Marisha Pessl

Marisha Pessl (born October 26, 1977) is an American writer known for her novels Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Night Film, Neverworld Wake, and Darkly.

Early life Pessl was born 1977 in Clarkston, Michigan, to Klaus, an Austrian engineer for General Motors, and Anne, an American homemaker.

Pessl started high school at the Asheville School, a private, co-educational boarding school, but graduated from Asheville High School in 1995. She attended Northwestern University for two years before transferring to Barnard College.

Career After graduating, she worked as a financial consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, while writing in her free time. After two failed attempts at novels, Pessl began writing a third novel in 2001 about the relationship between a daughter and her controlling, charismatic father. Kirkus Reviews called it "sharp, snappy fun for the literary-minded." Peter Dempsey writing for the Guardian, despite giving it a mixed review overall, called it "a page-turning murder mystery with a gratifyingly complex plot, a dizzying Usual Suspects-style narrative with nods to detective novelists conventional (Agatha Christie) and unconventional (Carlo Emilio Gadda). On a second reading, what appeared to be a high-school tale spatchcocked on to the story of an amateur detective is seen to be a ground-laying exercise of immense skill."

Pessl's second novel, Night Film, a psychological literary thriller about a New York investigative journalist looking into the apparent suicide of the daughter of a renowned filmmaker ("a fictional mash-up of Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski and David Lynch"), was published by Random House on August 20, 2013. It was ranked sixth on The New York Times Bestseller’s list following its release.

Pessl's third novel, Neverworld Wake, was released on June 5, 2018. It is described as a "psychological suspense novel with a sci-fi twist." It is set in Watch Hill, Rhode Island.

Personal life Pessl married neurosurgeon David Gordon on February 28, 2015. They have three children – Winter, born in 2015, Avalon, born in 2017, and Raine, born in 2019.

Works

Novels