Neal Karlen’s ninth book, Prince Talks! A Life Off the Record, a memoir of his 31-year friendship of, well, Prince, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in April 2020. Karlen was an associate editor for Newsweek, a Contributing Editor for Rolling Stone, a regular contributor to The New York Times, and an on-air essayist for CBS News and National Public Radio.
2016 Indianapolis 500
His other books range in topic from vaudeville, minor league baseball, and Midwest mobsters to religious fundamentalism, linguistics, and the Kabbalah. Karlen’s articles have appeared in both The New Yorker and the punk rock fanzine The Squealer, and his fiction has been published in The Indiana Review and Mandala. He has taught creative nonfiction in the MFA creative writing programs of the University of Minnesota and Augsburg College, and despite having seven “Fs” on his final transcript, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University (for real.) He has lectured from Bangor to Bakersfield on everything and nothing, and lives in his native Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Recent Books
Prince Talks! A Life Off the Record
Neal's memoir of his 31-year friendship of Prince, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in April 2020.
Augie’s Secrets: The Minneapolis Mob and the King of the Hennepin Strip
There's an old Yiddish saying: two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead. But two living…
The Story of Yiddish: How a Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews
Yiddish—an oft-considered "gutter" language—is an unlikely survivor of the ages, much like the Jews themselves. Its survival has been an…
Shanda: The Making and Breaking of a Self-Loathing Jew
Neal Karlen describes the rejection and subsequent embrace of the Jewish faith, remembering his childhood as the son of Orthodox…