Neal Pollack (born March 1, 1970) is an American satirist, novelist, short story writer, and journalist. He lives in Los Angeles, California. Pollack has written five books: The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, Never Mind the Pollacks, Beneath the Axis of Evil, Alternadad, and Stretch. He is a member of the Writer's Guild Of America and PEN.
From 1993 to 2000, Pollack worked as a staff reporter for The Chicago Reader, covering Chicago city politics and writing profiles of urban eccentrics. Meanwhile, he took classes from Del Close at ImprovOlympic and later joined The Free Associates, an improv troupe that performed long-form parodies of various literary genres, including "Cast On A Hot Tin Roof", "As We Like It: Shakespeare In Your Face", and "Blithering Heights". Pollack's theatrical career was short-lived, but in the late 1990s, he began reading his spoken-word parodies at performance nights around Chicago.
This led to a more substantial performance career during the heights of McSweeney's popularity. Pollack appeared in shows with John Hodgman, Sarah Vowell, Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, David Byrne, Arthur Bradford, They Might Be Giants, M. Doughty, and many others before parting ways with McSweeney's in 2003.
Pollack, who graduated from Northwestern University's Medill School Of Journalism in 1992, wrote a political satire column for Vanity Fair, and the "Bad Sex With Neal Pollack" column for Nerve.com. He frequently writes about sports for Slate.com and about parenting for The New York Times Magazine and Jewcy.com, among many other publications. His satirical online take down [1] of James Frey was named one of the "Top 26 Cultural Moments Of The Decade" by Slate cultural critic Troy Patterson.
In 2007, along with Ben Brown and Matthew Tobey, Pollack started Offsprung.com, a humor magazine and web community for parents, where Pollack contributes an advice column. The blog on his website, Alternadad, records Pollack's continuing adventures with his son Elijah; his wife, painter Regina Allen; and his Boston terriers Hercules and Shaq, and also talks about his most recent passion, yoga. In June 2010, he completed a 200-hour yoga teacher's certification course at Richard Freeman's Yoga Workshop in Boulder, Colorado.
The Anthology, a collection of short satires of literary pomposity, was originally published by McSweeney's in 2000. It won the 2001 Firecracker Award for best independently published fiction and led to Pollack being named a "Hot Writer" by Rolling Stone. HarperCollins later published an expanded edition.
Beneath the Axis of Evil, a parody of post-9-11 war punditry, was published in a limited edition by So New Media in 2002. Never Mind The Pollacks, a satirical novel about dueling rock critics, came out from HarperCollins in 2003.
Alternadad, published by Pantheon in January 2007, exposed Pollack's work to a wider public. Unlike his previous arch satires, Alternadad is a straightforward, if humorous memoir of his early days as a "cool" parent in Austin, Texas. Upon publication, Alternadad received a flurry of press, largely in the form of trend stories about "hipster parents." It was featured in Time and The New York Times, earned Pollack a cover profile in Poets & Writers Magazine, and led to a filmed feature about Pollack's family on Nightline. Critics were sharply divided on the book, calling it everything from "the most offbeat parenting memoir ever written" to "indescribably dull." Warner Brothers optioned Alternadad, and it is currently in development as a television comedy. The book was nominated for a 2008 Books For A Better Life award, in the parenting category.
Stretch: The Unlikely Making Of A Yoga Dude, a chronicle of Pollack's adventures in American yoga culture, appeared in August 2010, to largely positive reviews.
Pollack is also the editor of Chicago Noir, a collection of original crime stories from Akashic Books. His crime fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and short-story collections. One of his Slate.com articles was featured in the Best American Sportswriting collection of 2006.
In 2001, to coincide with the publication of the paperback edition of his Anthology, Pollack recorded a spoken-word album on Bloodshot Records, produced by Jon Langford and featuring Sally Timms and Kelly Hogan. Designed to look like Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, the album is a bizarre if entertaining mishmash of styles. HarperCollins put the album out in 2002 as part of a boxed set of Pollack's "collected recordings," including an hour-long disc of Def Poetry Jam parodies and a fake interview with John Hodgman.
Pollack formed a punk-rock band in 2003 to publicize Never Mind The Pollacks. The original Neal Pollack Invasion included folk-rock musician Jim Roll, veteran touring musicians Neil Cleary and Jon Williams, and Dakota Smith, a young Austin musician who later became the lead guitarist for Peel. They recorded an album of original songs. Pollack wrote the lyrics and Smith and Roll wrote the music. Telegraph Records released the album in the fall of 2003, and the band went on a 20-city tour, including shows at the South By Southwest and CMJ music festivals. They played their last show in New York City, at the Virgin Megastore in Union Square. Three weeks later, Telegraph Records went bankrupt, and the band never reunited. A new version of The Neal Pollack Invasion, featuring members of the Jello Biafra-inspired Yuppie Pricks, occasionally plays shows in Austin.
