An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.

Author of a written or legally copied work[link]

Legal significance[link]

In copyright law, there is a necessity for little flexibility as to what constitutes authorship. The United States Copyright Office defines copyright as "a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States (title 17, U.S. Code) to authors of "original works of authorship".^[1] Holding the title of "author" over any "literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, [or] certain other intellectual works" give rights to this person, the owner of the copyright, exclusive right to do or authorize any production or distribution of their work. Any person or entity wishing to use intellectual property held under copyright must receive permission from the copyright holder to use this work, and often will be asked to pay for the use of copyrighted material. After a fixed amount of time, the copyright expires on intellectual work and it enters the public domain, where it can be used without limit. Copyright law has been amended time and time again since the inception of the law to extend the length of this fixed period where the work is exclusively controlled by the copyright holder. However, copyright is merely the legal reassurance that one owns his/her work. Technically, someone owns their work from the time it's created. An interesting aspect of authorship emerges with copyright in that it can be passed down to another upon one's death. The person who inherits the copyright is not the author, but enjoys the same legal benefits.

Questions arise as to the application of copyright law. How does it, for example, apply to the complex issue of fan fiction? If the media agency responsible for the authorized production allows material from fans, what is the limit before legal constraints from actors, music, and other considerations, come into play? As well, how does copyright apply to fan-generated stories for books? What powers do the original authors, as well as the publishers, have in regulating or even stopping the fan fiction?

Literary significance[link]

In literary theory, critics find complications in the term "author" beyond what constitutes authorship in a legal setting. In the wake of postmodern literature, critics such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault have examined the role and relevance of authorship to the meaning or interpretation of a text.

Barthes challenges the idea that a text can be attributed to any single author. He quotes, in his essay "Death of the Author" (1968), that "it is language which speaks, not the author".^[2] The words and language of a text itself determine and expose meaning for Barthes, and not someone possessing legal responsibility for the process of its production. Every line of written text is a mere reflection of references from any of a multitude of traditions, or, as Barthes puts it, "the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture"; it is never original.^[2] With this, the perspective of the author is removed from the text, and the limits formerly imposed by the idea of one authorial voice, one ultimate and universal meaning, are destroyed. The explanation and meaning of a work does not have to be sought in the one who produced it, "as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fictioni, the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us".^[2] The psyche, culture, fanaticism of an author can be disregarded when interpreting a text, because the words are rich enough themselves with all of the traditions of language. To expose meanings in a written work without appealing to the celebrity of an author, their tastes, passions, vices, is, to Barthes, to allow language to speak, rather than author.

Michel Foucault argues in his essay "What is an author?" (1969), that all authors are writers, but not all writers are authors. He states that "a private letter may have a signatory—it does not have an author".^[3] For a reader to assign the title of author upon any written work is to attribute certain standards upon the text which, for Foucault, are working in conjunction with the idea of "the author function".^[3] Foucault's author function is the idea that an author exists only as a function of a written work, a part of its structure, but not necessarily part of the interpretive process. The author's name "indicates the status of the discourse within a society and culture", and at one time was used as an anchor for interpreting a text, a practice which Barthes would argue is not a particularly relevant or valid endeavor.^[3]

Expanding upon Foucault's position, Alexander Nehamas writes that Foucault suggests "an author [...] is whoever can be understood to have produced a particular text as we interpret it", not necessarily who penned the text.^[4] It is this distinction between producing a written work and producing the interpretation or meaning in a written work that both Barthes and Foucault are interested in. Foucault warns of the risks of keeping the author's name in mind during interpretation, because it could affect the value and meaning with which one handles an interpretation.

Literary critics Barthes and Foucault suggest that readers should not rely on or look for the notion of one overarching voice when interpreting a written work, because of the complications inherent with a writer's title of "author." They warn of the dangers interpretations could suffer from when associating the subject of inherently meaningful words and language with the personality of one authorial voice. Instead, readers should allow a text to be interpreted in terms of the language as "author."

Relationship between author and publisher[link]

The publisher of a work might receive a percentage calculated on a wholesale or a specific price and or a fixed amount on each book that is sold. Publishers, at times, reduced the risk of this type of arrangement, by agreeing only to pay this after a certain amount of copies had sold. In Canada this practice occurred during the 1890s, but was not commonplace until the 1920s.

• Commissioned: Publishers made publication arrangements, and authors covered all expenses (today the practice of authors paying for their publications is often called vanity publishing, and is looked down upon by many publishers, even though it may have been a common and accepted practice in the past). Publishers would receive a percentage on the sale of every copy of a book, and the author would receive the rest of the money made.

Relationship between author and editor[link]

The relationship between the author and the editor, often the author's only liaison to the publishing company, is often characterized as the site of tension. For the author to reach his or her audience, the work usually must attract the attention of the editor. The idea of the author as the sole meaning-maker of necessity changes to include the influences of the editor and the publisher in order to engage the audience in writing as a social act.

Pierre Bourdieu's essay "The Field of Cultural Production" depicts the publishing industry as a "space of literary or artistic position-takings," also called the "field of struggles," which is defined by the tension and movement inherent among the various positions in the field.^[5] Bourdieu claims that the "field of position-takings [...] is not the product of coherence-seeking intention or objective consensus," meaning that an industry characterized by position-takings is not one of harmony and neutrality.^[6] In particular for the writer, their authorship in their work makes their work part of their identity, and there is much at stake personally over the negotiation of authority over that identity. However, it is the editor who has "the power to impose the dominant definition of the writer and therefore to delimit the population of those entitled to take part in the struggle to define the writer".^[7] As "cultural investors," publishers rely on the editor position to identify a good investment in "cultural capital" which may grow to yield economic capital across all positions.^[8]

According to the studies of James Curran, the system of shared values among editors in Britain has generated a pressure among authors to write to fit the editors' expectations, removing the focus from the reader-audience and putting a strain on the relationship between authors and editors and on writing as a social act. Even the book review by the editors has more significance than the readership's reception.^[9]

Compensation[link]

A standard contract for an author will usually include provision for payment in the form of an advance and royalties. An advance is a lump sum paid in advance of publication. An advance must be earned out before royalties are payable. An advance may be paid in two lump sums: the first payment on contract signing, and the second on delivery of the completed manuscript or on publication.

An author's contract may specify, for example, that they will earn 10% of the retail price of each book sold. Some contracts specify a scale of royalties payable (for example, where royalties start at 10% for the first 10,000 sales, but then increase to a higher percentage rate at higher sale thresholds).

An author's book must earn out their advance before any further royalties are paid. For example, if an author is paid a modest advance of $2000.00, and their royalty rate is 10% of a book priced at $20.00 - that is, $2.00 per book - the book will need to sell 1000 copies before any further payment will be made. Publishers typically withhold payment of a percentage of royalties earned against returns.

In some countries, authors also earn income from a government scheme such as the ELR (Educational Lending Right) and PLR (Public Lending Right) schemes in Australia. Under these schemes, authors are paid a fee for the number of copies of their books in educational and/or public libraries.

These days, many authors supplement their income from book sales with public speaking engagements, school visits, residencies, grants, and teaching positions.

Ghostwriters, technical writers, and textbooks writers are typically paid in a different way: usually a set fee or a per word rate rather than on a percentage of sales.

