Michael Grothaus Books in Order

Michael Grothaus is an American novelist and journalist born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1977. He studied film and journalism at Columbia College Chicago, where his long-running interests in storytelling, media, and culture were already taking shape.

While at college, Grothaus began writing for Screen magazine and covered Chicago's film scene. It was a practical start, putting him close to an industry built on glamour, workaday hustle, and carefully managed appearances.

After graduating, he interned with 20th Century Fox at the Cannes Film Festival, then spent time at the Art Institute of Chicago. There, he eventually wrote and directed a children's film. The detour through film never really left the page.

Grothaus later worked at Apple before moving to London in 2007 to study creative writing at the University of London. He earned a master's degree with distinction, then returned to journalism with a wider set of subjects and a sharper interest in the ways technology changes ordinary life.

His articles have appeared in publications including Fast Company, The Guardian, The Irish Times, VICE, Quartz, and Engadget. Across that work, he has reported on internet subcultures, online puzzles, technology, sexuality, and the uneasy overlap between what people see online and what is real.

He keeps returning to the gap between the image and the thing itself.

That question sits at the center of Epiphany Jones, his 2016 debut novel. The book follows Jerry Dresden, a troubled Art Institute employee drawn into a dangerous search after a murder and theft leave him exposed. It mixes a thriller plot with dark comedy while taking on celebrity culture, pornography, internet obsession, and sex trafficking in Hollywood. The novel was longlisted for the 2017 CWA New Blood Dagger.

The subject matter is hard, but Grothaus doesn't treat it as background noise.

In Trust No One: Inside the World of Deepfakes, his first nonfiction book, he shifts from invented danger to a very real digital problem. Grothaus investigates how manipulated video and audio are made, speaks with people working in this murky space, and considers the personal and political damage that can follow when convincing fake evidence becomes cheap and easy to spread.

His 2023 novel Beautiful Shining People moves into near-future Japan. Seventeen-year-old tech prodigy John enters a small Tokyo cafe and meets Neotnia, a guarded waitress, as well as the cafe's former sumo wrestler owner and his unusual dog. Their journey moves through Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagano against a backdrop of deepfakes, automation, and a digital cold war. It is a coming-of-age story as much as a technology story, with room for friendship, loneliness, and questions about belonging. Whether he is writing fiction or reporting, Grothaus is interested in the pressure technology puts on human connection.