Alison Bechdel is an American cartoonist. Originally known for the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, she came to critical and commercial success in 2006 with her graphic memoir Fun Home, which was subsequently adapted as a musical that won a Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015. In 2012, she released her second graphic memoir Are You My Mother? She was a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Award. She is also known for originating the Bechdel test.
David Lipsky is an American author. His works have been New York Times bestsellers, New York Times Notable Books, Time, Amazon, The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, and NPR Best Books of the Year, and have been included in The Best American Magazine Writing and The Best American Short Stories collections.
Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was a Soviet writer and journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, Grossman trained as a chemical engineer at Moscow State University, earning the nickname Vasya-khimik because of his diligence as a student. Upon graduation, he took a job in Stalino in the Donets Basin. In the 1930s he changed careers and began writing full-time, publishing a number of short stories and several novels.
Lev Grossman is an American novelist and journalist who wrote The Magicians Trilogy: The Magicians (2009), The Magician King (2011), and The Magician's Land (2014). He was the book critic and lead technology writer at Time magazine from 2002 to 2016. His recent work includes the children's book The Silver Arrow and the screenplay for the film The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, based on his short story.
Dmitri "Misha" Collins is an American actor best known for his role as the angel Castiel on the CW television series Supernatural (2008–2020).
Rob Pardo is an American video game designer. He is the former Chief Creative Officer at Blizzard Entertainment, resigning on July 3, 2014. Previously he was the Executive Vice President of game design at Blizzard Entertainment, and prior to that the lead designer of World of Warcraft. In 2006, he was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Gary Shteyngart is a Soviet-born American writer. He is the author of five novels and a memoir. Much of his work is satirical.
Absurdistan is a term sometimes used to satirically describe a country in which absurdity is the norm due to the ubiquity and incompetence of its bureaucracy. The expression was originally used by Eastern bloc dissidents to refer to parts of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, but has remained common in post-communist discourse as well.
The Russian Debutante's Handbook is the debut novel by author Gary Shteyngart, published in 2002. It follows the exploits of young Russians both in the Alphabet City neighborhood of Manhattan and the European city of Prava.
Then We Came to the End is the first novel by Joshua Ferris. It was released by Little, Brown and Company on March 1, 2007. A satire of the American workplace, it is similar in tone to Don DeLillo's Americana, even borrowing DeLillo's first line for its title.
Austin Seth Grossman is an American author and video game designer. He has contributed to The New York Times and has written for a number of video games, most notably Deus Ex and Dishonored.
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia is a 2006 memoir by American author Elizabeth Gilbert. The memoir chronicles the author's trip around the world after her divorce and what she discovered during her travels. She wrote and named the book while living at The Oliver Hotel on the downtown square in Knoxville, TN. The book remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 187 weeks. The film version, which stars Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem, was released in theaters on August 13, 2010.
Kathryn Moira Beaton is a Canadian comics artist best known as the creator of the comic strip Hark! A Vagrant, which ran from 2007 to 2018. Her other major works include the children's books The Princess and the Pony and King Baby, published in 2015 and 2016 respectively. The former was made into an Apple TV+ series called Pinecone & Pony released in 2022 on which Beaton worked as an executive producer. Also in 2022, Beaton released a memoir in graphic novel form, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, about her experience working in the Alberta oil sands. Publishers Weekly named Ducks one of their top ten books of the year.
The Magicians is a new adult fantasy novel by the American author Lev Grossman, published in 2009 by Viking Press. It tells the story of Quentin Coldwater, a young man who discovers and attends a secret college of magic in New York. The novel received critical acclaim and was followed by a sequel, The Magician King, in 2011 and a third novel, The Magician's Land, in 2014.
Super Sad True Love Story is the third novel by American writer Gary Shteyngart published in 2010. The novel takes place in a near-future dystopian New York where life is dominated by media and retail.
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million is a 2002 non-fiction book by British writer Martin Amis.
Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point is a 2003 book by American author David Lipsky. It was placed on several top book lists, including Amazon's Best Books of the Year (2003). The work became a New York Times Notable Book and a New York Times bestseller.
"What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?" is an informal opinion poll conducted in 2006 by the New York Times Book Review (NYTBR) to determine "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." Eligible works were those written by an American author and published during the quarter-century period from 1980 through 2005. The poll was conducted by NYTBR editor Sam Tanenhaus, who sent letters to literary figures requesting their participation and received 124 responses. The results were published on May 21, 2006, in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. An essay by A. O. Scott, titled "In Search of the Best", reflected on the results and the premise of the "Great American Novel".
