Michael Chabon is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer. Born in Washington, DC, he spent a year studying at Carnegie Mellon University before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, graduating in 1984. He subsequently received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine.
Frank Morrison Spillane, better known as Mickey Spillane, was an American crime novelist, whose stories often feature his signature detective character, Mike Hammer. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally. Spillane was also an occasional actor, once even playing Hammer himself.
Paul Edward Theroux is an American novelist and travel writer who has written numerous books, including the travelogue The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). Some of his works of fiction have been adapted as feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast, which was adapted for the 1986 movie of the same name and the 2021 television series of the same name.
Crime is a typically 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century genre, dominated by British and American writers. This article explores its historical development as a genre.
"Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story by the American writer Herman Melville, first serialized anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853 issues of Putnam's Magazine and reprinted with minor textual alterations in his The Piazza Tales in 1856. In the story, a Wall Street lawyer hires a new clerk who, after an initial bout of hard work, refuses to make copies or do any other task required of him, refusing with the words "I would prefer not to."
A fictional book is a text created specifically for a work in an imaginary narrative that is referred to, depicted, or excerpted in a story, book, film, or other fictional work, and which exists only in one or more fictional works. A fictional book may be created to add realism or depth to a larger fictional work. For example, George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four has excerpts from a book by Emmanuel Goldstein entitled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism which provides background on concepts explored in the novel.
Kilgore Trout is a fictional character created by author Kurt Vonnegut. Trout is a notably unsuccessful author of paperback science fiction novels.
The New York Trilogy is a series of novels by American writer Paul Auster. Originally published sequentially as City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986), it has since been collected into a single volume. The Trilogy is a postmodern interpretation of detective and mystery fiction, exploring various philosophical themes.
A House for Mr Biswas is a 1961 novel by V. S. Naipaul, significant as Naipaul's first work to achieve acclaim worldwide. It is the story of Mohun Biswas, a Hindu Indo-Trinidadian who continually strives for success and mostly fails, who marries into the influential Tulsi family only to find himself dominated by it, and who finally sets the goal of owning his own house. It relies on some biographical elements from the experience of the author's father, and views a colonial world sharply with postcolonial perspectives.
David Stephen Mitchell is an English novelist, television writer, and screenwriter.
Haunted is a 2005 novel by Chuck Palahniuk. The plot is a frame story for a series of 23 short stories, most preceded by a free verse poem. Each story is followed by a chapter of the main narrative, is told by a character in main narrative, and ties back into the main story in some way. Typical of Palahniuk's work, the dominant motifs in Haunted are sexual deviance, sexual identity, desperation, social distastefulness, disease, murder, death, and existentialism.
Earl Wilbert Lovelace is a Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: "Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures." As Bernardine Evaristo notes, "Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile. But Lovelace's fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken."
Seepersad Naipaul was an Indo-Trinidadian writer. He was the father of V. S. Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Kamla Tewari, and Sati Bissoondath, and married into the influential Hindu Indo-Trinidadian Capildeo family.
The Lonely Londoners is a 1956 novel by Trinidadian author Samuel Selvon. Its publication was one of the first to focus on poor, working-class black people following the enactment of the British Nationality Act 1948 alongside George Lamming's (1954) novel The Emigrants. The Lonely Londoners was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books selected by a panel of experts, and announced in April 2022 by the BBC and The Reading Agency, to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II's platinum jubilee in June 2022.
The Mystic Masseur is a comic novel by V. S. Naipaul. It is set in colonial Trinidad and was published in London in 1957.
A Flag on the Island is a collection of short stories written by V.S. Naipaul, and first published by André Deutsch in 1967. It includes the title novella, "A Flag on the Island," outtakes from previous books such as "The Enemy", from Miguel Street, and pieces published in periodicals in Britain or the United States. The book is dedicated to Diana Athill.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was a Trinidadian-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. He wrote in prose that was widely admired, but his views sometimes aroused controversy. He published more than thirty books over fifty years.
Doc Savage was an American pulp magazine that was published from 1933 to 1949 by Street & Smith. It was launched as a follow-up to the success of The Shadow, a magazine Street & Smith had started in 1931, based around a single character. Doc Savage's lead character, Clark Savage, was a scientist and adventurer, rather than purely a detective. Lester Dent was hired to write the lead novels, almost all of which were published under the house name "Kenneth Robeson". A few dozen novels were ghost-written by other writers, hired either by Dent or by Street & Smith. The magazine was successful, but was shut down in 1949 as part of Street & Smith's decision to leave the pulp magazine field completely.
Mohamed Ismith Khan, better known as Ismith Khan, was a Trinidad and Tobago-born American author and educator. He is best known for his novel The Jumbie Bird, a semi-autobiographical work which blends Indian and Afro-Caribbean mythology and experience to explore the creation of a new Indo-Caribbean identity.
"One out of Many" is a short story within an unconventionally formatted novel entitled In a Free State, written by V. S. Naipaul and originally published by André Deutsch in 1971. The protagonist, Santosh, is forced to give up his familiar life inside the stratified castes of India to move with his employer, now an Indian ambassador, to Washington D.C during the civil rights protests and commensurate "hippie era". Themes developed in the story reflect Santosh's abrupt displacement from a comfortable, life-long acclimation in India, to an alien environment in the United States, where his beliefs, perceptions, and sense of belonging are upended.