See also[link]

• Novelist
• Writer
• Lists of writers
• Lists of poets
• List of novelists
• Professional writing
• Academic authorship
• Ghostwriter
• Lead author
• Autuer

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Author

Look up author in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Look up authorship in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikiversity has learning materials about Collaborative_play_writing

• A system for fast authorship by Daniel Hall

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (September 2011)

George R. R. Martin
Martin at the 2011 Time 100 gala
Born	(1948-09-20) September 20, 1948 (age 63) Bayonne, New Jersey
Occupation	Author
Nationality	American
Genres	Science fiction, horror, fantasy
Notable work(s)	A Song of Ice and Fire
Spouse(s)	Gale Burnick (1975–1979) Parris McBride (2011–present)
Influences Robert A. Heinlein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Stan Lee, William Faulkner, Roger Zelazny, Bernard Cornwell, Jack Vance, J. R. R. Tolkien, George MacDonald Fraser
Influenced Daniel Abraham, Scott Lynch, David Anthony Durham
www.georgerrmartin.com

George Raymond Richard Martin^[1] (born September 20, 1948), sometimes referred to as GRRM,^[2] is an American author and screenwriter of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He is best known for A Song of Ice and Fire, his bestselling series of epic fantasy novels that HBO adapted for their dramatic pay-cable series Game of Thrones. Martin was selected by Time magazine as one of the "2011 Time 100", a list of the "most influential people in the world".^[3][4]

Biography[link]

George R. R. Martin was born on September 20, 1948, in Bayonne, New Jersey,^[5] the son of a longshoreman. The family lived in a federal housing project near the Bayonne docks. As a child he wrote stories about a kingdom populated by his pet turtles. The turtles died frequently, and he decided that they were killing each other in "sinister plots".^[6] He attended Marist High School, where he developed interest in the superheroes of the Marvel Comics titles.^[7] He avidly read and collected 1960s comic books. Fantastic Four #20 (Nov 1963) featured a letter to the editor he wrote. He credits^[where?] attention garnered from this letter as inspiration for his becoming a professional writer. In 1965, Martin won an Alley Award for his story "Powerman vs. The Blue Barrier", the first of many awards he would win.

Eligible for the draft during the Vietnam War, to which he objected, Martin applied for and obtained conscientious objector status;^[8] he instead did alternative service work for two years as a VISTA volunteer. In 1970, Martin earned a B.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, graduating summa cum laude. He went on to complete a M.S. in Journalism in 1971, also from Northwestern.

Martin began to write science-fiction short stories in the early 1970s. His first story nominated for the Hugo Award^[9] and the Nebula Award was With Morning Comes Mistfall, published in 1973 by Analog magazine.

In 1976, for Kansas City's MidAmeriCon, the 34th World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon), Martin and his friend and fellow writer-editor Gardner Dozois conceived of and organized the first Hugo Losers Party for the benefit of all past and present Hugo-losing writers, their friends, and family the evening following the convention's Hugo Awards ceremony. Martin was nominated for two Hugoes that year but ultimately wound up losing both awards, for the novelette "...and Seven Times Never Kill Man" and the novella "The Storms of Windhaven", co-written with Lisa Tuttle^{[citation needed]}. The Hugo Losers Party became an annual Worldcon event thereafter, its formal title eventually evolving into something a little more politically correct as both its size and prestige grew.

Although much of his work is fantasy or horror, a number of his earlier works are science fiction occurring in a loosely defined future history, known informally as 'The Thousand Worlds' or 'The manrealm'. He has also written at least one piece of political-military fiction, "Night of the Vampyres", collected in Harry Turtledove's anthology The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century.^[10]

The unexpected failure of Martin's fourth book, Armageddon Rag (1983), "essentially destroyed my career as a novelist at the time", he recalled. It began his television career, however,^[6] by causing him to be hired to write for a revival of Twilight Zone and the dramatic-fantasy series Beauty and the Beast. As a book series editor, he oversaw the development of the lengthy Wild Cards cycle, which takes place in a shared universe in which a small slice of post-World War II humanity gains superpowers after the release of an alien-engineered virus. In Second Person Martin "gives a personal account of the close-knit role-playing game (RPG) culture that gave rise to his Wild Cards shared-world anthologies".^[11] Martin's own contributions to the multiple-author series often feature Thomas Tudbury, "The Great and Powerful Turtle", a powerful psychokinetic whose flying "shell" consisted of an armored VW Beetle. Twenty-one volumes had been published in the series as of June 2011. Earlier that year, Martin signed the contract for the twenty-second Wild Cards volume, to be called Low Ball when published by Tor Books.

Martin's novella, Nightflyers, was adapted into a 1987 feature film of the same title.

GRRM signing books in a bookstore in Ljubljana, Slovenia (June 2011)

Martin was also a college instructor in journalism and a chess tournament director. In his spare time, he collects medieval-themed miniatures, reading and collecting science fiction, fantasy, and horror books, and treasuring his still-growing comics collection, which includes the first issues of Marvel's "silver age" Spider-Man and Fantastic Four.

On February 15, 2011, Martin married his longtime paramour Parris McBride during a small ceremony at their Santa Fe, New Mexico, home; the couple exchanged custom made, Celtic-inspired wedding rings made for them by local artisans. Area friends were in attendance and helped them celebrate the occasion.^{[citation needed]}On August 19, 2011, they held a larger wedding ceremony and reception at Renovation, the 69th World Science Fiction Convention, in Reno, Nevada for their larger circle of friends within the fantasy and science fiction fields.^{[citation needed]}

A Song of Ice and Fire[link]

In 1991, Martin briefly returned to writing novels and began what would eventually turn into his epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire (reportedly inspired by the Wars of the Roses and Ivanhoe), which will run to at least seven volumes. The first volume A Game of Thrones was published in 1996. In November 2005, A Feast for Crows, the fourth book in this series, became The New York Times #1 Bestseller and also achieved #1 ranking on The Wall Street Journal bestseller list. In addition, in September 2006, A Feast for Crows was nominated for both a Quill Award and the British Fantasy Award.^[12] The fifth book, A Dance with Dragons, was published in July 2011, quickly becoming a huge international bestseller, including a #1 ranking on the New York Times Bestseller list and many others. The series has received critical praise from authors, readers, and critics alike. In 2012 A Dance With Dragons made the final ballot for science fiction and fantasy's Hugo Award, Locus Award, and the British Fantasy Award.

HBO series production[link]

During completion of A Dance With Dragons and other projects, George R. R. Martin was also heavily involved in the production of a television series adaptation of the A Song of Ice and Fire books named after the first book, A Game of Thrones. Martin's involvement included the selection of a production team and participation in scriptwriting; he is listed in the opening credits as an executive producer of the series.

HBO Productions purchased the television rights for the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series in 2007. Game of Thrones (the series title) began airing the fantasy series on their U. S. premium cable channel April 17, 2011; it ran weekly for ten episodes, each approximately an hour long.^[13] The series was renewed shortly after the first episode aired. The first season was nominated for 13 Emmy Awards, ultimately winning two for the freshman pay-cable series. Its second season of another ten episodes, based on the second Ice and Fire novel A Clash of Kings, began airing on HBO in the U. S. April 1, 2012.

Themes[link]

Critics have described Martin's work as dark and cynical.^[14] His first novel, Dying of the Light, set the tone for most of his future work; it is set on a mostly abandoned planet that is slowly becoming uninhabitable as it moves away from its sun. This story, and many of Martin's others, have a strong sense of melancholy. His characters are often unhappy or, at least, unsatisfied – trying to stay idealistic in a ruthless world. Many have elements of tragic heroes in them. Reviewer T. M. Wagner writes, "Let it never be said Martin doesn't share Shakespeare's fondness for the senselessly tragic."^[15] This gloominess can be an obstacle for some readers. The Inchoatus Group writes, "If this absence of joy is going to trouble you, or you’re looking for something more affirming, then you should probably seek elsewhere."^[16]

Martin's characters are multi-faceted—each with surprisingly intricate pasts, aspirations, and ambitions. Publishers Weekly writes of his ongoing epic fantasy A Song of Ice and Fire, "The complexity of characters such as Daenarys [sic], Arya and the Kingslayer will keep readers turning even the vast number of pages contained in this volume, for the author, like Tolkien or Jordan, makes us care about their fates."^[17] No one is given an unrealistic string of luck, however; so misfortune, injury, and death (and even false death) can befall any character, major or minor, no matter how attached the reader has become. Martin has described his penchant for killing off important characters as being necessary for the story's depth: "...when my characters are in danger, I want you to be afraid to turn the page, (so) you need to show right from the beginning that you're playing for keeps."

Major themes and areas of exploration in his short fiction include loneliness, connection, tragically doomed love, idealism, romanticism, and hard truth versus comforting deceit. Many of these occur in his magnum opus as well, but most of them are more abundant and obvious in his shorter works.

Relationship with fans[link]

Teaching at Clarion West, 1998.

