Books like Luminarium

Alexander Michael Shakar (born April 25, 1968) is an American novelist and short story writer. His novel Luminarium (Soho Press, 2011) received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction. His first novel, The Savage Girl, was chosen as a "Notable Book" by The New York Times, was a Book Sense 76 Pick, and has been translated into six foreign languages.

Shakar grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended Stuyvesant High School. He graduated from Yale University in 1990. He was a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, and earned his Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He currently lives in Chicago and teaches fiction writing as an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the son of actor Martin Shakar.