Rich moved to
San Francisco to write
San Francisco Noir, exploring how the city has been portrayed in film noir. The
San Francisco Chronicle ranked it as one of the best books of 2005. That year he was hired as an editor by
The Paris Review. Since then he has written and published both non-fiction and fiction books. In 2008, he published his debut novel ''The Mayor's Tongue
, described by Carolyn See in The Washington Post'' as a "playful, highly intellectual novel about serious subjects – the failure of language, for one, and how we cope with that failure in order to keep ourselves sane". In 2013 he published
Odds Against Tomorrow, which
NPR's
Alan Cheuse described as a "brilliantly conceived and extremely well-executed novel ... a knockout of a book."
Cathleen Schine wrote, in the
New York Review of Books, "Let's just, right away, recognize how prescient this charming, terrifying, comic novel of apocalyptic manners is ... Rich is a gifted caricaturist and a gifted apocalyptist. His descriptions of the vagaries of both nature and human nature are stark, fresh, and convincing, full of surprise and recognition as both good comedy and good terror must be." In 2018 Rich published the novel
King Zeno, a
New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, praised by
NPR,
Vanity Fair, and the
San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. "A groaning board of tasty literary treats," wrote
The Washington Post. "
King Zeno offers a gritty, panoramic portrait of the Big Easy." On August 1, 2018,
The New York Times Magazine devoted its entire issue to a single article by Rich titled "Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change." The article was described by the editor,
Jake Silverstein, as "a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change." "Losing Earth" won national awards from the
Society of Environmental Journalists and the
American Institute of Physics, and was expanded into the book
Losing Earth: A Recent History, published in 2019. The book was published in more than a dozen languages and was a finalist for the
PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.
Second Nature: Scenes From a World Remade, a collection of stories on environmental themes, was published in 2021, and longlisted for the
PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. The opening chapter, "Dark Waters," drawn from Rich's 2016
New York Times Magazine article "The Lawyer Who Became DuPont's Worst Nightmare," was adapted into the film
Dark Waters, starring
Mark Ruffalo. Rich is a contributing writer for
New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to
The New York Review of Books,
The Atlantic, and ''
Harper's''. ==Personal life==