Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published 22 novels, the best known of which are Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with Breathing Lessons winning the prize in 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015. She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her "brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail," and her "rigorous and artful style" and "astute and open language."
Wonder Boys is a 1995 novel by the American writer Michael Chabon. It was adapted into a film with the same title in 2000.
Sabbath's Theater is a novel by Philip Roth about the exploits of 64-year-old Mickey Sabbath. It won the 1995 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. The cover is a detail of Sailor and Girl (1925) by German painter Otto Dix.
The Ghost Writer is a 1979 novel by the American author Philip Roth. It is the first of Roth's novels narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, one of the author's putative fictional alter egos, and constitutes the first book in his Zuckerman Bound trilogy. The novel touches on themes common to many Roth works, including identity, the responsibilities of authors to their subjects, and the condition of Jews in America. Parts of the novel are a reprise of The Diary of Anne Frank.
Fugitive Pieces is a novel by Canadian poet Anne Michaels. The story is divided into two sections. The first centers around Jakob Beer, a Polish Holocaust survivor while the second involves a man named Ben, the son of two Holocaust survivors. It was first published in Canada in 1996 and was published in the United Kingdom the following year. Since the publication, the novel has won awards such as Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, Orange Prize for Fiction, Guardian Fiction Prize and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize. For over two years the novel was on Canada's bestseller list, and it was translated into over 20 different languages.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a 2007 novel by American author Michael Chabon. The novel is a detective story set in an alternative history version of the present day, based on the premise that during World War II, a temporary settlement for Jewish refugees was established in Sitka, Alaska, in 1941, and that the fledgling State of Israel was destroyed in 1948. The novel is set in Sitka, which it depicts as a large, Yiddish-speaking metropolis.
Mary McGarry Morris is an American novelist, short story author and playwright from New England. She uses its towns as settings for her works. In 1991, Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times described Morris as "one of the most skillful new writers at work in America today"; The Washington Post has described her as a "superb storyteller"; and The Miami Herald has called her "one of our finest American writers".
Adam Johnson is an American novelist and short story writer. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2012 novel, The Orphan Master's Son, and the National Book Award for his 2015 story collection Fortune Smiles. He is also a professor of English at Stanford University with a focus on creative writing.
Matt Gallagher is an American author, former U.S. Army captain and veteran of the Iraq War. Gallagher has written on a variety of subjects, mainly contemporary war fiction and non-fiction. He first became known for his war memoir Kaboom (2010), which tells of his and his scout platoon's experiences during the Iraq War. He works as a writing instructor at Words After War, a literary nonprofit devoted to bringing veterans and civilians together to study conflict literature.
A Hologram for the King is a 2012 American novel written by Dave Eggers. In October 2012, the novel was announced as a finalist for the National Book Award.
Kevin Powers is an American fiction writer, poet, and Iraq War veteran.
The Examined Life is a 2013 collection of essays by practising psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz which is an attempt to "distil over 50,000 hours of conversation into pure psychological insight, without the jargon." The book was serialised as Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 in January 2012, and spent 10 weeks on the Sunday Times non-fiction bestseller list. It has been translated into Dutch, Italian, German, Portuguese and Korean, and will be published in a further 14 languages including Spanish, Chinese and Hebrew. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani praised the book as “an insightful and beautifully written… a series of slim, piercing chapters that read like a combination of Chekhov and Oliver Sacks”
Jernigan is the 1991 debut novel by David Gates. The book received widespread critical acclaim, drawing comparisons to Richard Yates, Joseph Heller, and Frederick Exley. Jernigan was a finalist for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.
Omar El Akkad is an Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist.
The Return is a memoir by Hisham Matar that was first published in June 2016. The memoir centers on Matar's return to his native Libya in 2012 to search for the truth behind the 1990 disappearance of his father, a prominent political dissident of the Gaddafi regime. It won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, the inaugural 2017 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the 2017 Folio Prize, becoming the first nonfiction book to do so.
Daniel Torday is an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. He serves as an Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College.
The Testaments is a 2019 novel by Margaret Atwood. It is a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale (1985). The novel's events occur fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale. The novel is narrated by Aunt Lydia, a character from the previous novel; Agnes, a young woman living in Gilead; and Daisy, a young woman living in Canada.
