Roy Kesey was born and raised in northern California, and currently lives with his wife and children in Maryland.

His latest book is a short story collection called ANY DEADLY THING. He’s also the author of a novel called PACAZO (the January 2011 selection for The Rumpus Book Club), a collection of short stories called ALL OVER (a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award, and one of The L Magazine's Best Books of the Decade), a novella called NOTHING IN THE WORLD (winner of the Bullfight Media Little Book Award), and a historical guide to the city of Nanjing, China.

His work has appeared in several anthologies, including BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, NEW SUDDEN FICTION, THE ROBERT OLEN BUTLER PRIZE ANTHOLOGY and THE FUTURE DICTIONARY OF AMERICA, and in more than 80 magazines including McSweeney's, Subtropics, The Georgia Review, American Short Fiction, The Iowa Review and Ninth Letter.

His translation of Pola Oloixarac's magnificent debut novel, LAS TEORIAS SALVAGES, released from Soho Press as SAVAGE THEORIES in 2017. Other translations of his from Spanish and French into English include work on behalf of Turner Books, the Ministry of Education of Spain, PromPerú, Ferrovial Agromán, and the City of Santander.

Books by Roy Kesey

Savage Theories

written by Pola Oloixarac, translated by Roy Kesey - Fiction

Rosa Ostreech, a pseudonym for the novel’s beautiful but self-conscious narrator, carries around a trilingual edition of Aristotle’s METAPHYSICS, struggles with her thesis on violence and culture, sleeps with a bourgeois former guerrilla, and pursues her elderly professor. Elsewhere on campus, Pabst and Kamtchowsky tour the underground scene of Buenos Aires, dabbling in ketamine, group sex, video games and hacking. And in Africa in 1917, a Dutch anthropologist named Johan van Vliet begins work on a theory that explains human consciousness and civilization by reference to our early primate ancestors --- animals, who, in the process of becoming human, spent thousands of years as prey.