Michael Gerber (born June 14, 1969) is best known as the author of the Barry Trotter series, a Sunday Times best-selling parody of the Harry Potter books.
[1] Before becoming a novelist, Gerber contributed humor to The Yale Record,[2] The New Yorker,[3] The Atlantic,[4] The New York Times,[5] The Wall Street Journal, Slate, NPR, and Saturday Night Live, among many other venues.
In addition to providing an old-style closeness between editor and audience (as with Hugh Hefner and Stan Lee), its efficiency allows Bystander to pay its contributors.
A March 2019 column in The New York Times by Jennifer Finney Boylan lauded Gerber's "hard work and genius" as it detailed Bystander's long, strange path to publication.
In early 1982, a full pilot issue was prepared by then-Editor Brian McConnachie and Managing Editor Boylan, but funding fell through before it could be distributed.