Gary Braver is the pen name of Gary Goshgarian, the author of eight critically acclaimed suspense novels: three under his own name--Atlantis Fire, Rough Beast and The Stone Circle--and five under his pen name--Elixir, Gray Matter, Flashback, Skin Deep, and Tunnel Vision.

He is also the author of six popular college writing textbooks--Exploring Language, The Contemporary Reader, Dialogues, What Matters in America, Readings for Today, and Dialogue as Argument: A Concise Guide.

In the 1970s, Gary took up scuba diving and joined an Earthwatch team looking for Phoenician and Roman shipwrecks off the Spanish island of Mallorca. They discovered two Roman wrecks as well as modern-day pirates who attacked them underwater with anchors dragged behind fast speedboats. Unbeknownst to them, their little expedition had trespassed into the middle of an antiquities blackmarket involving dealers who were stealing booty from Mediterranean shipwrecks and selling it to museums around the world. Gary vowed that if he got out of that alive, he'd write a book about it. He did and moved the locale to the majestic island of Santorini, the ancient outpost of the Minoan empire. That book is called Atlantis Fire, which Stephen King called "a fine thriller seasoned with wit and sensibility...it blew me away."

His archaeological thriller, The Stone Circle, got good reviews and, for awhile, had attracted the interest of Jack Nicholson who was looking to do a horror movie on the success of "The Shining." He eventually passed, choosing to make "Wolf" (1994) instead.

In 1995, Gary's next novel Rough Beast was published. Because of its reception, the publisher asked that he do more of the same--high concept bio-medical thrillers centered on the family. That led to Elixir, which got optioned for a movie by director Ridley Scott. Because of that option and the publisher's perception that the book was going to take off, Gary was asked to adopt a pen name to fool the bookstore chains which base their prepublication purchases on the sales figures of an author's previous title. Thus, Gary Braver was born. The movie was not made, even after a second option, but Elixir did well.

Gary then published more thrillers--Gray Matter, Flashback, winner of the 2006 Massachusetts Honor Book Award, and Skin Deep, a psychological thriller centered on cosmetic surgery. His newest thriller, Tunnel Vision, released in June 2011.

Gary is an award-winning professor of English at Northeastern University where he teaches Fiction Writing and courses in popular culture (Science Fiction, Horror Fiction, Detective Fiction, Modern Bestsellers, and Edgar Allan Poe.) He has taught fiction-writing workshops throughout the U.S. and Europe.

He lives in Massachusetts.

 

Sunday, August 14, 2011

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