Neal Karlen

Karlen grew up in a Jewish family in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and attended St. Louis Park High School. [1] He studied Yiddish at Brown University.

Karlen has been a contributing author to many well-known magazines, including Newsweek, The New York Times,[2] and Rolling Stone.[3][4]

He is the author of eight books, and he teaches non-fiction writing at the University of Minnesota's Graduate School of Journalism.

• Take My Life, Please! - Henny Youngman (1991) ISBN 978-0-688-07744-0
• The Babe in Boyland (1995)[5] ISBN 978-0-06-039188-1
• Babes in Toyland: The Making and Selling of a Rock and Roll Band (1995)[6] ISBN 978-0-8129-2058-1
• Jen-X: Jenny McCarthy's Open Book (1997)[7] ISBN 978-0-06-039233-8
• Slouching Toward Fargo: A Two-Year Saga Of Sinners And St. Paul Saints At The Bottom Of The Bush Leagues With Bill Murray, Darryl Strawberry, Dakota Sadie And Me (1999)[8][9][10] ISBN 978-0-06-039233-8
• Shanda: The Making and Breaking of a Self-loathing Jew (2004) Simon and Schuster.[11] ISBN 978-0-7432-6631-4
• The Story of Yiddish: How a Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews (2009) HarperCollins.[12] ISBN 978-0-06-083711-2
• Augie's Secrets: The Minneapolis Mob and the King of the Hennepin Strip, (2013) Minnesota Historical Society Press.[13][14] ISBN 978-1-250-13524-7
• This Thing Called Life: Prince's Odyssey On + Off the Record, (2020) MacMillan Publishers/St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-1-250-13524-7

• Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology; Frank Bures, Ed., Belt Publishing, 2019. Reprint of a 1985 Rolling Stone cover story on Minneapolis. ISBN 978-1-948742-43-6
• Rolling Stone’s The 90’s: The Inside Stories, anthology collected by the editors of Rolling Stone, HarperCollins (2010), reprint of 1990 cover story on Prince. ISBN 978-0-06-177920-6
• Fishing With My Father: A Literary Companion, edited by Peter Kaminsky, Penguin Publishers, 2005, two previously published essays from The New York Times. ISBN 978-1-59609-146-7
• The Complete Armchair Book of Baseball: An All-Star Lineup Celebrates America’s National Pastime, Scribner publishers, 2004; edited by John Thorn, introduction by Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti; reprint of piece, “The Bad Nose Bees,” originally published in Rolling Stone, in an anthology of baseball writing from the Civil War to the present. ISBN 978-1-57866-004-9
• The Armchair Book of Baseball, Volume II; (Scribner, 1997; John Thorn, ed.) ISBN 978-0-684-18772-3
• The Indiana Review, University of Indiana, 1995, fiction, “The Power of the Just-Dead;” in the national literary magazine;
• The Best American Sportswriting 1994 (Houghton Mifflin, 1994; Glenn Stout, ed.) Cited for Village Voice feature article on Willie Mays. ISBN 978-0-395-63325-0

Neal was the recipient of the CASEY Award in 1999 for his book Slouching Toward Fargo.