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BIO
photo by Stefan Hagen
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Marshall Jon Fisher was born in 1963 in Ithaca, New York, grew up in Miami, and graduated from Brandeis University. After working various jobs (sportswriter, tennis instructor, temp secretary), he moved to New York City, where he received an M.A. in English at City College. In 1989 he moved to Boston and began working as a freelance writer and editor.
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From 1995 to 2002 he wrote on a variety of topics for the Atlantic Monthly, ranging from wooden tennis rackets to Internet fraud, and his work has also appeared in Harper’s, Discover, DoubleTake, and other publications, as well as The Best American Essays 2003. He wrote three books with his father, David E. Fisher, including Tube: the Invention of Television and Strangers in the Night: a Brief History of Life on Other Worlds, which was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the twenty-five Books to Remember of 1998.
In 2009, A Terrible Splendor was published. The Washington Post wrote, “Fisher has gotten hold of some mighty themes: war and peace, love and death, sports and savagery…. As the match enters its final set, all the narrative pieces lock together, and A Terrible Splendor becomes as engrossing as the contest it portrays.” The Wall Street Journal found the book “rich and rewarding,” and the San Francisco Chronicle called Splendor “enthralling…a gripping tale…. Wedding the nuances of a sport to broader historical events is a challenge, but Fisher pulls the task off with supreme finesse, at once revealing the triumph and tragedy of a remarkable tennis match.”
Marshall’s novel, A Backhanded Gift, was published in 2013. Next he completed another novel, Nabokov’s Advantage, about the great writer (and his future wife) in 1923, when he was just a promising young poet eking out a living teaching tennis and English in Russian Berlin. In July 2022, Abrams Press published Fisher’s next nonfiction book, Seventeen and Oh: Miami, 1972, and the NFL’s Only Perfect Season.
Marshall lives in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts with his wife, Mileta Roe (a professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock). They have two sons, Satchel and Bram.