Stefan Sullivan

"Sullivan lights up a verbal fireworks of humor, trash and philosophy...an absolute literary discovery!" Titel Magazin (Germany)

Born in 1966, Stefan Sullivan grew up in Washington D.C., southern Germany, and rural Illinois. He studied Political Science and Russian at Middlebury, and spent his junior year abroad in Paris and Moscow. After a year as a "Sovietologist" at SRI International, a Washington defense contractor, he embarked on an Oxford PhD about Jesus in 19th Century German philosophy (supervised by Leszek Kolakowksi and John Torrance). Throughout the early 1990s, as a break from Hegeliana and biblical exegesis, Sullivan also routinely visited Russia in various guises: as journalist, NGO operative in the war zones of the Caucasus, and quixotic adventurer in the outer reaches of Siberia.

After completing his dissertation in 1993, Sullivan returned to Siberia as a "biznesmen" in the oil and gas region of Tyumen: funny money, dark suits and the powder blue Mercedes 6-door; in short, material for a first novel. Published in 2002, the novel won widespread critical acclaim, comparisons to Henry Miller, Boris Vian, and Thomas Pynchon, and a Discovery Award at the Hollywood Film Festival. As a gonzo Bildungsroman, it follows the first-person narrator through a gamut of youthful experimentation: from bohemian squalor in the urban arctic to Rolex-wristed huckstering along the Geneva-Moscow-Tyumen axis. (See Sibirischer Schwindel, Eichborn, Frankfurt, 2002, also at amazon.de)

His next book, Marx for a Post-Communist Era: On Poverty, Corruption and Banality (Routledge, 2002), heralded a return to philosophy, but in a more accessible non-academic style. Drawing on extensive exposure to the developing world (besides Russia, he also lived two years in Thailand in the late 1990s), it's an essayistic take on Marx's legacy and the ongoing tensions between market interests and the public good.

In addition to books and academic articles, Sullivan has contributed to PLAYBOY (Germany), The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington City Paper, The Washington Times, and Die Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Germany`s leading national daily. He has also made numerous radio appearances, most recently on CITYWIDE, WNYU's award-winning arts and culture show (see also author interview in Der Tagesspiegel, Berlin's leading dailyA YEARNING FOR DIRT AND POWER: The Adventurer, Hegel Scholar and Novelist Stefan Sullivan on Siberian Shamans and the Mysticism of Buxtehude, http://www.stefansullivan.com/disc.htm).