Martin is known for his regular, decades-long attendance at science fiction conventions and comics conventions and his accessibility to fans. In the early 1970s, critic and writer Thomas Disch identified Martin^[where?] as a member of the "Labor Day Group", writers who regularly congregated at the annual Worldcon, usually held on or around the Labor Day weekend.

Martin's official fan club is the "Brotherhood Without Banners", who have a regular posting board at the Forum of the westeros.org website, which is centered upon his Ice and Fire fantasy series.^{[citation needed]}

Martin has been criticized by some readers for the long delays between books in the Ice and Fire series, notably the five-year gap between the fourth volume, A Feast for Crows (2006), and the fifth volume, A Dance with Dragons (2011).^{[18] [19]} In 2012, musical duo Paul and Storm, in a song dedicated to Martin, asked him to "write faster".^[20] In 2010, Martin responded to these concerns, saying he was unwilling to write his Ice and Fire series exclusively, saying that other writing and editing different projects has always been part of his working process.^[21]

Martin is strongly opposed to fan fiction, believing it to be copyright infringement and a bad exercise for aspiring writers.^[22][23]

Bibliography[link]

Author[link]

Novels[link]

• Dying of the Light (1977) – Hugo Award nominee, 1978;^[24] British Fantasy Award nominee, 1979^[25]
• Windhaven (1981, with Lisa Tuttle) – Locus SF Award nominee, 1982^[26]
• Fevre Dream (1982) – Locus SF^[26] and World Fantasy Award nominee, 1983^[27]
• The Armageddon Rag (1983) – Locus SF^[26] and World Fantasy Award nominee, 1984^[27]
• Hunter's Run (2007, expanded version of the novella "Shadow Twin", with Gardner Dozois and Daniel Abraham)
• A Song of Ice and Fire series:
  • A Game of Thrones (1996) – Locus Fantasy Award winner,^[26] Nebula and World Fantasy Award nominee, 1997^[27]
  • A Clash of Kings (1998) – Locus Fantasy Award winner,^[26] Nebula Award nominee, 1999^[28]
  • A Storm of Swords (2000) – Locus Fantasy Award winner,^[26] Hugo^[24] and Nebula Awards nominee, 2001^[29]
    • Part 1 Steel and Snow (UK edition only; US edition published as a single volume)
    • Part 2 Blood and Gold (UK edition only; US edition published as a single volume)
  • A Feast for Crows (2005) – Hugo,^[24] Locus Fantasy,^[26] and British Fantasy Awards nominee, 2006^[30]
  • A Dance with Dragons (2011) - Hugo Award nominee ^[31]
    • Part 1 Dreams and Dust (UK Edition)
    • Part 2 After the Feast (UK Edition)
  • The Winds of Winter (forthcoming)
  • A Dream of Spring (forthcoming)

Selected novelettes[link]

• "A Song for Lya", originally in Analog, June 1974.
• "Night of the Vampyres", originally in 'Amazing, 1975,^[32] re-published in The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century
• "The Skin Trade" (1989) from the three-author collection Dark Visions; optioned for film by Mike the Pike Productions^[33]
• "Tales of Dunk and Egg" series – set in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire
  • "The Hedge Knight" (1998)
  • "The Sworn Sword" (2003)
  • "The Mystery Knight" (2010)
  • "The She-Wolves of Winterfell" (forthcoming)
• "Shadow Twin" (2004) with Gardner Dozois and Daniel Abraham
• Shadow Twin (2005) published in hardcover as an illustrated, signed, and numbered limited-edition from Subterranean Press
• Sandkings, Hugo, Nebula awards winner.
• Meathouse Man, first published in 1976, in Orbit 18.

Children's book[link]

• The Ice Dragon

Collections[link]

• A Song for Lya (1976)
• Songs of Stars and Shadows (1977)
• Sandkings (1981)
• Songs the Dead Men Sing (1983)
• Nightflyers (1985)
• Tuf Voyaging (1987, collection of linked stories)
• Portraits of His Children (1987)
• Quartet (2001)
• GRRM: A RRetrospective (2003); reprinted in 2006 and 2007 in two volumes as Dreamsongs

Television[link]

• The Twilight Zone
  • The Last Defender of Camelot (1986) – writer (teleplay)
  • The Once and Future King (1986) – writer (teleplay), story editor
  • A Saucer of Loneliness (1986) – story editor
  • Lost and Found (1986) – writer (teleplay), from a published short story by Phyllis Eisenstein
  • The World Next Door (1986) – story editor
  • The Toys of Caliban (1986) – writer (teleplay), from an unpublished short story by Terry Matz
  • The Road Less Travelled (1986) – writer (story and teleplay), story editor
• Beauty and the Beast
  • Terrible Saviour (1987) – writer
  • Masques (1987) – writer
  • Shades of Grey (1988) – writer
  • Promises of Someday (1988) – writer
  • Fever (1988) – writer
  • Ozymandias (1988) – writer
  • Dead of Winter (1988) – writer
  • Brothers (1989) – writer
  • When the Blue Bird Sings' (1989) – writer (teleplay)
  • A Kingdom by the Sea (1989) – writer
  • What Rough Beast (1989) – writer (story)
  • Ceremony of Innocence (1989) – writer
  • Snow (1989) – writer
  • Beggar's Comet (1990) – writer
  • Invictus (1990) – writer
• Doorways (1993, unreleased pilot) – writer, producer, creator; (IDW Publishing issued the pilot's storyline as a graphic novel miniseries in 2010)^[34]
• Game of Thrones
  • "The Pointy End" – writer (story, teleplay, 1st season)
  • "Blackwater" – writer (story, teleplay, 2nd season)

Editor[link]

• New Voices in Science Fiction (1977: new stories by the John W. Campbell Award winners)
• New Voices in Science Fiction 2 (1979: more new stories by the John W. Campbell Award winners)
• New Voices in Science Fiction 3 (1980: more new stories by the John W. Campbell Award winners)
• New Voices in Science Fiction 4 (1981: more new stories by the John W. Campbell Award winners)
• The Science Fiction Weight Loss Book (1983) edited with Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg ("Stories by the great science fiction writers on fat, thin, and everything in between")
• The John W. Campbell Awards, Volume 5 (1984)
• Night Visions 3 (1986)

Wild Cards Series Editor (also contributor to many volumes)[link]

• Wild Cards (1987; contents expanded in 2010 edition with three new stories/authors)
• Wild Cards II: Aces High (1987)
• Wild Cards III: Jokers Wild (1987)
• Wild Cards IV: Aces Abroad (1988)
• Wild Cards V: Down & Dirty (1988)
• Wild Cards VI: Ace in the Hole (1990)
• Wild Cards VII: Dead Man's Hand (1990)
• Wild Cards VIII: One-Eyed Jacks (1991)
• Wild Cards IX: Jokertown Shuffle (1991)
• Wild Cards X: Double Solitaire (1992)
• Wild Cards XI: Dealer's Choice (1992)
• Wild Cards XII: Turn of the Cards (1993)
• Wild Cards: Card Sharks (1993; Book I of a New Cycle trilogy)
• Wild Cards: Marked Cards (1994; Book II of a New Cycle trilogy)
• Wild Cards: Black Trump (1995; Book III of a New Cycle trilogy)
• Wild Cards: Deuces Down (2002)
• Wild Cards: Death Draws Five (2006; solo novel by John J. Miller)
• Wild Cards: Inside Straight (2008; Book I of the Committee triad)
• Wild Cards: Busted Flush (2008; Book II of the Committee triad)
• Wild Cards: Suicide Kings (2009; Book III of the Committee triad)
• Wild Cards: Fort Freak (2011)
• Wild Cards: Lowball (forthcoming 2012; sequel to Fort Freak)

[edit] Cross-genre anthologies edited (with Gardner Dozois)

• Songs of the Dying Earth (2009; a tribute anthology to Jack Vance´s seminal Dying Earth series, first published by Subterranean Press)
• Warriors (2010; a massive, cross-genre anthology featuring stories about war and warriors; winner of the 2011 Locus Poll Award for Best Anthology)
• Songs of Love and Death (2010; a cross-genre anthology featuring stories of romance in fantasy and science fiction settings, originally entitled Star Crossed Lovers)
• Down These Strange Streets (2011; a cross-genre anthology that blends classic detective stories with fantasy and science fiction)
• Dangerous Women (tentative title; forthcoming; a cross-genre anthology focusing on women warriors and strong female characters, originally titled Femmes Fatales)^[35]
• Rogues (planned, a cross-genre anthology featuring stories about assorted rogues)^[36]
• Old Mars (planned, an anthology featuring new stories about Mars in retro-SF vein)^[37]
• Old Venus (planned, an anthology featuring new stories about Venus in retro-SF vein)^[38]

