Charles Bock (born 1969) is an American writer whose debut novel Beautiful Children (published by Random House) was selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year for 2008,[1] and won the 2009 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction[2] from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

On his website, he reflects upon his upbringing as a source of inspiration for the novel: Sometimes, when my siblings and I were little, my parents, for various reasons, used to have us stay in the back of the shop.

We’d occupy our time with sodas from a nearby casino’s gift shop, comic books, and a television that got wavy reception, and we’d do small chores, rolling coins or filing the previous day’s pawn tickets.

The store often had a line of people waiting to pawn their goods, local customers who worked in casinos and also spent all their spare time playing blackjack and slot machines, and also tourists who had blown all their cash, and maybe their plane tickets home, and now were desperate, and hung over, and needed loans on their wedding rings, so they could go back into the casinos and win back their money.

From the back of the store, I’d watch as the customers exploded and called my parents dirty Jews and cursed at them and threatened them at the top of their lungs.

Following a pair of bone marrow transplants, Diana Colbert died in December 2011, three days before Lily Starr's third birthday.