Look up moody in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Moody may refer to:

Places:

• Moody, Alabama, USA
• Moody, Missouri, USA
• Moody, Texas, USA
• Moody County, South Dakota, USA
• Port Moody, British Columbia, Canada
• Moody's Corner, Nova Scotia, Canada
• Moody, South Australia, Australia

In business:

• Moody's, an American credit-rating agency
• Moody's Analytics, a global risk management software company based in New York City, USA
• Moody Broadcasting Network, based in Chicago, USA
• Moody Publishers, based in Chicago, USA

Fictional Characters

• Mad-Eye Moody
• Hank Moody, a character from the television series Californication
• Judy Moody

Other:

• Moody (surname)
• Moody chart, used for computing friction losses in pipes
• Moody Air Force Base, Lowndes County, USA
• Dwight L. Moody, American evangelist
• Moody Bible Institute, based in Chicago, USA
• Moody Church, based in Chicago, USA

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Rick Moody
Lyon, France - May 2009
Born	(1961-10-18) October 18, 1961 (age 50) New York City, New York, US
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer, essayist, composer
Nationality	American
Period	1992 - present

Rick Moody (born Hiram Frederick Moody III, October 18, 1961) is an American novelist and short story writer best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into a feature film of the same title.

Life and work[link]

Moody was born in New York City and grew up in several of the Connecticut suburbs, including Darien and New Canaan, where he later set stories and novels. He graduated from St. Paul's School in New Hampshire and Brown University.

He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University in 1986; nearly two decades later he would criticize the program in an essay in The Atlantic Monthly.^[1] Soon after finishing his thesis, he checked himself into a mental hospital for alcoholism.^[2] Once sober and while working for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, he wrote his first novel, Garden State, about young people growing up in the industrial wasteland of northern New Jersey, where he was living at the time. In his introduction to a reprint of the novel, he called it the most "naked" thing he has written.^{[citation needed]} Garden State won the Pushcart Editor's Choice Award.

In 2006, Arizona State Senator Thayer Verschoor cited complaints he had received about The Ice Storm as part of the reason he supported a measure allowing students to refuse assignments they find "personally offensive." Verschoor said that "There’s no defense of this book. I can’t believe that anyone would come up here and try to defend that kind of material," although eventually numerous professors did just that.^[3]

His memoir The Black Veil (2002) won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. He has also received the Addison Metcalf Award, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Conjunctions, Harper's, Details, The New York Times, and Grand Street.

The Diviners was released in 2005. Little, Brown and Company, the publisher of The Diviners, changed the cover after the galleys came out because women reacted negatively to it. The original cover showed a Conan the Barbarian-type image in technicolor orange; the new cover uses that same image, but frames it as a scene on a movie screen.^[4]

The Diviners was followed in 2007 by Right Livelihoods, a collection of three novellas published in Britain and Ireland as The Omega Force.

The Four Fingers of Death was released July 28, 2010 by Little, Brown and Company.

In addition to his fiction, Moody is a musician and composer. He belongs to a group called the Wingdale Community Singers, which he describes as performing "woebegone and slightly modernist folk music, of the very antique variety."^[5] Moody composed the song "Free What's-his-name," performed by Fly Ashtray on their 1997 EP Flummoxed,"^[6] collaborated with One Ring Zero on the EP Rick Moody and One Ring Zero in 2004, and also contributed lyrics to One Ring Zero's albums As Smart As We Are, Memorandum, and Planets.^[7] In 2006, an essay by Moody was included in Sufjan Stevens's box-set Songs for Christmas.

When asked by the New York Times Book Review what he thought was the best book of American fiction from 1975 to 2000, Moody chose Grace Paley's The Collected Stories.^[8]

In 2001, Rick Moody co-founded the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award with Ethan Hawke, Hannah McFarland, and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh.^[9]

Moody is a co-host, along with One Ring Zero's Michael Hearst, for the 18:59 Podcast series.^[10]

Moody has taught at the State University of New York at Purchase and Bennington College, and currently teaches at New York University. He lives in Brooklyn and Fishers Island.

Praise[link]

Rick Moody speaking at the International Forum on the Novel in Lyon, France - May 2009.

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2012)

Literary critics have praised Moody's writing.

