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Matt Ruff

Goodreads Author

Born

in Queens, New York, The United States

Website

http://www.bymattruff.com

Twitter

bymattruff

Genre

Literature & Fiction

Member Since

June 2011

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I was born in New York City in 1965. I decided I wanted to be a fiction writer when I was five years old and spent my childhood and adolescence learning how to tell stories. At Cornell University I wrote what would become my first published novel, Fool on the Hill, as my senior thesis in Honors English. My professor Alison Lurie helped me find an agent, and within six months of my college graduation Fool on the Hill had been sold to Atlantic Monthly Press. Through a combination of timely foreign rights sales, the generous support of family and friends, occasional grant money, and a slowly accumulating back list, I’ve managed to make novel-writing my primary occupation ever since.

My third novel, Set This House in Order, marked a critical tur ...more

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Popular Answered Questions

In light of the #ownvoices movement, I'd love to hear from you as a white author writing Lovecraft Country about the experience of Black characters. How did you get comfortable with telling this story? What limitations did you become aware of, during and after the process? What are you learning from having the story adapted by Black writers & producers? Anything you would do differently? Any intuitions that paid off?

Matt Ruff I grew up in a multicultural theological debate society. My father was a Lutheran minister, originally from the Midwest. My mother, a missionary’s dau…moreI grew up in a multicultural theological debate society. My father was a Lutheran minister, originally from the Midwest. My mother, a missionary’s daughter, was born in southern Brazil and raised in Argentina during the Peron era. Our house in New York City served as Ellis Island for a nonstop parade of immigrating South American relatives. Most of my mother’s people were Lutheran, but a few – like my maternal grandmother, who lived with us for many years – were converts to Mormonism. And they all loved to argue.

The upshot of all this is that I learned at an early age that I’d be spending my time on this planet surrounded by people who didn’t see eye-to-eye with me, or with each other, and that there was value in learning to understand other perspectives. And my writing reflects this: My novels are all over the place in terms of genre and subject matter, but they often involve some sort of culture clash, and most of my protagonists come from different backgrounds and have different beliefs and worldviews than I do.

I realize that the issue of white authors writing from black perspectives is a particularly fraught one right now, but to me, what I was doing in Lovecraft Country is a natural extension of what I’ve always done: use the power of fiction to understand other ways of looking at and living in the world. I wouldn’t say I was “comfortable” doing this – it’s always good to be a little nervous, so I don’t get lazy – but I was reasonably confident that I could do justice to the characters, or that if I couldn’t, I’d figure that out before I embarrassed myself publicly.

The biggest challenge wasn’t the characters, but the history. I’d turn things up in my research that were hard to wrap my head around at first. Like the idea of whites-only ambulances that would literally let black people bleed to death rather than lift a finger to help them – that sounds like something out of dystopian science fiction, but in large parts of 1950s America it was just how things worked. So that was the tricky part, learning the rules of this strange country that my protagonists were trying to make their way in. Once I had that down, figuring out how intelligent, resourceful human beings would respond and adapt was relatively straightforward. And of course I had plenty of real-life examples – anecdotes and stories of how people coped – to draw on.

As for what I would do differently in hindsight, it’s still too soon to say. Ask me again in ten years, and I might have some thoughts, but for now I’m really happy with the way the novel turned out.
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Did you originally plan to have Lovecraft Country as a television series? I thought the episodic structure of the segments certainly lended themselves for that idea.

Matt Ruff Yes, I initially conceived of Lovecraft Country as a potential TV series back in 2007. (My elevator pitch was, “It’s The X-Files, if Mulder and Scully…moreYes, I initially conceived of Lovecraft Country as a potential TV series back in 2007. (My elevator pitch was, “It’s The X-Files, if Mulder and Scully were black travel writers living in the Jim Crow era.”) The people I was talking to passed on the idea, but the story stayed with me, and I decided to try to make it work as a book.

A part of the original TV show concept I wanted to preserve was this “monster of the week” element where each member of my ensemble cast would get to star in their own reimagined weird tale. I didn’t want to write a short story collection, though, I wanted to write a novel. Eventually I hit on the idea of an episodic novel – basically a TV season in literary form, that you would binge-read instead of binge-watching, and whose individual episodes would gradually be revealed to all be pieces of the same arc story.

