Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series. She was first published in 1959, and her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, producing more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children's books. Frequently described as an author of science fiction, Le Guin has also been called a "major voice in American Letters". Le Guin herself said she would prefer to be known as an "American novelist".
Marion Eleanor Zimmer Bradley was an American author of fantasy, historical fantasy, science fiction, and science fantasy novels, and is best known for the Arthurian fiction novel The Mists of Avalon, and the Darkover series. While noted for the feminist perspective in her writing, her reputation has been posthumously marred by multiple accusations of child sexual abuse and rape by two of her children, Mark and Moira Greyland, and for assisting her second husband, convicted pedophile Walter H. Breen, to rape and abuse multiple unrelated children.
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian-American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was published in 1994 and went on to become an Oprah's Book Club selection. Danticat has since written or edited several books and has been the recipient of many awards and honors.
Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Susan Mallery is an American author of popular romance novels set in non-urban, close-knit communities. Because of her love for animals, pets play a significant role in her books.
Min Jin Lee is a Korean American author and journalist based in Manhattan. Her work frequently deals with Korean and Korean American topics. She is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires (2007) and Pachinko (2017).
Tana French, born 1973 in Burlington, Vermont, is an American-Irish writer and theatrical actress. She is a longtime resident of Dublin, Ireland. Her debut novel In the Woods (2007), a psychological mystery, won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry awards for best first novel. The Independent has referred to her as "the First Lady of Irish Crime," who very quietly has become a huge international name among fiction readers.
Maaza Mengiste is an Ethiopian-American writer. Her novels include Beneath the Lion's Gaze (2010) and The Shadow King (2019), which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.
Eugenia Kim is a Korean American writer and novelist who lives in Washington, DC.
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.
Beautiful Bastard is an erotic romance novel by Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings under the singular pen name of Christina Lauren. The book was originally published online as a Twilight fan fiction entitled The Office, with Simon & Schuster purchasing the publishing rights to the series.
All the Light We Cannot See is a war novel written by American author Anthony Doerr, published by Scribner on May 6, 2014. It won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
The Hate U Give is a 2017 young adult novel by Angie Thomas. It is Thomas's debut novel, expanded from a short story she wrote in college in reaction to the police shooting of Oscar Grant. The book is narrated by Starr Carter, a 16-year-old black girl from a poor neighborhood who attends an elite private school in a predominantly white, affluent part of the city. Starr becomes entangled in a national news story after she witnesses a white police officer shoot and kill her childhood friend, Khalil. She speaks up about the shooting in increasingly public ways, and social tensions culminate in a riot after a grand jury decides not to indict the police officer for the shooting.
The Winternight trilogy is a series of adult historical fantasy novels written by American author Katherine Arden. The trilogy consists of The Bear and the Nightingale (2017), The Girl in the Tower (2018), and The Winter of the Witch (2019). At the beginning, the story takes place in a medieval Russian village. Vasilisa "Vasya" Petrovna has received a spiritual gift, using it to see the fantastical creatures that inhabit her village. This leads her to a conflict with the Orthodox Church who becomes convinced that she is a witch.
Stronger, Faster and More Beautiful is a 2018 science fiction novel by Arwen Elys Dayton. It explores the ethical question of how far humans will go in their pursuit of physical perfection. It was well-received critically, with Tom Shippey of the Wall Street Journal citing it as one of the best science fiction novels of 2018, and has won a number of awards.
Jane Rawson is an Australian writer and environmentalist. She has published four books, and is best known for her 2017 novel From the Wreck, which won the Aurealis Award for best science fiction novel. In 2018 Rawson was a recipient of the Australia Council grants for arts projects for individuals and groups in the literature category to the value of AU$34,830.
Gwendolyn Kiste is a Pennsylvania based horror and speculative fiction writer. She writes short stories and novels. She won the 2018 Bram Stoker Award for her novel The Rust Maidens. Kiste was born in Massillon, Ohio and was raised in New Philadelphia, Ohio. She now lives outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She wrote for the Pittsburgh City Paper where she has been their theater reviewer. She also wrote plays for the Massillon Museum. Initially she worked as an independent film maker before deciding to work in print. Her work has been published in a number of horror and science fiction genre magazines including Interzone, Nightmare, LampLight, Shimmer and Daily Science Fiction. Her award-winning first novel has been translated into Spanish.
The roles of women in The Lord of the Rings have often been assessed as insignificant, or important only in relation to male characters in a story about men for boys. Meanwhile, other commentators have noted the empowerment of the three major women characters, Galadriel, Éowyn, and Arwen, and provided in-depth analysis of their roles within the narrative of The Lord of the Rings.
The presence of sexuality in The Lord of the Rings, a bestselling fantasy novel by J. R. R. Tolkien, has been debated, as it is somewhat unobtrusive. However, love and marriage appear in the form of the warm relationship between the hobbits Sam Gamgee and Rosie Cotton; the unreturned feelings of Éowyn for Aragorn, followed by her falling in love with Faramir, and marrying him; and Aragorn's love for Arwen, described in an appendix rather than in the main text, as "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen".
The Seeker series of novels is a 2015-2017 science fiction body of work by American author Arwen Elys Dayton, beginning with the eponymous Seeker title, a novella, and two other full-length books. They share the story of a female teenage mercenary named Quin Kincaid. Author Dayton quickly followed Seeker later in 2015 with the novella The Young Dread, which focuses on a secretive young girl Maud. The two remaining book-length novels, Traveler (2016) and Disruptor (2017), completed the trilogy by following Quin’s complicated journey with her best friend Shinobu, her to-be enemy John, and the Young Dread who awakes within the stream of time to challenge the Seekers.