Awards[link]

• "A Song for Lya" 1975 Hugo Award for Best Novella
• "Sandkings" 1980 Hugo Award for Best Novelette and Nebula Award for Best Novelette (the only one among Martin's stories to achieve that double)
• "The Way of Cross and Dragon" 1980 Hugo Award for Best Short Story
• "Portraits of His Children" 1986 Nebula Award for Best Novelette
• "The Pear-Shaped Man" 1988 Bram Stoker Award for Long Fiction
• "The Skin Trade" 1989 World Fantasy Award for Best Novella
• "Blood of the Dragon" 1997 Hugo Award for Best Novella
• A Game of Thrones 2003 Premio Ignotus for Best Foreign Novel
• A Clash of Kings 2004 Premio Ignotus for Best Foreign Novel
• A Feast for Crows 2006 Quill Award and British Fantasy Award (nominated)
• A Storm of Swords 2006 Premio Ignotus for Best Foreign Novel
• Warriors (co-edited with Gardner Dozois) 2011 Locus Poll Award for Best Anthology
• Declared by Time Magazine "One of the Most Influential People of 2011"^[3]

A more complete list of Martin's awards and nominations can be found at The Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: George R. R. Martin

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: George R. R. Martin

• Official website
• Not A Blog: George R. R. Martin's Livejournal
• George R. R. Martin's Podcast
• George R. R. Martin at the Internet Movie Database
• George R. R. Martin Complete Bibliography
• George R.R. Martin at the Internet Book List
• George R. R. Martin at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Works by or about George R. R. Martin in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Gary Shteyngart
Gary Shteyngart at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
Born	Igor Shteyngart[1] (1972-07-05) July 5, 1972 (age 39)[2] Leningrad, USSR
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	United States

Gary Shteyngart (born Igor Shteyngart; July 5, 1972) is an American writer born in Leningrad, USSR. Much of his work is satirical and relies on the invention of elaborately fictitious yet somehow familiar places and times.

Life[link]

Shteyngart spent the first seven years of his childhood living in a square dominated by a huge statue of Vladimir Lenin in what is now St. Petersburg, Russia; (he alternately calls it "St. Leningrad" or "St. Leninsburg"). He comes from a Jewish family and describes his family as typically Soviet. His father worked as an engineer in a LOMO camera factory; his mother was a pianist. Shteyngart emigrated to the United States in 1979 and was brought up with no television in the apartment in which he lived, where English was not the household language. He did not shed his thick Russian accent until the age of 14.^[3]

Shteyngart took a trip to Prague, and this experience helped spawn his first novel, set in the fictitious European city of Prava. He is a graduate of Stuyvesant High School^[4] in New York City, Oberlin College in Ohio, where he earned a degree in politics, and Hunter College of the City University of New York, where he earned an MFA in Creative Writing.

Shteyngart now lives in the Gramercy neighborhood of Manhattan. He has taught writing at Hunter College, and currently teaches writing at Columbia University.

Gary Shteyngart had a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, for Fall 2007.^[5]

Awards[link]

Shteyngart's work has received numerous awards. The Russian Debutante's Handbook won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, the Book-of-the-Month Club First Fiction Award and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. It was named a New York Times Notable Book and one of the best debuts of the year by The Guardian ^[6] In 2002, he was named one of the five best new writers by Shout NY Magazine. Absurdistan was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review and Time magazine, as well as a book of the year by the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications. In June 2010, Shteyngart was named as one of The New Yorker magazine's "20 under 40" luminary fiction writers.^[7] Super Sad True Love Story won the 2010 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature.

Work[link]

Shteyngart's novels include The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2002), Absurdistan (2006), and Super Sad True Love Story (2010). His other writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, Granta, Travel and Leisure, and The New York Times.

Bibliography[link]

• The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2002)
• Absurdistan (2006)
• Super Sad True Love Story (2010)

References[link]

1. ^ [1]
2. ^ http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/12437.Gary_Shteyngart
3. ^ Pilkington, Ed (June 29, 2007). "Russian revolution". The Guardian (London). http://books.guardian.co.uk/interviews/story/0,,2114545,00.html. Retrieved May 3, 2010. 
4. ^ Young, Liza (May 2006). "The Metamorphosis of a Writer: An Interview with Gary Shteyngart". Education Update. http://www.educationupdate.com/archives/2006/May/html/car-metamorphosis.html. Retrieved 2007-11-01. 
5. ^ "Citigroup Distinguished Visitor, Class of Fall 2007". American Academy in Berlin. http://www.americanacademy.de/home/person/gary-shteyngart. Retrieved March 11, 2012. 
6. ^ http://www.columbia.edu/cu/writing/faculty/gary-shteyngart.html
7. ^ Bosman, Julie (June 2, 2010). "20 Young Writers Earn the Envy of Many Others". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/books/03under.html?scp=1&sq=new%20yorker%2040&st=cse. 

External links[link]

• Biography at barnesandnoble.com
• "Gary Shteyngart Becomes American" from Jewcy Magazine
• Interview with Georgetown's Program for Jewish Civilization
• Interview: 'On Meat over Meat: Dinner with Gary Shteyngart,' published in Gigantic
• Interview in the Forward
• Interview at Web del Sol.
• Interview from Modern Drunkard Magazine titled '10 Drinks with Gary Shteyngart'
• "Absurdistan", by Gary Shteyngart – Russian Unorthodox, review by Walter Kirn, New York Times, April 30, 2006
• With Zadie Smith at McNally Robinson
• Interview with Gary Shteyngart about Absurdistan, English and Italian version. BOOKSWEB TV
• Over There by Gary Shteyngart from Granta 84
• Interview with Gary Shteyngart: On Travel Writing
• http://therumpus.net/2009/10/james-francos-face/?full=yes
• Interview with Gary Shteyngart: On Stuyvesant High School
• Radio interview with Gary Shteyngart on CBC Radio One's Writers and Company
• In Conversation: 1984 2.0: Gary Shteyngart with Alessandro Cassin, The Brooklyn Rail

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Born	1960 (age 51–52) Amioun, Lebanon
Residence	United States, United Kingdom, Lebanon
Citizenship	Lebanese, American
Nationality	Lebanese
Fields	Author, Statistician, Trader[1]
Institutions	Polytechnic Institute of New York University (current), Oxford University (current), University of Massachusetts Amherst, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
Alma mater	University of Paris (B.S & M.S) Wharton School (M.B.A.) University of Paris (Dauphine) (Ph.D.)
Doctoral advisor	Hélyette Geman
Known for	Applied epistemology
Influences	Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper,[2] Henri Poincaré, Michel de Montaigne, Benoit Mandelbrot

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Arabic: نسيم نيقولا نجيب طالب‎, alternatively Nessim or Nissim, born 1960) is a Lebanese American essayist whose work focuses on problems of randomness and probability.^[3] His 2007 book The Black Swan was described in a review by Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II.^[4]

He is a bestselling author,^[5][6][7] and has been a professor at several universities, currently at Polytechnic Institute of New York University and Oxford University.^[8][9] He has also been a practitioner of mathematical finance,^[10]a hedge fund manager,^[11][12][13] a Wall Street trader,^[14][15][16] and is currently a scientific adviser at Universa Investments and the International Monetary Fund.^[17][18]

He criticized the risk management methods used by the finance industry and warned about financial crises, subsequently making a fortune out of the late-2000s financial crisis.^[19][20] He advocates what he calls a "black swan robust" society, meaning a society that can withstand difficult-to-predict events.^[11] He proposes "antifragility" in systems, that is, an ability to benefit and grow from random events, errors, and volatility ^[21][22] as well as "stochastic tinkering" as a method of scientific discovery, by which he means experimentation and fact-collecting instead of top-down directed research.^[23]

