David Abrams is one of those typical film geeks who consistently put Citizen Kane at the top of every list. That's the high-art side of him; the low-art half happens to like Joe vs. the Volcano, thankyouverymuch.Films he could watch over and over and over: North by Northwest, All About Eve, Pinocchio, Monty Python and the Holy Grail ("What? The curtains?"), Notorious, Hail the Conquering Hero, Casablanca, Amadeus, The Third Man, Blade Runner, His Girl Friday, Days of Heaven, The Princess Bride, The General, City Lights, Out of the Past, High Noon, Psycho, The Godfather II, Mrs. Miniver, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Rear Window, Cinema Paradiso, Double Indemnity, Orphans of the Storm, The Shining, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Wizard of Oz, The Bicycle Thief, The Sixth Sense, Laura.
Favorite scent: New-book glue
Favorite flavor: Toasted marshmallow
Favorite color: Royal blue
Favorite list of favorite things: This one
Born in Pennsylvania and raised in Wyoming, Abrams earned a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Oregon. After working as a reporter and copy editor for two small-town newspapers in Montana, he enlisted as a journalist in the Army in 1988. Since then, he has traveled the globe at least once, visiting and living in places like Atlanta, Thailand, the Mojave Desert, Japan, the Comoros Islands, El Paso ("Hell Paso"), and for the majority of his career, Alaska.
While living in the Last Frontier, Abrams has hooked 45-pound king salmon, pursued the ever-elusive ice worm, danced half-naked beneath the northern lights at midnight and once had his tongue freeze to metal (but once was enough).
At various points in his measly little life, he has been a librarian, a school janitor, a summer-stock thespian, a newspaper deliveryman, a pizza deliveryman, a cook, a dishwasher, a waiter, a teacher, a storage facility manager, a video store clerk, a stamp collector, and Secretary-General of the U.N. (One of these things doesn't belong with the others...Can you guess which one, boys and girls?)
His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Esquire, The Greensboro Review, Fish Stories, The Nebraska Review, The Santa Clara Review, Permafrost, Snowy Egret, The Christian Century, The Belletrist Review, Grand Tour, and Snake Nation Review.
An essay on fishing in Alaska appears in Alaska Passages, published by Sasquatch Books in 1997. One of his short stories was listed as one of the "100 Other Distinguished Stories of 1998" in the anthology The Best American Short Stories, 1999 (edited by Amy Tan). Online, he has written for www.epinions.com, www.januarymagazine.com and Drexel Online Journal (www.drexel.edu/doj/). He has written a novel, Dubble, about a midget working as a stuntman for a terrible-tempered child movie-star in the 1940s.
Abrams currently lives in Anchorage with his wife, three kids and two cats.
The Ongoing List of Beautiful and Smart People He Adores: Cary Grant, Charles Dickens, Rickie Lee Jones, Jean Arthur, Preston Sturges, Emmylou Harris, Alfred Hitchcock, John Irving, John Prine, David Lynch, William Faulkner, Tchaikovsky, Dostoevsky, Lewis Nordan, N.C. Wyeth, Flannery O'Connor, Sinead O'Connor, Jean Harlow, Buster Keaton, Rick Bass, Winona Ryder, David Letterman, Billie Holiday, Fred & Bing & Gene, Anne Sexton, John Singer Sargent, Greer Garson, Meryl Streep, Orson Welles, Maxfield Parrish, Irving Thalberg, Raymond Carver, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Richard Ford, Kate Bush, William Wharton, Edith Wharton.
