Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Richard Miller Flanagan is an Australian writer, who has also worked as a film director and screenwriter. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Janet R. Maslin is an American journalist, best known as a film and literary critic for The New York Times. She served as a Times film critic from 1977 to 1999 and as a book critic from 2000 to 2015. In 2000, Maslin helped found the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York. She is president of its board of directors.
Darin Strauss is a best-selling American writer whose work has earned a number of awards, including, among numerous others, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Strauss's 2011 book Half a Life, won the 2011 NBCC Award for memoir/autobiography. His most recent book, The Queen of Tuesday, came out in August, 2020. It is currently nominated for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize.
If Beale Street Could Talk is a 1974 novel by American writer James Baldwin. His fifth novel, it is a love story set in Harlem in the early 1970s. The title is a reference to the 1916 W.C. Handy blues song "Beale Street Blues", named after Beale Street in Downtown Memphis, Tennessee.
Raymond Joseph Smith was an American educator, author, and book editor. He was for more than 30 years the editor of Ontario Review, a literary magazine, and the Ontario Review Press, a literary book publisher. He was married to the American author Joyce Carol Oates.
Blonde is a bestselling 2000 biographical fiction novel by Joyce Carol Oates that presents a fictionalized take on the life of American actress Marilyn Monroe.
Jonathan Eig is an American journalist and biographer. He is the author of six books, the most recent being King: A Life (2023), a biography of Martin Luther King Jr.
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart is a 1990 novel by American novelist Joyce Carol Oates. The title is taken from "In the Desert", a poem by Stephen Crane. Oates's novel was nominated for best work of fiction in the 1990 National Book Awards.
Zachary Lazar is an American novelist. Lazar was born in Phoenix, Arizona. He earned an A.B. degree in Comparative Literature from Brown University (1990) and M.F.A from the University of Iowa Iowa Writer's Workshop (1993). In 2015, he was the third recipient of the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, "given biennially to a writer in mid-career whose work has demonstrated consistent excellence."
Jean Hanff Korelitz is an American novelist, playwright, theater producer and essayist.
Mary U. Miller is an American fiction writer. She is the author of two collections of short stories entitled Big World and Always Happy Hour. Her debut novel entitled The Last Days of California was published by Liveright. It is the story of a fourteen-year-old girl on a family road trip from the South to California, led by her evangelical father. By January 2014, Big World had sold 3,000 copies and Last Days of California had an initial print run of 25,000.
A Fair Maiden is a 2010 novella by Joyce Carol Oates that chronicles the relationship between teenage nanny Katya Spivak and the much older, affluent artist Marcus Kidder. The novel's themes and plot are reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.
The Little Red Chairs is a 2015 novel by Irish author Edna O'Brien, who was 85 at the time of publication. The novel is O'Brien's 23rd fictional publication.
A Book of American Martyrs is a 2017 novel by the American author, Joyce Carol Oates. The story chronicles two American families, the Voorheeses and the Dunphys, whose faith and convictions are vastly different. The story begins with the aftermath of the November 1999 murder of Dr. Gus Voorhees by Luther Amos Dunphy.
The Sacrifice is a 2015 novel by the American writer Joyce Carol Oates. Set in blighted urban New Jersey in the 1980s, it follows a young Black woman, Sybilla, who is discovered in a degraded condition in an abandoned factory after going missing. When she alleges that she was kidnapped, assaulted, and left for dead by a group of white police officers, her cause is taken up by an ambitious and unscrupulous civil rights activist and his lawyer brother, despite evidence of deceit in her story. The events of the novel are based on the real-life Tawana Brawley case, and takes place in a part of New Jersey still suffering from the aftermath of post-war deindustrialization and the 1967 Newark riots.
The Other Americans is a mystery novel written by Moroccan American novelist Laila Lalami. The novel was published in 2019 by Pantheon Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Jason Mott is an American novelist and poet. His fourth novel, Hell of a Book, won the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction.
Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. is a 2020 novel by American writer Joyce Carol Oates, about a man who was killed by the police and the aftermath of his death on his family. Its title comes from a poem by Walt Whitman.
