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 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.
Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is best known for his 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Eggers is also the founder of several notable literary and philanthropic ventures, including the literary journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the literacy project 826 Valencia, and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness. Additionally, he founded ScholarMatch, a program that connects donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in numerous prestigious publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.
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 nonfiction. 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).
Barbara Ellen Kingsolver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist, and poet. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a nonfiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.
George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, "American Psyche", to The Guardian's weekend magazine between 2006 and 2008.
Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.
Daniel Alarcón is a Peruvian-American novelist, journalist and radio producer. He is co-founder, host and executive producer of Radio Ambulante, an award-winning Spanish language podcast distributed by NPR. Currently, he is an assistant professor of broadcast journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and writes about Latin America for The New Yorker.
Ceridwen Dovey is a South African and Australian author and social anthropologist. The winner of several awards, she is known for her first novel, Blood Kin (2007), and her 2014 short story collection, Only the Animals. In 2024 she published another collection of short stories, called Only the Astronauts.
Samuel R. "Chip" Delany is an American writer and literary critic. His work includes fiction, memoir, criticism, and essays on science fiction, literature, sexuality, and society.
Han Kang is a South Korean writer. From 2007 to 2018, she taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. Han rose to international prominence for her novel The Vegetarian, which became the first Korean language novel to win the International Booker Prize for fiction in 2016. In 2024, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, a first for an Asian woman and for a Korean.
Cara Hoffman is an American novelist, essayist, and journalist. She is a founding editor of The Anarchist Review of Books and the author of three critically acclaimed novels, So Much Pretty (2011), Be Safe, I Love You (2014), and Running (2017).
So Long, See You Tomorrow is a novel by American author William Maxwell. It was first published in The New Yorker magazine in October 1979 in two parts. It was published as a book the following year by Alfred A. Knopf.
We the Animals (2011) is the debut novel by American author Justin Torres. It is a bildungsroman about three wild brothers of white and Puerto Rican parentage who live a rough and tumble childhood in rural upstate New York during the 1980s. The youngest brother, protagonist of the story, eventually breaks away from the rest of the family.
Samantha Hunt is an American novelist, essayist and short-story writer.
Chinelo Okparanta is a Nigerian-American novelist and short-story writer. She was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where she was raised until the age of 10, when she emigrated to the United States with her family.
Carmen Maria Machado is an American short story author, essayist, and critic best known for Her Body and Other Parties, a 2017 short story collection, and her memoir In the Dream House, which was published in 2019 and won the 2021 Folio Prize. Machado is frequently published in The New Yorker, Granta, Lightspeed, and other publications. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Her stories have been reprinted in Year's Best Weird Fiction, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, The New Voices of Fantasy, and Best Women's Erotica.
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is the debut novel by Vietnamese American poet Ocean Vuong, published by Penguin Press on June 4, 2019. An epistolary novel, it is written in the form of a letter from a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother. It was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction.
Blackouts is a 2023 historical fiction novel by Justin Torres, published by Macmillan Publishers. The book uses historical documents including the 1941 report Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns by the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants in addition to historical photographs and illustrations to supplement the narrative. The real life Sex Variants study was based on the research of journalist Helen Reitman, who conducted hundreds of interviews with gay and lesbian people in Europe and New York City in the 1920s and 30s. Eighty of these interviews and case histories were eventually included in the 1941 Sex Variants study, published by Dr. George W. Henry, which concluded that homosexuality is a pathological condition. Excerpts from these firsthand accounts, in redacted form, are interspersed throughout the book.
Bruna Dantas Lobato is a fiction writer and translator of Brazilian literature. Her translation of The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel won the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Her translation of The Dark Side of Skin by Jeferson Tenório won an English PEN Translates Award, and her translation of Moldy Strawberries by Caio Fernando Abreu was longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize.
