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Norman M. Klein
Norman M. Klein is a Los Angeles-based urban and media historian whose fictional works ‘interweave fiction with social criticism, reportage and confessional memoire […] fiction of a loose and absurdist sort, separated from fact by the blurriest of boundaries’. In 2011, the Los Angeles Times put Klein’s 1997 book The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory on its ‘Best L.A. Books’ list. Since 1974, Klein has been professor in the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts, where he is on the faculty of both the master’s programme in Aesthetics and Politics and the Center for Integrated Media. As layered systems that resemble certain genres of games and other media narrative formats, Klein’s novels primarily offer literary alternatives. Having coined the term ‘scripted space’ in 1998, Klein (with Margo Bistis) coined ‘wunder roman’ in 2012 to characterize a particular kind of picaresque novel whose component parts function like a narrative engine.