Norman M. Klein

Norman M. Klein was born in Brooklyn, New York and lives in Los Angeles. A novelist, media and urban historian, he is the author of The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory; 7 Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon; the media novel Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986; Freud in Coney Island and Other Tales; The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects; and the online tale The Imaginary 20th Century (ZKM, 2014). A unique narrative engine, the online Imaginary 20th Century features an exploratory interface of 2,200 rare archival images. The tale meanders across fictional and factual story lines, from 1893 to 1925-- offering live mapping and voice-over narrative. With its companion print novel enhanced by historical essays (ZKM, 2016), The Imaginary 20th Century is at once a comic picaresque and a treatise on the last century. It is a playful and yet deadly serious mediation on one sentence: "the future can only be told in reverse."