Peter Mountford

Peter's first novel, A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism won a Washington State Book Award, and his second novel, The Dismal Science, was a NYT editor's choice. His third book, Detonator, a collection of stories, was published in September, 2025. A fellow of Yaddo and Bread Loaf, he won the 2016 Gar LaSalle Storyteller award for a Washington State fiction writer.

Peter's short fiction and essays have appeared in the Paris Review, the Atlantic, Ploughshares, the New York Times Magazine, Guernica, Granta, Conjunctions, and Boston Review, among others.

A popular writing teacher and coach, Peter is on faculty at UNRT's low-residency MFA program, and offers classes and coaching through his own company, Mountford Writing Services, as well as other partner organizations, including Hugo House and Craft Talks.

PRAISE:

Whatever sort of surprise you’re after—funny, devastating, sexy, shocking, savage, tender, illuminating—Detonator will supply it, in Mountford’s exquisitely tuned and attentive prose. Like Mary Gaitskill, Mountford has a gift for creating crystalline articulations of the messiness inside us. I loved these stories, and I learned from them.

-Karen Russell

The stories in Detonator are hilarious, even when they are miserable. Their humor is unfailingly intelligent and it makes room for unexpected grace; Mountford wins you over even if you don’t want to be won over.

-Mary Gaitskill

The Dismal Science is exuberant art, a deep, moving comedy about grief, guilt, and the heart's geopolitics. Mountford writes with soul and style and makes the plight of his protagonist count.

-Sam Lipsyte

In his fiercely intelligent second novel, Mountford examines, with wry humor and sympathy leavened with a realistic accounting of Vincenzo D’Orsi's flaws and failings, the repercussions of a decision made in haste and -- perhaps -- regretted at leisure. Or not regretted. Who could have ever predicted that an economist at the World Bank could be such a terrific main character? I absolutely loved The Dismal Science.

-Nancy Pearl

The Dismal Science is a beautiful novel: stark, powerful, and life-affirming. Vincenzo's haunting journey will stay with me for a very, very long time.

-Garth Stein

Quietly wrenching, sharply drawn and completely un-put-downable. With The Dismal Science, Peter Mountford asserts himself as our generation’s most significant business-world ombudsman, a deft and unflinching exponent of the human side of a polarizing world few of us actually understand.

—Tea Obreht

In this perceptive collection, Mountford (The Dismal Service) unearths the inner struggles of characters caught in the middle of political and private battles….Mountford is an expert at locating what makes his characters tick and how they handle crises, as with the title story’s married couple, struck “by old wounds… forever confused and looking in the wrong direction.” There’s plenty of heat in this wide-ranging volume.

-Publisher's Weekly

A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism is, quite simply, one of the most compelling and thought-provoking novels I've read in years. It's extraordinarily vivid, populated by characters whose fates I cared about desperately, beautifully written, timely beyond measure, but above all it conveys--with impressive precision and nuance--how we are vectors on the grid of global capital; how difficult it is to even attempt to be an authentic, let alone admirable, human being when we are, first and last, cash flow.

-David Shields

A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism is a brilliant debut novel, one that is generous in giving readers an original cast of vividly-drawn and unforgettable characters, learned in its knowledge of the interwoven worlds of finance and politics, sexy, and thoroughly cosmopolitan. Peter Mountford is easily one of the most gifted and skillful young writers, already accomplished, I have had the pleasure of reading in many years.

-Charles Johnson