Family background and education[link]

Taleb in his student days

Taleb was born in Amioun, Lebanon to Minerva Ghosn and Najib Taleb, a physician and an oncologist and a researcher in anthropology. His parents were Greek Orthodox Lebanese with French citizenship, and he attended a French school there, the Grand Lycée Franco-Libanais.^[2][24] His family saw its political prominence and wealth reduced by the Lebanese Civil War, which began in 1975. During the war, Taleb studied for several years in the basement of his family's home.^[25]

Both sides of his family were politically prominent in the Lebanese Greek Orthodox community. On his mother's side, his grandfather, Fouad Nicolas Ghosn, and his great-grandfather, Nicolas Ghosn, were both deputy prime ministers. His paternal grandfather was a supreme court judge; his great-great-great-great grandfather, Ibrahim Taleb, was a governor of the Ottoman semi-autonomous Mount Lebanon Governorate in 1861. The Taleb family Palazo, built in 1860 by Florentine architects for his great-great-great-great grandfather, still stands in Amioun.^[26]

Taleb received his bachelor and master in science degrees from the University of Paris.^[27] He holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Management Science (his thesis was on the mathematics of derivatives pricing) from the University of Paris (Dauphine)^[28] under the direction of Hélyette Geman.^[29]

A polyglot, Taleb has a literary fluency in English, French, and classical Arabic; a conversational fluency in Italian and Spanish; and can read classical texts in Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and ancient Hebrew, as well as the Canaanite script.^[30][31]

Finance career[link]

Taleb considers himself less a businessman than an epistemologist of randomness, and says that he used trading to attain independence and freedom from authority.^[32] As a trader, his strategy has been to safeguard investors against crises while reaping rewards from rare events, and thus his trading career has included several jackpots followed by lengthy dry spells.^[2] Taleb was a pioneer of tail risk hedging (now sometimes called "black swan protection"),^[33] whereby investors are insured against extreme market moves. He says that reaping dividends the way he has means dwelling in the land of "Mediocristan" instead of "Extremistan", the latter being an environment where huge things (black swans) can happen to you, whereas Mediocristan is the land of dentists who earn an above average income but with less extreme variations.^[34]

He has held the following positions: managing director and proprietary trader at UBS; worldwide chief proprietary arbitrage derivatives trader for currencies, commodities and non-dollar fixed income at CS First Boston; chief currency derivatives trader for Banque Indosuez; managing director and worldwide head of financial option arbitrage at CIBC Wood Gundy; derivatives arbitrage trader at Bankers Trust, proprietary trader at BNP Paribas, as well as independent option market maker on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange; and founder of Empirica Capital, after which Taleb retired from trading and became a full-time author and scholar in 2004.^[35] Taleb is currently Principal/Senior Scientific Adviser at Universa Investments in Santa Monica, California, a tail protection firm owned and managed by former Empirica partner Mark Spitznagel.

Taleb reportedly became financially independent after the crash of 1987^[15] and made a multi-million dollar fortune during the financial crisis that began in 2007, a development which he attributed to the mismatch between statistical distributions used in finance and reality.^[36] Universa is a fund which is based on the "black swan" idea and to which Taleb is a principal adviser. Separate funds belonging to Universa made returns of 65% to 115% in October 2008.^[20][37] In the wake of the economic crisis that started in 2008, Taleb has become an activist for a "black swan robust society" ^[38][39] and as of July 2011, Taleb is working with the International Monetary Fund on identifying and mitigating tail risks in financial markets.^[17]

Academic career[link]

Taleb became a full time researcher in 2004, as a university professor. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at Polytechnic Institute of New York University,^[40] and Distinguished Research Scholar, Said Business School, Oxford University.^[9] He was Visiting Professor at London Business School and the Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of New York University, and affiliated faculty member at the Wharton Business School Financial Institutions Center. He jointly teaches regular courses with Paul Wilmott and occasionally on the Certificate in Quantitative Finance. In May 2012, he ranked fourth in terms of the number of downloaded papers on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) .^[41]

Writing career[link]

Taleb's first non-technical book, Fooled by Randomness, about the underestimation of the role of randomness in life, was published in 2001.

His second non-technical book, The Black Swan, about unpredictable events, was published in 2007, selling as of February 2011, close to 3 million copies. It spent 36 weeks on the ^[42] New York Times Bestseller list  ; 17 as hardcover and 19 weeks^[43] as paperback. ^[2] and was translated into 31 languages.^[2] The Black Swan has been credited with predicting the banking and economic crisis of 2008.^[4]

Taleb's non-technical writing style mixes a narrative style (often semi-autobiographical) and short philosophical tales together with historical and scientific commentary. The sales of Taleb's first two books garnered an advance of $4 million for a follow-up book^[2] on anti-fragility.

A book of aphorisms, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, was released in December 2010.

In 2007, in The Black Swan, Taleb warned about the coming crisis:^[44]

Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur .... I shiver at the thought. The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deem these events "unlikely".

Among the people Taleb's writing has influenced is writer Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker. Gladwell wrote, "We associate the willingness to risk great failure – and the ability to climb back from catastrophe – with courage. But in this we are wrong. That is the lesson of Nassim Taleb."^[45][46]

Philosophical theories[link]

His book The Bed of Procrustes summarizes the central problem: "we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas". Taleb disagrees with Platonic (i.e., theoretical) approaches to reality to the extent that they lead people to have the wrong map of reality rather than no map at all.^[16] He opposes most economic and grand social science theorizing, which in his view suffer acutely from the problem of overuse of Plato's Theory of Forms.

Relatedly, he also believes that universities are better at public relations and claiming credit than generating knowledge. He argues that knowledge and technology are usually generated by what he calls "stochastic tinkering" rather than by top-down directed research.^{[23][47][48][49]}

He calls for cancellation of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, saying that the damage from economic theories can be devastating.^[50][51] He opposes top-down knowledge as an academic illusion and believes that price formation obeys an organic process.^[52] Together with Espen Gaarder Haug, Taleb asserts that option pricing is determined in a "heuristic way" by operators, not by a model, and that models are "lecturing birds on how to fly".^[52] Pablo Triana has explored this topic with reference to Haug and Taleb,^[53][54] and says that perhaps Taleb is correct to urge that banks be treated as utilities forbidden to take potentially lethal risks, while hedge funds and other unregulated entities should be able to do what they want.^[55]

Taleb's writings discuss the error of comparing real-world randomness with the "structured randomness" in quantum physics where probabilities are remarkably computable and games of chance like casinos where probabilities are artificially built.^[34] Taleb calls this the "Ludic fallacy". His argument centers on the idea that predictive models are based on Plato's Theory of Forms, gravitating towards mathematical purity and failing to take some key ideas into account, such as: the impossibility of possessing all relevant information, that small unknown variations in the data can have a huge impact, and flawed theories/models that are based on empirical data and that fail to consider events that have not taken place but could have taken place. Discussing the Ludic fallacy in The Black Swan, he writes, "The dark side of the moon is harder to see; beaming light on it costs energy. In the same way, beaming light on the unseen is costly in both computational and mental effort."

In the second edition of The Black Swan, he posited that the foundations of quantitative economics are faulty and highly self-referential. He states that statistics is fundamentally incomplete as a field as it cannot predict the risk of rare events, a problem that is acute in proportion to the rarity of these events. With the mathematician Raphael Douady, he called the problem statistical undecidability (Douady and Taleb, 2010).

