A former correctional librarian, Blair Austin was born in Michigan and attended the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where the seed novel for Dioramas won a Hopwood Award. Dioramas is his first novel.
"""Blair Austin's Dioramas is a novel of endless possibilities and conceptual fiction at its finest. While it bears resemblance to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, this novel is a masterwork in its own right and a major artistic leap for a debut novel."" —Chigozie Obioma, Booker prize finalist author of The Fishermen and An Orchestra of Minorities ""Dioramas impressed me not only with its innovative structure and voice-driven narrative, but with its careful attention to the meticulous details of the world it weaves on the page. This is an absorbing and remarkable novel."" -Anne Valente, author of The Desert Sky Before Us ""Dioramas will keep your eyes peeled until the very last page."" —David Tromblay, author of As You Were ""Dioramas immerses the reader in the most minute details of a vanished and preserved world—the sheen on the feathers of a theen finch, the sheer filament which war mosquitoes deployed to stitch shut wounds, the viscosity of varnish. Yet it does not hesitate to explore the macrocosm, to encompass it from afar within the bird’s-eye-view. In lyrical, meticulous prose, this novel causes us to question the very nature of subject and object, and to contemplate our own vanishing world at a time when our future is far from certain."" —Nina Shope, author of Asylum"