Matt Ruff Books in Order

Matt Ruff was born in New York City in 1965. He says he decided he wanted to be a fiction writer at five, then spent his childhood and teen years learning how to shape a story. It was an early decision, and he kept following it.

At Cornell University, Ruff wrote what became Fool on the Hill as his senior thesis in Honors English. His professor, novelist Alison Lurie, helped him find an agent. Within six months of graduation, Atlantic Monthly Press had bought the novel, and Ruff had a path into publishing.

Fool on the Hill introduced a habit that has stayed with him: start with a recognizable setting, then let the strange things in. Set around Cornell, the book brings a retired Greek god, student writers, animals, elves, rats, and a dragon into one unruly tale.

Ruff has never settled into just one genre.

That range is part of the point. Rather than build one familiar fictional world, he has repeatedly chosen a fresh set of rules, a new place, and a new pressure point for each novel.

His next novel, Sewer, Gas and Electric, heads into a wildly exaggerated future New York, where an investigation takes in a Tower of Babel, androids, robots, and a computer-resurrected Ayn Rand. The story has the wide, comic sprawl of satire, but it also shows Ruff's interest in how ideas about power get played out in ordinary lives.

With Set This House in Order, he made a sharp change of scale. The novel follows Andrew Gage and Penny Driver, two people living with multiple inner selves, and centers on trust, memory, trauma, and the work of building a life with other people. It won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, a Washington State Book Award, and a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and helped Ruff secure a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

Then he turned paranoia into a game of shifting rules.

In Bad Monkeys, murder suspect Jane Charlotte says she belongs to a secret group that fights evil, while a jail psychiatrist tries to work out whether she is lying, unwell, or something harder to name. The Mirage shifts to an alternate post-9/11 world in which the United States and the Middle East have traded geopolitical roles. Both books pull readers along by making certainty feel temporary.

Lovecraft Country brought Ruff's interest in history, horror, and ordinary people under pressure into a 1950s Chicago story about Atticus Turner, his family, and friends confronting both segregation and supernatural dangers. The novel became a New York Times bestseller and inspired an HBO adaptation. Ruff returned to those characters in The Destroyer of Worlds, set two years later.

His 2020 novel, 88 Names, moves into online role-playing games and virtual reality. It follows a professional game guide who grows wary of a secretive client, using a fast-moving thriller setup to ask who people are when most of what you know about them happens on a screen. Ruff's books often share crowded plots, unusual premises, dark humor, and characters trying to get their bearings in systems bigger than themselves. He has made novel-writing his primary occupation since graduating from college. Since 1998, he has been married to researcher and rare-book expert Lisa Gold. They live in Seattle, Washington.