Patricia Lee Smith is an American singer, songwriter, poet, painter, author and photographer. Her 1975 debut album Horses made her an influential member of the New York City-based punk rock movement. Smith has fused rock and poetry in her work. In 1978, her most widely known song, "Because the Night", co-written with Bruce Springsteen, reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and number five on the UK Singles Chart.
Horses is the debut studio album by American musician Patti Smith. It was released by Arista Records on November 10, 1975. A fixture of the mid-1970s underground rock music scene in New York City, Smith signed to Arista in April 1975 and recorded Horses with her band at Electric Lady Studios that September. She enlisted former Velvet Underground member John Cale to produce the album. With Horses, Smith drew upon her backgrounds in rock music and poetry, aiming to create an album combining both forms.
Jin Xuefei is a Chinese-American poet and novelist using the pen name Ha Jin (哈金). The name Ha comes from his favorite city, Harbin. His poetry is associated with the Misty Poetry movement.
Robert Michael Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images. His most controversial works documented and examined the gay male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Carlos Fuentes Macías was a Mexican novelist and essayist. Among his works are The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), Terra Nostra (1975), The Old Gringo (1985) and Christopher Unborn (1987). In his obituary, The New York Times described Fuentes as "one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world" and an important influence on the Latin American Boom, the "explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and '70s", while The Guardian called him "Mexico's most celebrated novelist". His many literary honors include the Miguel de Cervantes Prize as well as Mexico's highest award, the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor (1999). He was often named as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he never won.
William Tanner Vollmann is an American novelist, journalist, war correspondent, short story writer, and essayist. He won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction with the novel Europe Central.
William Joseph Kennedy is an American writer and journalist who won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for his 1983 novel Ironweed.
Stephen Michael Erickson is an American novelist. The author of influential works such as Days Between Stations, Tours of the Black Clock and Zeroville, he is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award and a Guggenheim fellowship.
Craig Nova is an American novelist and author of fourteen novels.
Lydia Davis is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages, who often writes very short stories. Davis has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Swann's Way by Marcel Proust and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
Allan Gurganus is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose work, which includes Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and Local Souls, is often influenced by and set in his native North Carolina.
Michael Silverblatt is a literary critic and American broadcaster who hosted Bookworm, a nationally syndicated radio program focusing on books and literature, from 1989 to 2022. He recorded over 1,600 interviews with authors and other literary figures, including Salman Rushdie, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, David Foster Wallace, William H. Gass, W. G. Sebald, and John Ashbery.
Christopher Sorrentino is an American novelist and short story writer of Italian and Puerto Rican descent. He is the son of novelist Gilbert Sorrentino and Victoria Ortiz. His first published novel, Sound on Sound (1995), draws upon innovations pioneered in the work of his father, but also contains echoes of many other modernist and postmodernist writers. The book is structured according to the format of a multitrack recording session, with corresponding section titles.
Tao Lin is an American novelist, poet, essayist, short-story writer, and artist. He has published four novels, a novella, two books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and a memoir, as well as an extensive assortment of online content. His third novel, Taipei, was published by Vintage on June 4, 2013. His nonfiction book Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change was published by Vintage on May 1, 2018. His fourth novel, Leave Society, was published by Vintage on August 3, 2021.
Alexander Louis Theroux is an American novelist and poet. He is known for his novel Darconville's Cat (1981), which was selected by Anthony Burgess for his book-length essay Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 – A Personal Choice in 1984 and by Larry McCaffery for his 20th Century's Greatest Hits list.
Muumuu House is an independent, small press publishing company and online literary magazine based formerly in Manhattan, New York, and currently in Hawaii that was founded by writer Tao Lin in 2008. Muumuu House publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in print and online.
H is for Hawk is a 2014 memoir by British author Helen Macdonald. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book of the Year award, among other honours.
M Train is a 2015 memoir written by Patti Smith. Smith's audiobook recording of M Train earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Spoken Word Album.
In the Dream House is a memoir by Carmen Maria Machado. It was published on November 5, 2019, by Graywolf Press.
Bookworm is an interview radio show hosted by Michael Silverblatt and produced by KCRW. The show featured interviews and discussions with authors and other literary figures. The show ran from 1989 to 2022, syndicated nationally on NPR.
