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Welcome to the Evan Dara Affinity

The Evan Dara Affinity is a site dedicated to the exploration and amplification of the works of Evan Dara, who has deftly managed to publish three of the most remarkable novels of the past 25 years, while remaining masked and pseudonymous.  And frightfully unread.

While we don’t generate a large number of posts, you can keep up with us at the blog or examine the growing list of resources.

But if you want a quick synopsis, here is the description of Dara which is found on Wikipedia:

Evan Dara is an American novelist. He has published three novels, which are concerned with subjects including social atomization, music, political dysfunction, epistemology, ecology, and time. The Times Literary Supplement (London) called Dara “one of the most exciting American novelists writing today.”^[1]

Widely believed to be using a pseudonym, Dara has given no interviews and has issued no photographs, and has chosen to publish his novels through his own press, Aurora. His work has been almost totally unacknowledged by the commercial American literary community—Australian critic Emmett Stinson has called Dara “the best-kept secret in all of contemporary American literature”—but he has received exceptional acclaim from underground and alternative sites.^{[2][3][4][5][6]} His books have been the subject of numerous scholarly articles and theses, and have been taught in dozens of colleges and universities across the world.

This includes a course in Madrid called “In Search of the Great American Novel,” where Dara’s work was read alongside that of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison.^[7] The only other writer of Dara’s generation to be included in this survey was David Foster Wallace.^[8]

In 1995, his first novel, The Lost Scrapbook, won the 12th Annual FC2 Illinois State University National Fiction Competition judged by William T. Vollmann.^[9] Dara’s second novel, The Easy Chain, was published by Aurora Publishers in 2008. A third novel, Flee, was published by Aurora in 2013.