Andrew Ridker Books in Order

Andrew Ridker grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, a streetcar suburb west of Boston. He has described it as a progressive, largely Jewish community, and books were simply part of the household. His parents read Philip Roth, and the shelves led him toward writers such as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud.

That early reading turned into serious study. Ridker attended Washington University in St. Louis, spent a year at Oxford, and later earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. St. Louis, Boston, New York, and Iowa all became places he knew from the inside, a useful vantage point for someone interested in regional habits, class, and the stories people tell about themselves.

Before publishing novels, he worked across literary magazines and nonfiction. In 2013, while at Boston Review, public arguments over government surveillance gave him the idea for Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics. He edited the collection, which brought together poems responding to surveillance and its effects on private life.

Editing was not a side note. He also became a founding editor of Nat. Brut, a multimedia literary magazine, and his essays and criticism have appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, Bookforum, Guernica, and The Paris Review Daily. The work kept him close to other writers while he developed his own fiction.

Then he put that attention into a family novel.

His 2019 debut, The Altruists, centers on the Alter family. Arthur, a professor in St. Louis with money problems, calls home his estranged adult children, Ethan and Maggie, after their mother’s death leaves them an inheritance. The plan is partly reconciliation and partly desperation, which gives the story its pressure. Readers who like family stories with uncomfortable humor will find arguments about money, morality, dating, privilege, and the gap between generations.

Hope, published in 2023, moves to Brookline in 2013 and follows the Greenspans through a year of increasingly public and private trouble. When cardiologist Scott Greenspan is caught falsifying blood samples, the crisis pushes his wife Deb, daughter Maya, and son Gideon into choices they had not expected to make. The novel uses a large family canvas, but it keeps returning to smaller questions: What do people owe each other? How much of a good life rests on luck?

Ridker’s characters often have strong opinions and messy blind spots. They want to be decent, informed, helpful people, but they also protect status, comfort, and the version of themselves they prefer to believe. That tension gives his books a comic bite without turning the people in them into simple targets. Jewish family life, liberal institutions, work, money, and old family grievances all recur, usually alongside a close look at how an ideal can get tangled up with self-interest.

He has said that writing lets him live, for a while, inside minds unlike his own.

Ridker lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and founded the Prospect Writers’ Workshop. He continues to write fiction and essays, and to work in the literary community that first gave his own writing room to grow.