The Washington Post reviewed Moody’s most recent collection of novellas Right Livelihoods. In response to the novella "The Albertine Notes" they describe it as “one of the best stories to appear in the new millennium; it underscores that Rick Moody is one of our best writers.” Irish literary critic Val Nolan, writing in The Sunday Business Post, called the story “a symbolic reaction to the crisis of instability in American identity today” and remarked that the collection as a whole “brilliantly reflects the unease and baroque insecurities of the post-9/11 nation."^[11]

His 2005 novel The Diviners received praise in multiple reviewsTemplate:From whom?: “In this affectionate but unflinching cautionary tale about vanity, ambition, and life's unlikely paths, Rick Moody delivers a masterpiece of comedy that will bring him to a still higher level of appreciation.”^{[citation needed]}

Of the novel The Ice Storm (later produced as the movie starring Sigourney Weaver), Hungry Mind Review commented that it “works on so many levels, and is so smartly written, that it should establish Rick Moody as one of his generation's bellwether voices."^{[citation needed]}

Reviews of Moody’s novel Purple America continued in this vein.^[ambiguous] Salon commented: "Reading Purple America can feel like dancing a quadrille with four very different partners. On we go, propelled from consciousness to consciousness by Moody's prodigious gift for ventriloquism and large, supple vocabulary."^{[citation needed]} Details was also positive: "You come up gasping on the last page."^{[citation needed]} And Booklist states: "Closely interknitting his narrative with the lyrical, soaring monologues of all the key players, Moody effortlessly moves from one striking passage to the next....it's the characters' voices, so full of urgency and distress, that are unforgettable."^{[citation needed]}

Michael Chabon and Thomas Pynchon gave high praise for the memoir, The Black Veil, the former calling it "a unique blend of wrenching emotion and human playfulness," the latter saying Moody "writing with boldness, humor, generosity of spirit, and a welcome sense of wrath, takes the art of the memoir an important step into its future."

The Review of Contemporary Fiction, in their June 2003 issue, says of Moody's writing:

"Within Moody's fictional treatments, the reader is necessarily one step removed from experience. We are engaged within a tight fuselage-world of the rendered text, an intricate and highly original language system wherein lurks characters sustained by the exertion of words, like the music sustained by the exertion of piano keys. Indeed, Moody's characters are like word-chords whose considerable tribulations and emotional woundings are never the central fact of the text, but rather convincing casings, occasions to press ink on paper. Voices emerge--language projections that ignite from plot moments, from brutal experience set to the available music of language, characters finally as sonic events who inhabit a geography of print."^{[citation needed]}

Esquire describes Moody as “that rare writer who can make the language do tricks and still suffuse his narrative with soul."^{[citation needed]}

Lydia Millet, in a 2001 article for The Village Voice, described Moody as "equipped with subtle but powerful typographic tools—the vibrant and pervasive Bernhardian italic phrase, pregnant with meaning, the elegant Joycean em dash denoting dialogue—Moody strikes me as a self-styled avenging angel of highbrow literary cool. Underneath the Clark Kentish exterior lurks a crypto-Superman schooled in semiotics and steeped in pop culture, one eyebrow permanently raised at the unsightly stupidity of the masses."^{[citation needed]}

Criticism[link]

Novelist and critic Dale Peck unfavorably reviewed Moody's The Black Veil in The New Republic, a review so harsh it has become infamous in literary circles.^[12] Peck began the review with the sentence "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation,"^[13] arguing that Moody's writing is "pretentious, muddled, derivative, [and] bathetic" and claiming, "I am not convinced that Moody's books are about anything at all."

Works[link]

Novels

• Garden State (1992)
• The Ice Storm (1994)
• Purple America (1996)
• The Diviners (2005)
• The Four Fingers of Death (2010)

Fiction collections

• The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven (novella and stories, 1995)
• Demonology (stories, 2001)
• Right Livelihoods (novellas, 2007)

Nonfiction

• The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions (2002)

Satire

• Surplus Value Books: Catalog Number 13 (Illustrated by David Ford) (1999)

As editor or contributor

• Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited (co-editor, with Darcey Steinke, and contributor) (1997)
• The Magic Kingdom, by Stanley Elkin (introduction to the Dalkey Archives trade paperback reprint) (2000)
• A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by Joseph Cornell (contributor) (2001)
• The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy (introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition) (2002)
• Lithium for Medea, by Kate Braverman (introduction to the Seven Stories Press trade paperback reprint) (2002)
• Twilight: Photographs by Gregory Crewdson (text) (2002)
• Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible (contributor, short fiction envisioning a modern-day Jonah) (2004)
• The Wilco Book (contributor) (2004)
• The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (introduction) (2006)
• The Flash (contributor) (2007)
• The Rumpus (Music blogger) (2009)

Notes[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Rick Moody

Writing

• David Ryan (Spring-Summer 2001). "Rick Moody, The Art of Fiction No. 166". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/509/the-art-of-fiction-no-166-rick-moody. 
• Moody reads "Twister" from The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven (Audio) at Salon.com (2000)
• Salon "Writing in the dark", an essay at Salon.com (2001)
• Short Story: "Fragment from an Untelevised Revolution" on Fictionaut

Music

• Selections from Rick Moody and One Ring Zero and performances on WNYC's The Next Big Thing, at Transom.org
• Musical pieces by Moody and collaborators, at UbuWeb