Matthew Stadler received an MFA from Columbia University in 1987. His four novels—Landscape, Runaway, The Sex Offender, and Allen Stein—explore the moral ambiguities of contemporary life. Stein is the cofounder of Clear Cut Press, an independent publisher of original books, and served as the literary editor of the design magazine Nest. He teaches in graduate writing programs around the United States and has written art and literary criticism for periodicals such as the New York Times, Bookforum, and Dwell. Stadler has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Foundation Writers Award, a Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Novel (for Allen Stein), and the Howard Foundation Mid-Career Fellowship for Fiction (from Brown University).