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Benjamin Anastas (born 1969) is an American novelist, memoirist, journalist and book reviewer born in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He teaches literature and writing at Bennington College and is on the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program. [1]
Anastas started publishing his short fiction while still a graduate student at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. [2] His first novel, An Underachiever's Diary, is a comic send-up of the meritocracy narrated by the underachieving half of a set of identical twins, and is set in Cambridge, Massachusetts. [3] On the jacket of Anastas's second book, The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance: A Novel, Daniel Handler called it "hands down, the best novel of the year". [4] It concerns the disappearance of the pastor of a liberal Congregational church in suburban Boston [5] and was a New York Times Notable Book. [6]
Anastas's fiction, criticism, essays and journalism have appeared in Story, GQ, The Paris Review , The New Republic online, [7] The New York Observer, [8] The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and Bookforum . In 2005, The Yale Review published his novella Versace Enthroned with Saints: Margaret, Jerome, Alex and the Angel Donatella [9] and later awarded it the Smart Family Foundation Prize for Fiction. [2]
Anastas has published articles on the Mayan Calendar 2012 hoax in The New York Times Magazine, [10] the prosperity gospel in Harper's Magazine [11] and a short piece about his father's nude portrait on Granta 's website. [12] His essay "The Foul Reign of Emerson's 'Self Reliance'", also from The New York Times Magazine, was selected for The Best American Essays 2012, guest edited by David Brooks. [13] His essay on the Gullah language folktale ″Buh Black Snake Git Ketch″ appeared in the Spring, 2020 issue of The Oxford American.
His memoir, Too Good To Be True, was published in 2012. [14] [15] The title is taken from a sign that the author was made to wear around his neck by a childhood therapist. [16] It tells the story of his stalled career as a writer, the end of his marriage, [17] and his attempts to rebuild his life again. [18] Anastas published the book with Amazon's fledgling publishing imprint in New York City and numerous bookstores have refused to stock it. [17] Giles Harvey, writing in The New Yorker, [19] groups Too Good to Be True in a category he calls the "failure memoir" [20] and cites F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up essays as an influence.
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
David Foster Wallace was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing. Wallace is widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which Time magazine cited as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. His posthumous novel, The Pale King (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. The Los Angeles Times's David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years".
Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri is a Bengali American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.
Creative nonfiction is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other nonfiction, such as academic or technical writing or journalism, which are also rooted in accurate fact though not written to entertain on prose style. Many writers view creative nonfiction as overlapping with the essay.
Cynthia Ozick is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist.
Thomas Mallon is an American novelist, essayist, and critic. His novels are renowned for their attention to historical detail and context and for the author's crisp wit and interest in the "bystanders" to larger historical events. He is the author of ten books of fiction, including Henry and Clara, Two Moons, Dewey Defeats Truman, Aurora 7, Bandbox, Fellow Travelers, Watergate, Finale, Landfall, and most recently Up With the Sun. He has also published nonfiction on plagiarism, diaries, letters and the Kennedy assassination, as well as two volumes of essays.
Ariel Levy is an American staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and the author of the books The Rules do Not Apply and Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Vogue, Slate, and The New York Times. Levy was named one of the "Forty Under 40" most influential out individuals in the June/July 2009 issue of The Advocate.
Phillip Lopate is an American film critic, essayist, fiction writer, poet, and teacher. He is the younger brother of radio host Leonard Lopate.
Kathryn Harrison is an American author. She has published seven novels, two memoirs, two collections of personal essays, a travelogue, two biographies, and a book of true crime. She reviews regularly for The New York Times Book Review. Her personal essays have been included in many anthologies and have appeared in Bookforum, Harper's Magazine, More Magazine, The New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Vogue, Salon, and Nerve.
Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, critic and teacher. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.
Gary Shteyngart is a Soviet-born American writer. He is the author of five novels and a memoir. Much of his work is satirical.
Hisham Matar is an American born British-Libyan writer. His memoir of the search for his father, The Return, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and the 2017 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. His debut novel In the Country of Men was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. Matar's essays have appeared in the Asharq al-Awsat, The Independent, The Guardian, The Times and The New York Times. His second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, was published to wide acclaim on 3 March 2011. He lives and writes in London.
Vijay Seshadri is an American poet, essayist and literary critic based in Brooklyn.
Shalom Auslander is an American novelist, memoirist, and essayist. He grew up in a strict, Orthodox neighborhood in Monsey, New York, where he describes himself as having been "raised like a veal", a reference to his strict religious upbringing. His writing style is notable for its existentialist themes, biting satire and black humor. His non-fiction often draws comparisons to David Sedaris, while his fiction has drawn comparisons to Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Groucho Marx. His books have been translated into over a dozen languages, and are published around the world.
Rich Cohen is an American non-fiction writer. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone. He is co-creator, with Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger and Terence Winter, of the HBO series Vinyl. His works have been New York Times bestsellers, New York Times Notable Books, and have been collected in the Best American Essays series. He lives in Ridgefield, Connecticut, with his four sons.
Benjamin Taylor is an American writer whose work has appeared in a number of publications including The Atlantic, Harper's, Esquire, Bookforum, BOMB, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, The Georgia Review, Raritan Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, Salmagundi, Provincetown Arts and The Reading Room. He is a founding member of the Graduate Writing Program faculty of The New School in New York City, and has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, Bennington College and Columbia University. He has served as Secretary of the Board of Trustees of PEN American Center, has been a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and was awarded the Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger Residency at Yaddo. A Trustee of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Inc., he is also a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2012 - 2013. Taylor's biography of Marcel Proust, Proust: The Search, was published in October 2015 by Yale University Press as part of its newly launched Yale Jewish Lives series.
The Kite Runner is a stage adaption of Afghan-American novelist Khaled Hosseini's 2003 book The Kite Runner. Aside from sharing the 2003 book as a source, it is unrelated to the 2007 film The Kite Runner. The play was adapted for the stage by Matthew Spangler and premiered at San Jose Repertory Theatre in 2009.
Gone Girl is a 2012 crime thriller novel by American writer Gillian Flynn. It was published by Crown Publishing Group in June 2012. The novel was popular and made the New York Times Best Seller list. The sense of suspense in the novel comes from whether Nick Dunne is responsible for the disappearance of his wife Amy.
Patricia Lockwood is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. Her 2021 debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, won the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Her poetry collections include Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a 2014 New York Times Notable Book. Since 2019, she has been a contributing editor for The London Review of Books.
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