lives between New York City and Camogli, Italy.

Participant In These Roundtable Discussions

Sat
Feb 21st
2026
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Why We Write

A naïve and perhaps mischievous take on the query “why we write” is to claim that what we write already asserts why we write. On this view “It was lunchtime and I had a sandwich at Joe’s” directs you ostensively to information about my afternoon meal. “Do I need to spell it out?” goes the... read more! »