Franz Nicolay's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, The Paris Review Daily, The Kenyon Review Online, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Ringer, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, LitHub, Longreads, and elsewhere. He has taught at UC Berkeley and Columbia, and is currently a faculty member in music and written arts at Bard College.

His first book, "The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar," was named a “Season’s Best Travel Book” by The New York Times; his second, the novel "Someone Should Pay For Your Pain," was called "a knockout fiction debut" in Buzzfeed and named one of Rolling Stone's "Best Music Books of 2021" (“Finally, the great indie-rock novel"). Hua Hsu, in The New Yorker, said "Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music" “might be one of the least bacchanalian books ever published about the rock-and-roll life style, but also one of the most honest,” and it was named a Rolling Stone "Best Music Book of 2024."