Taleb sees his main challenge as mapping his ideas of "robustification" and "anti-fragility", that is, how to live and act in a world we do not understand and build robustness to black swan events. Taleb introduced the idea of the "fourth quadrant". One of its applications is in his definition of the most effective (that is, least fragile) risk management approach: what he calls the 'barbell' strategy which is based on avoiding the middle in favor of linear combination of extremes, across all domains from politics to economics to one's personal life. These are deemed more robust to estimation errors. For instance, he suggests that investing money in 'medium risk' investments is pointless because risk is difficult if not impossible to compute. His preferred strategy is to be both hyper-conservative and hyper-aggressive at the same time. For example, an investor might put 80 to 90% of their money in extremely safe instruments, such as treasury bills, with the remainder going into highly risky and diversified speculative bets. An alternative suggestion is to engage in highly speculative bets that are insured against losses of more than a specified amount. He asserts that by adopting these strategies a portfolio can be "robust", that is, gain a positive exposure to black swan events while limiting losses suffered by such random events.^[56] Taleb also applies a similar barbell-style approach to health and exercise. Instead of doing steady and moderate exercise daily, he suggests that it is better to do a low-effort exercise such as walking slowly most of the time, while occasionally expending extreme effort. He avers that the human body evolved to live in a random environment, with various unexpected but intense efforts and much rest.^[57]

Praise and criticism[link]

In a 2008 article in The Times, the journalist Bryan Appleyard described Taleb as "now the hottest thinker in the world".^[14] The Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman proposed the inclusion of Taleb's name among the world's top intellectuals, saying "Taleb has changed the way many people think about uncertainty, particularly in the financial markets. His book, The Black Swan, is an original and audacious analysis of the ways in which humans try to make sense of unexpected events."^[58] Taleb was treated as a "rock star" at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos in 2009; at that event he had harsh words for bankers.^{[clarification needed][59][60]}

Taleb contends that statisticians can be pseudoscientists when it comes to risks of rare events and risks of blowups, and mask their incompetence with complicated equations. This stance has attracted criticism: the American Statistical Association devoted the August 2007 issue of The American Statistician to The Black Swan. The magazine offered a mixture of praise and criticism for Taleb's main points, with a focus on Taleb's writing style and his representation of the statistical literature. Robert Lund, a mathematics professor at Clemson University, writes that in Black Swan, Taleb is "reckless at times and subject to grandiose overstatements; the professional statistician will find the book ubiquitously naive."^[61]

Aaron Brown, a finance professor at Yeshiva University, said that "the book reads as if Taleb has never heard of nonparametric methods, data analysis, visualization tools or robust estimation."^[62] Nonetheless, he calls the book "essential reading" and urges statisticians to overlook the insults to get the "important philosophic and mathematical truths." Taleb replied in the second edition of The Black Swan that "One of the most common (but useless) comments I hear is that some solutions can come from 'robust statistics.' I wonder how using these techniques can create information where there is none".^[63] While praising the book, Westfall and Hilbe in 2007 complained that Taleb's criticism is "often unfounded and sometimes outrageous."^[64] Taleb's contentious style, they say, "describes writers and professionals as knaves or fools, mostly fools. His writing is full of irrelevances, asides and colloquialisms, reading like the conversation of a raconteur rather than a tightly argued thesis."^[64] Taleb felt that academics showed "bad faith" by criticizing a literary book that claimed to be a literary book and by ignoring the empirical evidence provided in his appendix and more technical works.^[65]

The late Berkeley statistician David Freedman said that efforts by statisticians to refute Taleb's stance have been unconvincing.^[66] Taleb wrote in the second edition of The Black Swan that he had a session in 2008 with statisticians in which the hostility changed:

I found out that telling researchers "This is where your methods work very well" is vastly better than telling them "This is what you guys don’t know." So when I presented to what was until then the most hostile crowd in the world, members of the American Statistical Association, a map of the four quadrants, and told them: your knowledge works beautifully in these three quadrants, but beware of the fourth one, as this is where the Black Swans breed, I received instant approval, support, offers of permanent friendship, refreshments (Diet Coke), invitations to come present at their sessions, even hugs(...) They tried to convince me that statisticians were not responsible for these aberrations, which come from people in the social sciences who apply statistical methods without understanding them.

Taleb and Nobel laureate Myron Scholes have traded personal attacks, particularly after Taleb's paper with Espen Haug on why nobody used the Black-Scholes-Merton formula. Taleb said that Scholes was responsible for the financial crises of 2008, and suggested that "this guy should be in a retirement home doing Sudoku. His funds have blown up twice. He shouldn't be allowed in Washington to lecture anyone on risk."^[39] Scholes retorted that Taleb simply "popularises ideas and is making money selling books". Scholes claimed that Taleb does not cite previous literature, and for this reason Taleb is not taken seriously in academia.^[67] Taleb and Haug (2010) listed hundreds of research documents showing the Black-Scholes formula was not Scholes' at all and argued that the economics establishment ignored the literature by practitioners and mathematicians (such as Ed Thorp), who had developed a more sophisticated version of the formula.

Citing his academic works on the same topics covered in The Black Swan, Taleb said that "Academics should comment on data there, not make technical comments on a literary book".^[65] He has said that no direct published criticism has been directed at his ideas, but rather at his person and style. He wrote, "you never win an argument until they attack your person."^[65] In an interview on Charlie Rose, Taleb said that he was pleased that none of the criticism he received for The Black Swan had any substance, as it was either unintelligent, ad hominem, or style over substance, which convinced him to "go for the jugular" with a huge financial bet on the breakdown of statistical methods in finance.^[68]

Taleb's aggressive attitude against the finance industry has led to personal attacks, including a smear campaign and death threats from former employees of Lehman Brothers.^[69]

Personal life[link]

Though a non-smoker, Taleb suffered from throat cancer in the mid-1990s, which he overcame.^[70] He has stated that his major hobby is "teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don't have the guts to sometimes say: 'I don’t know ...'"^[71] Some reporters have commented that information about his personal life is difficult to extract, though Taleb appears to enjoy being in the limelight.^[72] Others find him more talkative: Malcolm Gladwell, in What the Dog Saw, wrote: "We would have lunches that would last for hours. The delight I took in his company was offset only by the dread I felt at the prospect of transcribing all those hours of tapes."^[73]

Bibliography[link]

Literary and nontechnical books[link]

• Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2001/2005). Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. New York: Random House and Penguin. ISBN 0-8129-7521-9. 
• Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2005). Le Hasard Sauvage. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. ISBN 2-251-44297-9.  The French edition of Fooled by Randomness with revisions and changes to the English version.
• Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2007/2010). The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House and Penguin. ISBN 978-1-4000-6351-2. .The book was completed in 2010 with the second edition including a long essay "On Robustness and Fragility".
• Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2010). Force et fragilité, reflexions philosophiques et empiriques. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. 
• Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2010). The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1-4000-6997-2. 

Scholarly and technical publications[link]

• Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (1997). Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options. New York: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-15280-3. 
• Taleb, N. N. (2004) Bleed or Blowup: What Does Empirical Psychology Tell Us About the Preference For Negative Skewness?, Journal of Behavioral Finance, 5
• Taleb, N. N. (2004) “These Extreme Exceptions of Commodity Derivatives.” in Helyette German, Commodities and Commodity Derivatives. New York: Wiley.
• Taleb, N. N. (2004) “Roots of Unfairness.” Literary Research/Recherche littéraire. 21(41–42): 241–254.^[74]
• Taleb, N. N. (2004) “On Skewness in Investment Choices.” Greenwich Rountable Quarterly 2.
• Taleb, N. N. (2004) "I problemi epistemologici del risk management " in: Daniele Pace (a cura di) "Economia del rischio. Antologia di scritti su rischio e decisione economica", Giuffrè, Milano
• Taleb, N. N. (2005) "Fat Tails, Asymmetric Knowledge, and Decision making: Essay in Honor of Benoit Mandelbrot's 80th Birthday." Technical paper series, Willmott (March): 56–59.
• Derman, E. and Taleb, N. N. (2005) The Illusion of Dynamic Replication, Quantitative Finance, vol. 5, 4
• Taleb, N. N. (2006) "Homo Ludens and homo Economicus." Foreword to Aaron Brown's The Poker Face of Wall Street. New York: Wiley.
• Goldstein, D. G. and Taleb, N. N. (2007) We Don't Quite Know What We Are Talking About When We Talk About Volatility, Journal of Portfolio Management, Summer 2007.
• Taleb, N. N. (2007) "Black Swan and Domains of Statistics", The American Statistician, August 2007, Vol. 61, No. 3
• Taleb, N. N. and Pilpel, A. (2007)Epistemology and Risk Management, "Risk and Regulation", 13, Summer 2007
• Taleb, N. N. (2008) Infinite Variance and the Problems of Practice, Complexity, 14(2).
• Taleb, N. N. (in Press), Errors, Robustness, and the Fourth Quadrant, International Journal of Forecasting (forthcoming)
• Haug, E. G. and Taleb, N. N. (2008) Why We Have Never Used the Black-Scholes-Merton Option Pricing Formula, Wilmott
• Taleb, N. N., Golstein, D. G., and Spitznagel, M., 2009, "The Six Mistakes Executives Make in Risk Management", Harvard Business Review , October
• Taleb, N. and Tapiero, C.Too Big to Fail and the Fallacy of Large Institutions (forthcoming)
• Makridakis, S. and Taleb, N., 2009, "Decision making and planning under low levels of predictability", International Journal of Forecasting (in press)
• Mandelbrot, B. and Taleb, N. N. (in Press). Random Jump, not Random Walk. In Francis Diebold and Richard Herring (Eds.), The Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable, Princeton University Press
• Taleb, N. N. and Pilpel, A., 2010, “The Prediction of Action”, in (eds. T. O' Connor & C. Sandis) A Companion to the Philosophy of Action (Wiley-Blackwell).
• Taleb, N. N., 2010, Common Errors in the Interpretation of the Ideas of The Black Swan and Associated Papers,Critical Review, Vol 21, No 4
• Taleb, N. and Tapiero, C., 2010, The Risk Externalities of Too Big to Fail in press,Physica A
• Haug, E. G. and Taleb, N. N., 2010, Why Option Traders Have Never Used the Formula known as Black-Scholes-Merton Equation, forthcoming, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organizations
• Taleb, N.N., 2010,Robustness and Model Error inside the Fourth Quadrant, forthcoming.
• Taleb, N.N., 2011,Why Did the Crisis of 2008 Happen?, forthcoming, New Political Economy
• Douady, R, and Taleb,N.N.,2011, Statistical Undecidability, forthcoming.
• Taleb, N.N. and Blyth, M, 2011, The Black Swan of Cairo,Foreign Affairs, 90, 3

