Once a Man

Rick Moss is a multi-disciplinary artist living in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of three previous novels. His most recent, the darkly comic Impossible Figures, employs multiple, looping narratives to unfold the tale of Ranger, a once-celebrated conceptual artist making a desperate comeback attempt. Ranger recruits Oscar Hiller, a self-destructive young physicist on the verge of a quantum theory breakthrough, to stage the most consequential art performance of all time—one that threatens to unravel time and existence in the process. Ebocloud, Moss’s first novel, is a near-future thriller about a massive social media movement. Cited at the time of its release for its predictions of a coming “social singularity,” it was included in the syllabus for a Duke University literature course, alongside William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Dave Eggers’ The Circle. It features a unique novel-within-a-novel structure. Moss’s second book, Tellers, stitches together a series of short stories with an overarching narrative thread. Bestselling author Ryan Mathews characterized Tellers as “a Matryoshka doll of a book—stories nesting inside stories nesting inside stories.” Moss earned his degree in fine arts from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and California College of the Arts. Throughout his career in publishing and media, he has applied his design skills to a broad range of print, web, and video projects. He was a founding principle of the online business forum, RetailWire, where he oversaw editorial and marketing content. He publishes his songwriting under the name, Rock Moses.