Paul Lisicky Books in Order

If you want his fiction first: Lawnboy → The Burning House
If you want memoir first: Famous Builder → The Narrow Door → Later
If you want short, lyrical prose: Unbuilt Projects
If you want music and literary memoir together: Song So Wild and Blue

Paul Lisicky grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and a lot of his work still carries traces of that world: suburbia, family tension, private longing, and the odd ways a person learns to make a self. He studied English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, earned an MA at Rutgers-Camden, and later completed an MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. That mix of New Jersey roots and serious training in craft shows up all through his books.

Before prose took over, music was one of his first languages.

As a young man, Lisicky was a songwriter as much as an aspiring writer. In Famous Builder, he remembers the awkward boy he once was, drawing elaborate housing plans, writing liturgical music, and trying to imagine a future big enough to live in. Later he set the guitar aside and turned more fully to prose, a shift that eventually carried him to Iowa and into the writing life he has kept building ever since.

His books move between novel, memoir, essay, and short prose, but they often return to the same live wires: queer identity, friendship, family history, illness, desire, art-making, and the places that shape how people see themselves. He writes a lot about communities under pressure, biological families, chosen families, circles of writers and artists, and towns that feel both sheltering and fragile. Even when the form changes, the emotional questions stay close.

Readers often start with Lawnboy, his debut novel, which follows a gay teenager in South Florida through desire, exile, and the messy hope of finding home. Others come to Famous Builder for its funny, tender account of suburban childhood and self-invention. In The Burning House, he turns family strain and erotic confusion into a compact, tense novel about a man trying to stay decent while his world shifts under him.

Place matters in his books.

That is especially true of Later, his memoir of Provincetown in the early 1990s, where he was finding freedom, art, sex, and belonging while the AIDS crisis reshaped daily life. The book became one of NPR's Best Books of 2020. The Narrow Door, another memoir, looks at friendship, breakup, illness, and grief through scenes drawn from two long relationships, and it was a New York Times Editors' Choice and a finalist for the Randy Shilts Award. Then Song So Wild and Blue widened the frame again, using Joni Mitchell's music to think about influence, voice, and what it means to grow into an artist.

His shorter book Unbuilt Projects shows another side of him. Made up of compressed prose pieces, it brings together childhood, sex, faith, family, and loss in quick, vivid bursts. It is a good reminder that Lisicky is not tied to one mode. He likes forms that can hold feeling without overexplaining it.

Alongside the books, he has built a long teaching and editing life. He has taught creative writing at Cornell, New York University, Sarah Lawrence, and elsewhere, and he is now a professor in the MFA program at Rutgers University-Camden. He also edits StoryQuarterly. His work has appeared in places such as The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Tin House, and The New York Times Book Review, and he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, among others.

He lives in Brooklyn, New York. What keeps readers coming back is not polish for its own sake, but the way his books stay open to contradiction: funny and bruised, intimate and roomy, alert to pain but also to music, weather, friendship, and the strange relief of being understood.