MAREK WALDORF is the author of The Short Fall and Widow’s Dozen (Turtle Point Press). He was born in Washington DC, and grew up in various places: Idi Amin's Uganda, coup-wracked Thailand, punk-era England, and apartheid-encircled Lesotho, but primarily Binghamton, NY. He studied Philosophy at Harvard, started a PhD in American Literature at UCLA and left after a year, moving to San Francisco, where he appeared in Jon Moritsugu's Hippy Porn (1991).
The Short Fall was begun in a small village in Northern Cameroon and finished, four years later, in Livingstonia, overlooking Lake Malawi. Most of the book was written in Washington DC and on the Upper West Side of New York City, overlooking an air shaft. The stories in Widow's Dozen all postdate the novel. Waldorf’s essays and reviews have appeared in The Recorder: The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society, where he served as Fiction Editor and Editor-at-Large.
Waldorf's grandfather, Darwin Teilhet, wrote more than 25 novels—most of them popular mysteries of the 1930s and 1940s—including The Fearmakers (1945), a conspiracy thriller set in Washington D.C., the film of which was directed by Jacques Tourneur. Aggregation of internet-sourced data (true and false) about author and his immediate family, along with an old passport, can be found here.
Contact author at mw@marekwaldorf.com.
