Michael Ventura (b. 31 October 1945) is an American novelist, essayist, and cultural critic. He is best known for his long-running column, "Letters at 3 A.M.", which first appeared in L.A. Weekly in the early 1980s and now appears biweekly in the Austin Chronicle. His three published novels, Night Time Losing Time (1989), The Zoo Where You're Fed to God (1994), and The Death of Frank Sinatra (1996) were all received with considerable critical acclaim, and yet were such complete commercial failures that his fourth novel could not find a publisher. He is currently completing yet another novel, about Miriam of Magdala, an excerpt from which was published in the third issue of the CalArts literary journal Black Clock in 2005. His two essay collections, Shadow-Dancing in the U.S.A. (1985) and Letters at 3 A.M.: Reports on Endarkenment (1994) are widely regarded as classics. With famed psychologist James Hillman, Ventura co-authored the 1992 bestseller We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse. He appears as a fictional character in Steve Erickson's 1996 novel, Amnesiascope.

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