Robert Abel is an American writer, teacher and artist now living in Massachusetts. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 1978 and he won the 1989 Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award for Ghost Traps.Robert Abel worked in Beijing as a foreign expert in 1987, and taught English through literature at the Beijing Foreign Studies University in 1994 and 1997. He has also lectured on literature and language throughout Southeast Asia, including the University of Sumatra and Andalas University (Indonesia), Thammasat University (Bangkok) and De LaSalle and St. Louis Universities (Philippines).
Robert Abel's most recent novel is Riding a Tiger -- "a lively, upbeat and humorous look at Beijing life through the eyes of an unabashed Westerner" (Ruth Mathewson, South China Morning Post) -- is a comic novel with a tragic twist, "written" by Arnold Fisher, as a deposition to the Chinese Ministry of Justice after he has been arrested and detained for immoral behaviour and building an illegal financial empire (trading in watermelons and bicycles, amongst other things) in Beijing and beyond, and his inadvertent involvement in the murder of a cadre. In the course of his self-criticism and interrogation he discovers who has betrayed him, and who he has betrayed in turn.Read more about Riding a Tiger (including excerpts)
Robert Abel has written two previous novels, Freedom Dues, a comic historical novel and The Progress of a Fire, about the Vietnam generation, as well as three collections of stories: Ghost Traps (the title story of which won the 1989 Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award), Full-Tilt Boogie and Skin and Bones.
A more complete Web site for Robert Abel includes his experience in teaching, freelance writing and examples of his artwork.
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