BIO

Paul A. Toth (born 1964) is an American novelist and short story writer. He is the author of four novels, Fizz (Bleak House Books, 2004), Fishnet (Bleak House Books, 2005), Finale (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2009), and Airplane Novel (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2011; 2nd ed. Eye Am Eye Media, 2026). His work has appeared in numerous publications and websites.
Toth was born in 1964 in Flint, Michigan and has lived in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Denver, and Sarasota, Florida.
Early work
Toth's early work consists of short stories, over a hundred of which have been published. Themes include the persistence of identity conflicts and more recently experiments in historical fiction as seen through his one-of-a-kind perspectve. Toth's short stories, as well as his nonfiction, poetry, and multimedia work, are widely available on the web. Links will soon be added to this site.
Novels
Fizz, Fishnet and Finale is a trilogy of novels focusing on characters facing radical identity crises, working them out for better and worse with tragicomic results.
Airplane Novel is a major departure for Toth in which he reframes 9/11 from the perspective of the South Tower, creating a previously impossible inside-out perspective, with the building itself a portent of AI and its large language models.
In his review of Airplane Novel, New York Times and Newsweek journalist Dan Newland wrote, "Airplane Novel is, without a doubt, the most extraordinary of all books published to date on the destruction by terrorists of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. His book tells a truly intimate inside story of the rise and fall of the Twin Towers that cuts through the hype and emotive rhetoric...Objective, clear-headed and big-picture focused, this is a book that will change the outlook of many a reader regarding the 9/11 tragedy."
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Education
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Toth has a BA in Liberal Arts and creative writing and an MA in Communications and Media Literacy from Gonzaga University.
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Source: Updated Wikipedia entry
PAUL A. TOTH

​In Airplane Novel, the South Tower tells its story from a truly inside-out perspective.
​Praise for Airplane Novel:
The 9/11 Novel​​​​​
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4th Best Independent Novel of the Year
USA Today
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Toth's Airplane Novel is narrated from the vantage point of the South Tower, and it uses the
structure of tragedy to elaborate,
in five acts, on its own destruction.
Oxford History of the Novel in English:
Volume 8: American
Fiction since 1940
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There have been a lot of books about 9/11,
but I promise you none like this.​
Midwest Book Reviewer Reviewer's Choice
Is Paul A. Toth's new Airplane Novel the 9/11 novel?
Perhaps. It certainly makes the short list.
We've been seeking perspective,
after all, and Toth delivers.
Shelf Unbound
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Eminently quotable—the man can certainly write a damn good sentence—and with
endearing, terribly ‘real’ characters...
decomP Magazine
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​Toth is undeniably talented and has all the makings of a notable force in contemporary fiction.​
Bookgasm​
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Airplane Novel is, without a doubt, the most extraordinary of all books published
to date on the destruction by terrorists of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
Dan Newland, international journalist for The New York Times, The London Daily Telegraph, The London Daily Express, Newsweek and more
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Paul A. Toth’s Airplane Novel retells 9/11
from the narrative point of view of the
South Tower, with continuous references
to the past, but constantly, undercutting its own narrative architecture by metafictional
and self-reflexive interventions.
New York: A Literary History. Ross Wilson,. ed.
The Sixth Borough, Imagining New York
after 9/11, Brigit Däwes​
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Toth's novel functions as a form of narrative retribution, a revenge against conventional perspectives that must now be reconsidered and rescinded.​​​
Robert Moscaliuc, 9/11 Imagineria: Writing,
Catastrophe, Memory, and the War on Terror​​
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