Nathan Deuel

For the last half decade, Nathan Deuel lived in the Middle East, where as an NPR correspondent his wife swashbuckled her way across Mesopotamia, embedded with Syrian rebels, and climbed nonchalantly atop Yemeni rubble as US warplanes circled above. Nathan, meanwhile, kept the Beirut homefires burning -- a former Rolling Stone editor, a father -- often alone, and taking care of their daughter.

FRIDAY WAS THE BOMB (May 2014, Dzanc) is a collection of personal essays from ring-side seats to some of the Middle East's greatest spasms: The end of US involvement in Iraq, the Arab Spring, and war in Syria. At once a mediation on fatherhood and an unusual memoir of a war correspondent's husband, it's also a long take on the best and worst we can do as people.

Nathan Deuel has written personal essays, creative nonfiction, reported pieces, criticism, and short fiction, in print and online, for Harper's, GQ, The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, and many others. He is a regular contributor of essays and short fiction to The Paris Review, a columnist for The Financial Times, and a contributing editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books. He graduated from the University of Tampa with an MFA in creative writing and lives in Los Angeles with his family.