Essays in literary journals[link]

• Taleb, N. N. (2009) Le cygne noir de Yevgenia in Delicious Paper (Paris)
• Taleb, N. N. (2010) Be a gentleman on the treadmill in The Drawbridge (London)

Other essays[link]

• Taleb, N. N. (2005) Edge article: The Opiates of the Middle Class
• Taleb, N. N. (2006) "On Forecasting." In John Brockman, ed., In "What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science and the Age of Certainty. New York: Harper Perennial.
• Taleb, N. N. (2008) Edge article: Real Life is Not a Casino, in John Brockman, ed., Edge Question 2008. New York:Harper Perennial. The article explains Taleb's position on global warming and why we need to be green regardless of models.
• Taleb, N. N. (2008) Edge Essay: The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics
• Taleb, N. N. (2009) Edge article: The Idea of Iatrogenic Science, in John Brokman, ed., Edge Question 2009. New York: Harper Perennial.
• Taleb, N. N. (2011) Edge article: AntiFragility Or the Property of Disorder Loving Systems, forthcoming in John Brockman, ed., Edge Question 2011. New York: Harper Perennial.

Collaborations[link]

• Taleb was collaborating with Benoit Mandelbrot on a general theory of risk management.^[75]
• Taleb also works with Daniel Goldstein on a project to test empirically people's intuitions about ecological and high impact uncertainty.^[76]

Honors[link]

• Inducted into the Derivatives Hall of Fame in February 2001.^[77]
• Selected for the Power 30 in Business by SmartMoney in October 2007.
• 2007 getAbstract International Book Award.
• 2008 Frost & Sullivan Visionary of the Year Award.^[78]
• 2008 Prospect Magazine Long list for Public Intellectual of the Year.^[79]
• 2009 Made the Forbes Magazine list of "Most Influential Management Gurus".^[80]
• In 2011, he made the Bloomberg 50 most influential people in global finance.^[81]

See also[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• Taleb distribution
• Applications of randomness
• List of American philosophers

Footnotes[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• Nassim Taleb's home page
  • Lecture on Philosophy of Probability at Princeton University
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Facebook
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Charlie Rose
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb at the Internet Movie Database
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb collected news and commentary at The Guardian
• Works by or about Nassim Nicholas Taleb in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought discussion on his book, "The Black Swan (Taleb book)", at The Long Now Foundation, February 2008
• Reflection on a Crisis discussion with Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman at Digital, Life, Design (DLD), January 2009
• Building a "Black Swan-Robust" Society conversation with Prime Minister David Cameron and Daniel Finkelstein at The RSA, August 2009

Interviews

• Interview with Constantine Sandis
• Taleb on Black Swans Podcast interview with Nassim Taleb at EconTalk
• Econtalk presenting Taleb's Austrian economics point of view
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb Interview – June 2010 New Statesman

Review

• FrankVoisin.com – Summary and review of Fooled By Randomness

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There are many people in history who are commonly appended with the phrase "the Great", or who were called that or an equivalent phrase in their own language. Other languages have their own suffixes such as e Bozorg and e azam in Persian and Urdu respectively.

In Persia, the title "the Great" at first seems to be a colloquial version of the Old Persian title "Great King". This title was first used by the conqueror Cyrus II of Persia.^[1]

The Persian title was inherited by Alexander III of Macedon (336–323 BC) when he conquered the Persian Empire, and the epithet "Great" eventually became personally associated with him. The first reference (in a comedy by Plautus)^[2] assumes that everyone knew who "Alexander the Great" was; however, there is no earlier evidence that Alexander III of Macedon was called "the Great".

The early Seleucid kings, who succeeded Alexander in Persia, used "Great King" in local documents, but the title was most notably used for Antiochus the Great (223–187 BC).

Later rulers and commanders began to use the epithet "the Great" as a personal name, like the Roman general Pompey. Others received the surname retrospectively, like the Carthaginian Hanno and the Indian emperor Ashoka the Great. Once the surname gained currency, it was also used as an honorific surname for people without political careers, like the philosopher Albert the Great.

As there are no objective criteria for "greatness", the persistence of later generations in using the designation greatly varies. For example, Louis XIV of France was often referred to as "The Great" in his lifetime but is rarely called such nowadays, while Frederick II of Prussia is still called "The Great". A later Hohenzollern - Wilhelm I - was often called "The Great" in the time of his grandson Wilhelm II, but rarely later.

Rulers[link]

