Lucas Stoffel

Luke Stoffel is an artist and author based in Lower Manhattan. His debut memoir, How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter, won a 2026 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award. His companion novels, Boy, Refracted and The Third Person, are the first two volumes of The Warboy Chronicles. Here he talks about grief, machines, the Buddhist Eightfold Path, and what it costs to love someone you keep trying to fix. Luke Stoffel Recent Interviews: Your first book started as a joke. Is that

Book Review: On grief, witness, and the perilous tenderness of loving another person without trying to reorganize their soul in “Boy, Refracted At Wat Xieng Thong after rain, a solitary figure, a phone, and the Tree of Life hold the book’s central tension in one suspended image: grief on the verge of becoming witness, fracture, and form. Most novels about AI ask whether a machine can feel. “Boy, Refracted” asks a nastier question: what does it look like when love arrives as

Publishers Weekly gave it 9.50 out of 10. Kirkus called it exuberant. A picaresque memoir about daring to live an unlikely life in a society that punishes those who try.

The Third Person is a memoir written entirely in third person. Yes, that sounds like a contradiction. It follows a version of me after a devastating breakup with the person I call Warboy, the end of a fifteen-year relationship that left me suspended somewhere between grief and motion. I rent out my New York apartment, lose my job, go home to Iowa for Christmas, and eventually do the thing heartbroken people do when standing still becomes unbearable: I leave. Vietnam. Thailand