About Otto Penzler

Otto Penzler is the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, and the world's foremost authority on crime, mystery and suspense fiction.

Penzler founded The Mysterious Press in 1975, which he later sold to Warner Books. He reacquired the imprint, and it now published new fiction at Grove/Atlantic, and digitizes classic crime fiction through MysteriousPress.com. 

He was the publisher of The Armchair Detective, the Edgar-winning quarterly journal devoted to the study of mystery and suspense fiction, for seventeen years. He also created the publishing firms of Otto Penzler Books and The Armchair Detective Library. He currently has imprints at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the United States and Quercus in the U.K., publishing such authors as Thomas H. Cook, Andrew Klavan, Thomas Perry and Joyce Carol Oates.

Mr. Penzler is also a prolific editor, and his most recent anthologies include Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original) and The Best American Noir of the Century (Mariner Books), with James Ellroy. 

Since 1997, he has been the Series Editor of The Best American Mystery Stories of the Year (Houghton Mifflin), featuring guest editors like Ed McBain, Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, James Ellroy, Michael Connelly, Nelson DeMille, Joyce Carol Oates, Scott Turow, Carl Hiaasen and George Pelecanos.

He is also the co-series editor (with Thomas H. Cook) of the annual Best American Crime Reporting (Ecco/HarperCollins). Other mystery anthologies, containing all original stories, include Dangerous Women and a series of seven sports-themed books, including Murder Is My Racquet, (tennis), Murderer's Row (baseball) and Murder On the Ropes.

Penzler has won two Edgar Awards, for The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection in 1977, and The Lineup in 2010. The Mystery Writers of America awarded him the prestigious Ellery Queen Award in 1994, and the Raven--the group's highest non-writing award--in 2003.

He was born July 8, 1942. He lives with his wife, Lisa Atkinson, in New York and Connecticut.

Agent:

Nat Sobel
Sobel Weber Associates
146 East 19th Street
New York, NY 10023
(212) 420-8585