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's 1996 novel Infinite Jest was cited by Time magazine 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".
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American author. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002), and The Marriage Plot (2011). The Virgin Suicides served as the basis of the 1999 film of the same name, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.
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.
Thomas Coraghessan Boyle is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published nineteen novels and more than 150 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York.
Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story author, and writer of a series of novels featuring the character Frank Bascombe.
Edna Ann Proulx is an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. She has written most frequently as Annie Proulx but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx.
Lorrie Moore is an American writer, critic, and essayist. She is best known for her short stories, some of which have won major awards. Since 1984, she has also taught creative writing.
Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University during the academic year.
Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian-American author, essayist, critic, television writer, and screenwriter. He is best known for the novels Nowhere Man (2002) and The Lazarus Project (2008), and his scriptwriting as a co-writer of The Matrix Resurrections (2021).
William Keepers Maxwell Jr. was an American editor, novelist, short story writer, essayist, children's author, and memoirist. He served as a fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975. An editor devoted to his writers, Maxwell became a mentor and confidant to many authors.
Jennifer Egan is an American novelist and short-story writer. Her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. As of February 28, 2018, she is the president of PEN America.
Fredrick Barthelme is an American novelist and short story writer of minimalist fiction. He is the director of the Center For Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi and editor of the literary journal Mississippi Review. He is currently the editor of New World Writing
Joseph O'Neill is an Irish novelist and non-fiction writer. O'Neill's novel Netherland was awarded the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.
Richard Bausch is an American novelist and short story writer, and Professor in the Writing Program at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has published thirteen novels, nine short story collections, and one volume of poetry and prose.
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
David Vann was born October 19, 1966, on Adak Island in the Aleutian Islands, Alaska. He is a novelist and short story writer, and was formerly a professor of creative writing at the University of Warwick in England. Vann received a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been a National Endowment of the Arts fellow, a Wallace Stegner fellow, and a John L’Heureux fellow. His work has appeared in many magazines and newspapers. His books have been published in 23 languages and have won 14 prizes and been on 83 'best books of the year' lists. They have been selected for the New Yorker Book Club, the Times Book Club, the Samlerens Bogklub in Denmark and have been optioned for film by Inkfactory and Haut et Court. He has appeared in documentaries with the BBC, CNN, PBS, National Geographic, and E! Entertainment.
The Hundred Brothers is a 1997 novel by American author Donald Antrim. The novel was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1998. In his introduction to the novel, Jonathan Franzen wrote, "The Hundred Brothers is possibly the strangest novel ever published by an American. Its author, Donald Antrim, is arguably more unlike any other living writer than any other living writer."
The Verificationist is a 2000 novel by American author Donald Antrim. The novel follows the conversations, fantasies, and the emotionally dissociated states of a group of psychoanalysts gathered during a nocturnal pancake supper. The narrator’s predilection for starting food fights and instigating mayhem leads Bernhardt, the most grotesque and overbearing from among his colleagues, to hold him around his midsection almost for the duration of the novel while the narrator hallucinates himself hovering over the crowd. The New York Times called it, "A Freudian free-for-all," and George Saunders hailed it as, "one of the most pleasure-giving, perverse, complicated, and addictive novels in the past 20 years," in his article for Salon, which later became the book's introduction.
The Afterlife is an American memoir written by Donald Antrim. The book became a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in 2007.
