Barbara Kingsolver is a Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist, essayist and poet. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a non-fiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.
Middlesex is a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Jeffrey Eugenides published in 2002. The book is a bestseller, with more than four million copies sold since its publication. Its characters and events are loosely based on aspects of Eugenides' life and observations of his Greek heritage. It is not an autobiography; unlike the protagonist, Eugenides is not intersex. The author decided to write Middlesex after reading the 1980 memoir Herculine Barbin and finding himself dissatisfied with its discussion of intersex anatomy and emotions.
A rainbow party is a supposed group sex event featured in an urban legend spread since the early 2000s. A variant of other sex party urban myths, the stories claim that at these events, allegedly increasingly popular among adolescents, girls wearing various shades of lipstick take turns fellating boys in sequence, leaving multiple colors on their penises.
Lilith's Brood is a collection of three works by Octavia E. Butler. The three volumes of this science fiction series were previously collected in the now out-of-print omnibus edition Xenogenesis. The collection was first published under the current title of Lilith's Brood in 2000.
Elizabeth Gilbert is an American journalist and author. She is best known for her 2006 memoir Eat, Pray, Love, which has sold over 12 million copies and has been translated into over 30 languages. The book was also made into a film of the same name in 2010.
The Road is a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. The book details the grueling journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed industrial civilization and almost all life. The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006. The book was adapted into a film of the same name in 2009, directed by John Hillcoat.
Dawn Raffel is an American writer. She has authored two short story collections, a novel, a memoir, and a biography. Her work has appeared in The Quarterly,NOON, edited by Diane Williams, O, The Oprah Magazine,Conjunctions, Open City, Fence, Guernica, The Antioch Review, The Mississippi Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Anchor Book of New American Short Fiction, Micro Fictions, BOMB, and numerous other publications.
Jean Kwok is the award-winning, New York Times and international bestselling Chinese American author of the novels Girl in Translation, Mambo in Chinatown, and Searching for Sylvie Lee, which was chosen as The Today Show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a 2013 novel by British author Neil Gaiman. The work was first published on 18 June 2013 through William Morrow and Company and follows an unnamed man who returns to his hometown for a funeral and remembers events that began forty years earlier. The illustrated edition of the work was published on 5 November 2019, featuring the artwork of Australian fine artist Elise Hurst.
An American Marriage is a novel by the American author Tayari Jones. It is her fourth novel and was published by Algonquin Books on February 6, 2018. In February 2018, the novel was chosen for Oprah's Book Club 2.0. The novel also won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction.
Dzanc Books is an American independent press book publisher. It is a non-profit 501(c)(3) private foundation. Michelle Dotter is publisher and editor-in-chief.
The Nightingale is a historical fiction novel by American author Kristin Hannah published by St. Martin's Press in 2015. The book tells the story of two sisters in France during World War II and their struggle to survive and resist the German occupation of France. The book was inspired by the story of a Belgian woman, Andrée de Jongh, who helped downed Allied pilots escape Nazi territory.
Pamela Ryder is an American writer. Ryder is the author of Correction of Drift: A Novel in Stories, A Tendency to Be Gone: Stories, and Paradise Field: A Novel in Stories. Her fiction has also been published in many literary journals, including Black Warrior Review, Conjunctions, Prairie Schooner, The Quarterly, Shenandoah, and Unsaid.
Melissa Broder is an author, essayist and poet. Her work includes novels The Pisces and Milk Fed, the poetry collection Last Sext, and essay collection So Sad Today, as well as the popular Twitter feed also titled So Sad Today, on which the book is based. Broder has written for The New York Times, Elle, Vice, Vogue Italia, and New York magazine‘s The Cut.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a 2009 mystery novel by Olga Tokarczuk. Originally published in Polish by Wydawnictwo Literackie, it was later translated to English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and published in 2018 by the British independent publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. The book received a wider release in 2019 when it was published in the United States by Riverhead Books on 13 August 2019. A portion of the English translation was originally published in literary magazine Granta in 2017.
Girl, Woman, Other is the eighth novel by Bernardine Evaristo. Published in 2019 by Hamish Hamilton, it follows the lives of 12 characters in the United Kingdom over the course of several decades. The book was the co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments.
John Domini is an Italian-American author, translator and critic who has been widely published in literary and news magazines, including The Paris Review, The New York Times, Ploughshares, The Washington Post, and Literary Hub. He is the author of three short story collections, four novels, and a 2021 memoir. Domini has also published one book of criticism, one book of poetry, and a memoir translated from Italian. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Domini lives in Des Moines with his wife, the science fiction writer Lettie Prell.
The Friend is a novel by the American writer Sigrid Nunez published by Riverhead Books in 2018. The book concerns an unnamed novelist who adopts a Great Dane that belonged to a deceased friend and mentor.
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir is a 2016 Canadian book by Kai Cheng Thom. A surrealist novel, it follows an unnamed transgender woman protagonist who leaves home at a young age to live on the Street of Miracles—where various sex work takes place—with other "femmes". After one of them is killed, others form a gang and begin to attack men on the street.
Elle Nash is a British-American editor and author best known for her debut novella Animals Eat Each Other. Nash has stressed the importance of focusing her work on working-class characters and narratives and has criticized mainstream literature for ignoring those narratives.
