But Enough About Me

Hi, everyone. My name is Neal Pollack, and I'm a writer.

Against all reasonable judgment, I live in Los Angeles, with my wife Regina Allen, our son Elijah, and our Boston Terriers, Hercules and Shaq. My next book, STRETCH: The Unlikely Making Of A Yoga Dude, will be published in August 2010 by Harper Perennial. The book is a comedy about my journey through the bizarre and pretentious world of yoga culture, and about my gradual adoption of yoga as a way of life. It will be beloved by millions, or possibly dozens.

People often ask me: What kind of yoga do you do? And then I start talking about the Ashtanga lineage until their eyes begin to grow cloudy. So let's just say that I do the best I can, probably better than I thought I'd be doing at age 40.

I've also written four other books. The bestselling memoir Alternadad came out in 2007. The Neal Pollack Anthology Of American Literature, an epic satire of literary pretension, was published in 2000 by McSweeneys books and then republished in an expanded paperback edition in 2002 by HarperCollins. Also in 2002, my friend Ben Brown published Beneath The Axis Of Evil, a satire of war journalism. In 2003, Harper Collins published my rock-n-roll novel Never Mind The Pollacks. I also edited a book of crime fiction, Chicago Noir, which Akashic Books put out in 2005.

I spent most of the 1990's as a staff writer for The Chicago Reader, and the first half of the 2000s as a contributor to McSweeney's and a columnist for Vanity Fair and Nerve.com. I contribute freelance journalism to many magazines and websites, including Men's Journal, Maxim, and Slate.com, and I write about yoga for The Faster Times and Yoga Journal.

In 2000, Rolling Stone Magazine named me its "Hot Writer," whatever that means. In 2001, the Anthology won the Firecracker Award for best independently-published fiction. I was featured as a "Writer To Watch" in a 2002 issue of Book Magazine, though they didn't actually give me a watch.

My recording career has been little heralded, for good reason. In 2001, I recorded an album version of the Anthology, with backing music from Jon Langford, Sally Timms, Kelly Hogan, and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts. It was subsequently released on Bloodshot Records.

In 2003, to coincide with the release of Never Mind The Pollacks, I formed a punk band called The Neal Pollack Invasion. We recorded Never Mind The Pollacks, an album, which was released by Telegraph Records, RIP.

If you really need any more information about any of this stuff, you can visit my Wikipedia entry, which is more or less accurate.

That's all for now. See you in yoga class.

Namaste,
NP