The morning after our interview, Ken Pisani emailed me. “Thanks again, Amy, for the great interview!” he wrote. “You asked questions about things I had not thought of in a while. I guess it’s back to therapy for me!”
Then he attached an article he had published on Medium about his ongoing quest for the perfect author photo.
When I opened it, it wasn’t the polished headshot I was expecting. Instead, I found a striking graphic of a human silhouette against a vivid red background, riddled with bullet holes like a shooting target. Darkly funny, slightly unsettling, and undeniably original, it felt more like modern art than an author portrait.
Which made perfect sense. During our interview, Pisani told me that before he became an award-winning novelist, he dreamed of becoming an artist. In the end, he wasn’t too far off. His Medium is no longer paint but prose.
Pisani built a career telling stories in television, producing features for Sports Illustrated Television and covering some of the biggest sporting events in the world. But while sports coverage often focuses on statistics, championships, and records, Pisani was always more interested in the people behind the headlines.
“I was always less interested in who’s got the most home runs or who’s breaking the records,” he says. “It’s the humanity behind the sport. Who is this guy? Who is this woman? What drives her to run? Where did they come from?”
That curiosity has become the heartbeat of his fiction. Whether he’s writing about an amputee rebuilding his life in AMP’D, a Russian hockey player who defects just months before the collapse of the Soviet Union in his latest novel, The Defection and Subsequent Resurrection of Nikolai Pushkin, or a dying man given the chance to relive ten days from his past in his newest manuscript, Days Are Here Again, Pisani isn’t writing about extraordinary events; he’s exploring universal experiences: loss, reinvention, regret, family, and the strange comedy that accompanies all of them.
“I think I write about fish out of water,” Pisani says. “Take somebody out of their comfort zone and ask, ‘What happens now?’”
That question has become the foundation of a body of work that feels refreshingly authentic in an era increasingly dominated by formula, algorithms, and the pressure to write the next bestseller rather than create enduring literature.
Growing up in Queens, New York, Pisani always saw the world from a different vantage point. As a kid, he and his friends spent their time on rooftops and water towers overlooking the city below. I suggested that those moments seemed to shape the writer he would become. “You’re an observer of life,” I told him. Pisani paused before responding, “That’s a great metaphor. I hadn’t really thought about it that way.”
When it came time for college, his friends stayed in New York, but Pisani chose Tucson, Arizona, because he wanted, as he put it, “to just completely turn my head around.” The experience reinforced what would become one of the defining themes of his work: characters forced out of their comfort zones and into unfamiliar worlds.
Humor, he says, became his currency as a child. Small in stature and not particularly athletic, he learned that making people laugh helped him make friends, avoid fights, and navigate life. Today, that same instinct shapes his writing. “If I’m just writing jokes, it feels empty,” he explains. “The jokes are easy. What’s harder is finding the human truth behind the humor.”
In AMP’D, the protagonist returns home after losing an arm, but the novel is about identity, not disability. Pisani believes readers connect not because they share the exact experience, but because everyone eventually experiences a moment when they no longer recognize the person they used to be.
Pisani describes his latest novel, The Defection and Subsequent Resurrection of Nikolai Pushkin, as a “surreal romp” through a changing world, another chance to take a character far from where he expected to land and see what happens next.
Pisani doesn’t believe we regret what we do as much as what we never attempt. That optimistic philosophy runs throughout his work, allowing difficult subjects to coexist with warmth and humor.
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His manuscript, Days Are Here Again, may feature his most compelling premise yet. “It’s about a man who’s dying,” Pisani says. “He’s told, ‘You have ten days to live. Which ten days do you want? Live them all over again. Out of sequence, it doesn’t matter. You don’t get to change things. You just get to have them again.’” The manuscript recently won Book Pipeline’s Unpublished Novel Award, and its judges remarked that the story was so inherently cinematic it could just as easily work as a film.
At the end of our conversation, I asked Pisani what he hopes readers will carry with them after finishing one of his novels.
“When I finish a book, it’s more about what I feel than what I remember about the plot,” he said. “I certainly want them to feel something, and I want them to be surprised.”
He recalled one reader who wrote, “This was a big surprise. I laughed really hard. I woke my husband up reading in bed. This is not at all what I expected.”
Pisani smiled. “The unexpected, in a good way, is something that I hope they feel. But I also hope they bring from it something about their own humanity, their sense of loss and growth.”
After spending an hour talking with him, it’s hard to imagine a better description of what his work leaves behind: the kind of smile and laughter that lingers long after the final page.
Find AMP’D here. And The Defection and Subsequent Resurrection of Nikolai Pushkin here.
Amy Pais-Richer is a published author, screenwriter, and former advertising creative director.
