Drew Magary Books in Order

Drew Magary was born in Sydney, Australia, to American parents and moved to the United States when he was four months old. He grew up in Minnesota and Connecticut, and that mix of places shows up in his work, where suburban life often sits right next to the weird, the anxious, and the absurd.

Writing clicked for him early. At Phillips Exeter, he wrote a column for the student paper, and an English class on Catch-22 gave him a jolt: assigned reading could actually be funny. That discovery matters, because so much of Magary's later work runs on the same engine, jokes first, then the harder feeling right behind them.

College took him first to the University of Michigan and then to Colby College in Maine, where he studied English. After graduation he moved into advertising and copywriting, working there for about a decade while writing on the side.

He didn't come out of an MFA program. He came out of day jobs, deadlines, and the internet at full speed.

That path made him. Magary became widely known through football blogging and then spent more than a decade at Deadspin, where his columns, mailbags, and annual NFL roast pieces built a loyal audience. He also wrote for GQ, and after the Deadspin staff walkout he became a co-founder of Defector. He now writes there and also works as a columnist for SFGATE.

His books move easily between memoir, satire, and speculative fiction. Men with Balls turns the culture of pro sports into a fake handbook. Someone Could Get Hurt takes modern fatherhood, strips away the polite talk, and leaves all the panic, mess, love, and bad decisions on the table.

Then there are the novels. The Postmortal imagines a near future where aging can be switched off, then follows the social wreckage that comes after. The Hike starts with a dad taking a short walk before dinner and turns into a surreal quest full of monsters, danger, and homesick momentum. Point B uses teleportation, corporate power, first love, and a murder mystery to build a world that feels wild but not all that far from this one. Readers who like Magary usually like that he takes a huge premise and keeps it tied to ordinary fear, family life, and embarrassment.

In December 2018, after a Deadspin event in New York, Magary suffered a catastrophic brain hemorrhage and fractured his skull in a fall. He spent two weeks in a coma and then faced a long recovery, with lasting changes to his hearing, smell, taste, and balance. He wrote about that stretch in The Night the Lights Went Out, which is as interested in anger, confusion, and damage as it is in survival.

Also, yes, he really did win an amateur episode of Chopped.

That mix of pain, curiosity, and sideways humor is a big part of why his work sticks with people. Across his books, you keep seeing the same interests come back: bodies that fail without warning, systems that promise easy fixes and make life worse, and families trying to stay whole while the world acts ridiculous. He lives in Maryland with his wife, three kids, and dog, and he has joked that he now operates with 95 percent of a functioning brain. It sounds like a punch line, but it also feels like a fair description of the work, damaged, funny, stubborn, and very much alive.