• Abbas I of Persia (1571–1629), Shah of Iran
• Akbar (1542–1605), ruler of the Mughal Empire of South Asia, mainly India
• Alain I of Albret (1440–1522), French aristocrat
• Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), King of Macedonia, Persia, Greece, Egypt, and all of Mesopotamia
• Alexander I of Georgia (1386–1446), King of Georgia
• Alfonso III of León (c. 848-910), King of León, Galicia and Asturias
• Alfred the Great (848/849-899), King of Wessex
• Antiochus III the Great (c. 241–187 BC), ruler of the Seleucid Empire
• Ashoka the Great (c. 304–232 BC), Indian emperor of the Maurya dynasty
• Ashot I of Iberia “the Great”(died 826/830), presiding prince of Iberia (modern Georgia),
• Askia Mohammad I (c. 1442–1538), ruler of the Songhai Empire
• Bhumibol Adulyadej (born 1927), King of Thailand
• Bolesław I Chrobry (967-1025), sometimes called "the Great", first King of Poland
• Bruno the Great (925–965), Archbishop of Cologne and Duke of Lotharingia (also listed in the following section)
• Buddha Yodfa Chulaloke (1736–1809), founder and ruler of the Rattanakosin Kingdom (in what is now Thailand)
• Cnut the Great (c. 985 or 995-1035), King of Denmark, England, Norway and parts of Sweden
• Casimir III the Great (1310–1370), King of Poland
• Catherine the Great (1729–1796), Empress of Russia
• Chandragupta II (reigned 375-413/415), also known as Vikramaditya, ruler of the Gupta empire in India
• Charlemagne (died 814), King of the Franks and Emperor of the Romans
• Chulalongkorn (1853–1910), King of Siam (now Thailand)
• Chlothar II (584-629), King of Neustria and King of the Franks
• Conrad, Margrave of Meissen (c. 1097-1157), Margrave of Meissen
• Constantine I (c. 272-337), Roman emperor
• Cyaxares the Great (c. 625-585 BC), third king of Media
• Cyrus the Great (c. 600 BC or 576 BC–530 BC), founder and ruler of the Persian or Achaemenid Empire
• Darius the Great (550 – 486 BC), third ruler of the Persian Empire
• Devapala (died 850), ruler of the Pala Empire in the Indian subcontinent
• Dionysius I, Greek tyrant of Syracuse^[3]
• Ferdinand I of León and Castile (c. 1015–1065), King of León and Count of Castile
• Frederick the Great (1712–1786), King of Prussia
• Genghis Khan (1162?-1227), founder and Great Khan of the Mongol Empire
• Gero (c. 900–965), ruler of Marca Geronis, a very large march in Europe
• Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden (1594–1632), King of Sweden, founder of the Swedish Empire, and noted military leader
• Gwanggaeto the Great, King of Goguryeo, one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea^[4][5]
• Hanno the Great, the name of three leaders of Carthage, in the 4th, 3rd, and 2nd centuries BC
• Henry I, Duke of Burgundy (946–1002)
• Henry IV of France (1553–1610), King of France and King of Navarre
• Herod the Great (73/74 BC-4 BC), King of Judea
• Hugh the Great (898-956), Duke of the Franks and Count of Paris
• Hugh Magnus of France (1007–1025), co-King of France
• Hugh I, Count of Vermandois (1057–1101)
• Humphrey I de Bohun (died c. 1123), Anglo-Norman aristocrat
• Ivan III of Russia (1440–1505), Tsar of Russia
• John I of Portugal (1358–1433), King of Portugal and the Algarve
• John II of Aragon (1398–1479), King of Aragon and, through his wife, King of Navarre
• Justinian I (483-565), Byzantine Emperor
• Kamehameha I (c. 1758-1819), first King of Hawai'i
• Kanishka (died c. 127), ruler of the Kushan Empire in Central Asia and parts of India
• Kvirike III of Kakheti (1010–1029), King of Kakheti in eastern Georgia
• Kublai Khan (1215–1294), Mongol ruler in the 13th century and Emperor of China; founder of the Yuan Dynasty
• Llywelyn the Great (c. 1172–1240), Prince of Gwynedd and de facto ruler of most of Wales
• Louis I of Hungary (1326–1382), King of Hungary, Croatia and Poland
• Mangrai the Great (1238–1317), Lanna, northern Thailand
• Emperor Meiji (1852–1912), Emperor of Japan
• Mircea I of Wallachia (1355–1418)
• Mithridates II of Parthia (died 88 BC), ruler of the Parthian Empire (in present day Iran)
• Mithridates VI of Pontus (134 BC–63 BC), ruler of Pontus and the Bosporan Kingdom
• Mstislav I of Kiev (1076–1132), Grand Prince of Kievan Rus
• Naresuan (1555–1605), King of Ayutthaya
• Narai (1633–1688), King of Ayutthaya (in what is now modern Thailand)
• Odo the Great (died c. 735), Duke of Aquitaine
• Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor (912-973)
• K'inich Janaab' Pakal (603-683), ruler of the Mayan city-state of Palenque
• Parakramabahu I of Polonnaruwa (1123–1186), King of Sri Lanka
• Peter Krešimir IV of Croatia (died 1075), King of Croatia
• Peter the Great (1672–1725), Tsar of Russia
• Peter III of Aragon (1239–1285), King of Aragon and King of Sicily
• Pompey (106 BC-48 BC), military and political leader of the late Roman Republic, rival of Julius Caesar
• Radama I (1793–1828), first king of greater Madagascar
• Raja Raja Chola I (c. 947-1014), Indian emperor of the Cholas.^[6][7][8]
• Rajendra Chola I (reigned 1014–1044), Tamil King of India
• Ramesses II (reigned 1279 BC – 1213 BC), considered the greatest pharaoh of Ancient Egypt
• Ram Khamhaeng (around 1237 to 1247-1298), King of Sukhothai (in present day Thailand)
• Ramon Berenguer III, Count of Barcelona (1082–1131), also Count of Provence and various other counties
• Rhodri the Great (c. 820–878), King of Gwynedd (in present day Wales)
• Roman the Great (after 1160-1205), Grand Prince of Kiev
• Saladin (c. 1138-1193), Kurdish Sultan of Egypt and Syria, founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, and victor over the Crusaders
• Samudragupta (c. 335–375), ruler of the Gupta empire in the Indian subcontinent
• Sancho III of Navarre (c. 992-1035), King of Kingdom of Navarre
• Sargon of Akkad (died c. 2215 BC), ruler of the Akkadian Empire
• Sejong the Great (1397–1450), Korean king^[9]
• Shapur II (309-379), king of the Sassanid Empire, Persia
• Simeon I of Bulgaria (864/865-927), ruler of the First Bulgarian Empire
• Stephen III of Moldavia (1433–1504), Prince of Moldavia (Romania)
• Stephen Uroš IV Dušan of Serbia (c. 1308-1355), King of Serbia and Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks
• Taksin (1734–1782), King of the Thonburi Kingdom (Thailand)
• Tamar (1160-1123), Queen of the Georgian Empire
• Timur (1336–1405), better known as Tamerlane, founder of the Timurid Dynasty
• Theobald II, Count of Champagne (1090–1151), Count of Blois and of Chartres as Theobald IV, Count of Champagne and of Brie
• Theodoric the Great (454-526), King of the Ostrogoths, regent of the Visigoths and a viceroy of the Byzantine Empire
• Theodosius I (347-395), Roman emperor
• Tigranes the Great (140-55 BC), Emperor of Armenia
• Tiridates III of Armenia (285-339), King of Armenia
• Umar (c. 586 to 590–644), second caliph of the Muslim Empire
• Valdemar I of Denmark (1131–1182), King of Denmark
• Valentinian I (364-375), Roman Emperor
• Vladimir I of Kiev (c. 958-1015), ruler of Kievan Rus
• Vytautas (c. 1350-1430), archduke of the Lithuanian Grand Duchy
• William I, Count of Burgundy (1020–1087), Count of Burgandy and Mâcon
• William V, Duke of Aquitaine (969-1030), also Count of Poitou
• Xerxes I (519-465 BC), King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire (Persia)
• Yu the Great (c. 2200-2100 BC), legendary ruler in ancient China

Religious figures[link]

• Abraham the Great of Kashkar (ca. 492-586), monk and saint of the Assyrian Church of the East
• Abraham Kidunaia (died c. 366, hermit, priest, and Christian saint of Mesopotamia
• Albertus Magnus (1193/1206–1280), medieval German philosopher and theologian
• Anthony the Great (c. 251–356), early Christian saint of Egypt
• Babai the Great (c. 551–628), Assyrian church leader
• Basil of Caesarea (330-379), Greek bishop and theologian
• Bruno the Great (925–965), Archbishop of Cologne and Duke of Lotharingia (also listed in the previous section)
• Euthymius the Great (377-473), abbot and Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox saint
• Gertrude the Great (1256-c. 1302), German Benedictine, mystic, theologian and Roman Catholic saint
• Pope Gregory I (c. 540-604)
• Hiyya the Great, 3rd-century rabbi, Palestine
• Pope John Paul II (1920–2005)
• Pope Leo I (c. 391 or 400-461)
• Macarius of Egypt (c. 300-391), Egyptian hermit
• Pope Nicholas I (c. 800-867)
• Photius I of Constantinople (c. 810–c. 893), Eastern Orthodox saint and Patriarch of Constantinople
• William of Maleval (died 1157), founder of the Catholic congregation of Williamites

Other[link]

• Beli Mawr, a figure in medieval Welsh literature and genealogies
• Emmy the Great, folk singer
• Matteo Rosso the Great, Roman politician and father of Pope Nicholas III
• Prokop the Great, Hussite general in Bohemia

See also[link]

• Epithet
• List of monarchs by nickname
• List of nicknames of European Royalty and Nobility: G-I
• James, son of Zebedee, also known as James the Greater, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus
• Ajax (mythology), called Ajax the Greater
• Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, whose common honorific "Mahatma" means "Great Soul"

Notes[link]