Obviously in structuring the novel this way, I hoped that the finished book might also serve as a proof of concept for a possible TV series, but I knew that was a longshot and I certainly never expected it to work out as well as it has.
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Matt Ruff’s books

Average rating: 3.94 · 83,927 ratings · 9,810 reviews · 23 distinct works • Similar authors

	Lovecraft Country (Lovecraft Country, #1) 4.01 avg rating — 48,990 ratings — published 2016 — 72 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Bad Monkeys 3.61 avg rating — 11,208 ratings — published 2007 — 44 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Set This House in Order 4.30 avg rating — 6,148 ratings — published 2003 — 28 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Fool on the Hill 4.10 avg rating — 4,932 ratings — published 1988 — 22 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Mirage 3.60 avg rating — 3,770 ratings — published 2012 — 26 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Destroyer of Worlds (Lovecraft Country, #2) 3.94 avg rating — 3,346 ratings — published 2023 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Sewer, Gas and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy 3.93 avg rating — 3,104 ratings — published 1994 — 26 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	88 Names 3.41 avg rating — 2,538 ratings — published 2020 — 14 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Ich und die anderen by Matt Ruff (Goodreads Author), Jens Wawrczeck (Narrator) 4.60 avg rating — 5 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	In Hooterville and "The Bear Story" in The Risley Revue vol. 2, issue 3 it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Matt Ruff's Blog

60

Still the coolest thing to happen to me this year

I am sixty years old today.

It’s been a wild decade. On this day in 2015, I’d finished copyediting Lovecraft Country and was waiting on the first-pass galleys. The book was due to be published in February and I was hopeful that it would do well, but I had no idea what was waiting for me just a few months down the road. It must have been April whe

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Lovecraft Country (2 books)
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Matt Ruff (Goodreads Author)

4.01 avg rating — 52,332 ratings

Halloween is, of course, the traditional season for scary stories. But for those of us weirdly dedicated to the genre, it’s a year-round...

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Matt Ruff wrote a new blog post 60 Still the coolest thing to happen to me this yearI am sixty years old today.It’s been a wild decade. On this day in 2015, I’d finished copyediting Lo Read more of this blog post »
Sep 09, 2025 12:05AM · 8 likes · like
Matt Ruff made a comment on I’m 59 today " Keith wrote: "Congratulations! Still beats the alternative! Have a great birthday!" Thank you! ...more "
Sep 14, 2024 10:23AM · see blog post

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Quotes by Matt Ruff (?)

“But stories are like people, Atticus. Loving them doesn’t make them perfect. You try to cherish their virtues and overlook their flaws. The flaws are still there, though. "

"But you don’t get mad. Not like Pop does."

"No, that’s true, I don’t get mad. Not at stories. They do disappoint me sometimes." He looked at the shelves. "Sometimes, they stab me in the heart.”
― Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country

tags: books, disappointment, flaws, perfection, reading, stories, writers-and-their-work

64 likes

“That’s the horror, the most awful thing: to have a child the world wants to destroy and know that you’re helpless to help him. Nothing worse than that. Nothing worse.”
― Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country

29 likes

“But stories are like people, Atticus. Loving them doesn't make them perfect. You try to cherish their virtues and overlook their flaws. The flaws are still there, though. But you don't get mad.”
― Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country

27 likes

See all Matt Ruff's quotes »

Polls

Vote for the August 2019 Adult / Non-fiction BOM.

Details of the books can be found in the nom thread here

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

55 votes 19.8%

Educated by Tara Westover

36 votes 12.9%

Beartown (Beartown, #1) by Fredrik Backman

Beartown by Fredrik Backman

29 votes 10.4%

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

22 votes 7.9%

Bird Box (Bird Box, #1) by Josh Malerman

Bird Box by Josh Malerman

20 votes 7.2%

The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware

19 votes 6.8%

Next Year in Havana by Chanel Cleeton

17 votes 6.1%

The Escape Room by Megan Goldin

16 votes 5.8%

There There by Tommy Orange

15 votes 5.4%

The Binding by Bridget Collins

10 votes 3.6%

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

9 votes 3.2%

How Not to Die Alone by Richard Roper

8 votes 2.9%

Sebastian by Anne Bishop

6 votes 2.2%

In Shadows by Sharon Sala

5 votes 1.8%

Hounded (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #1) by Kevin Hearne

Hounded by Kevin Hearne

5 votes 1.8%

Heroine Complex (Heroine Complex, #1) by Sarah Kuhn

Heroine Complex by Sarah Kuhn

3 votes 1.1%

The Corset by Laura Purcell

3 votes 1.1%

278 total votes

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