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Peter Gadol is an American author. Gadol was born on April 15, 1964, and grew up in Westfield, New Jersey. He received an A.B. magna cum laude in English and American Literature from Harvard College in 1986. While at Harvard, he studied writing with Seamus Heaney, wrote a thesis on Wallace Stevens under the supervision of Helen Vendler, edited the literary magazine The Harvard Advocate , and was for two years a fiction intern at The Atlantic .
Gadol is the author of seven books. His debut novel, Coyote, published by Crown in 1990, was hailed by The Los Angeles Times as "the work of an energetic mind, one seemingly unfettered by fashionable norms," and his second novel, The Mystery Roast (Crown, 1993), was described by The Washington Post as "a savory spoof of trends, but ultimately...a love story involving secrets and dreams, anxieties about fulfillment and intimacy and the Muses that inspire us nonetheless."
Closer to the Sun, published by Picador USA in 1996, was inspired by Gadol's move to Los Angeles and tells the story of a young couple who, after having lost their home in a canyon wildfire, enlist the help of a drifter to rebuild the house themselves, the drifter himself overcoming the loss of a lover to AIDS.
In The Long Rain (Picador USA, 1997), Gadol returned to California, this time wine country, to write a literary thriller about a lawyer who defends a man wrongly accused of committing a crime the lawyer himself committed. The novel was translated into several languages and nominated for a prize from PEN West.
Light at Dusk (Picador USA, 2000), is set in the Paris of a slightly near-future in which the far right has ascended and white power skinhead gangs freely roam the streets. The daylight abduction of a Lebanese boy causes a young American ex-diplomat to re-enter the morally questionable world he abandoned in order to find the child. The LA Weekly applauded the novel for its "elegant, but mannered prose; tight, suspenseful plotting; moody Parisian setting; fearlessly high-modernist concerns," and claimed the novel "will not look out of place slouching on the shelf somewhere between Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene."
Gadol's sixth novel Silver Lake was published by Tyrus Books in September 2009. Silver Lake is about two architects, two men turning forty who have been involved professionally and personally for twenty years, and who are beginning to see their practice and their marriage falter. One day, a peculiar young man drifts into their storefront office claiming he has car trouble, asking to use the phone. The men get to talking; the young stranger is curious but enchanting, and one of the architects ends up playing tennis with him that afternoon, ultimately inviting him home for dinner. The ensuing evening involves a lot of wine and banter and then increasingly dark conversation, and when the stranger has had too much to drink, the two men insist he sleep in their guest room. During the night, the stranger commits an act of violence which shatters the architects' ordered lives, each man in his own way over the days and months that follow coping with blossoming doubt and corrosive secrets. The reviewer for Booklist wrote: "In his trademark crystalline prose, reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith, Gadol vividly illustrates the universal themes of the stranger who comes to town, the quest for redemption, and the entanglement of deception." Silver Lake was nominated for awards from the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association and Lambda Literary.
The Stranger Game, a novel about a woman who is drawn into a dangerous game following random strangers, was published on October 2, 2018, by Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HarperCollins. The reviewer for Kirkus called the book a "beautiful, thoughtful meditation on the invisible ties that bind us—even to strangers." The Stranger Game has been optioned by FX to be developed as a television series.
His short fiction has appeared in Story , Tin House , StoryQuarterly, Bloom, and the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal. He has taught at UCLA and the California Institute of the Arts. He is Chair and Professor of MFA Writing at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles.
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John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime. All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America.
Henry Green was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke, an English writer best remembered for the novels Party Going, Living and Loving. He published a total of nine novels between 1926 and 1952.
Clive John Sinclair was a British author who published several award-winning novels and collections of short stories, including Hearts of Gold (1979), Bedbugs (1982) and The Lady with the Laptop (1996).
Molly McGrann is an American literary critic, poet, and novelist. She is an alumna of Skidmore College and New York University. She lives in England.
Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, singer, and music composer from India.
Michael Foster (1904-1956) was an American novelist, journalist, screenwriter and cartoonist.
Tod Goldberg is an American author and journalist best known for his novels Gangster Nation (Counterpoint), Gangsterland (Counterpoint) and Living Dead Girl, the popular Burn Notice series (Penguin/NAL) and the short story collection The Low Desert: Gangster Stories (Counterpoint).
Mark W. Lee is an American novelist, children's book writer, poet and playwright. He has worked as a war correspondent and some of these real-life experiences have appeared in his fiction.
Soon I Will Be Invincible is a novel by Austin Grossman, published by Pantheon Books and released on June 5, 2007. The novel uses two alternating first person narratives—the first told from the point of view of Fatale, a female cyborg recruited by the superhero group The New Champions as they investigate the disappearance of a superhero named CoreFire. The other narrative is told from the point of view of Dr. Impossible, a supervillain possessing super-human strength and intellect who suffers from Malign Hypercognition Disorder. The plot follows Impossible's thirteenth attempt to take over the world after escaping from prison.
Nash Candelaria was an American novelist. He was known for a tetralogy of novels about the Rafa family. He has been called the "historical novelist of the Hispanic people of New Mexico."
Michelle Huneven is an American novelist and journalist. Huneven was born and raised in a Jewish family in Altadena, California, where she returned to live in 2001. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and attended the Methodist Claremont School of Theology. She now attends Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church in Pasadena, California.
Justin Torres is an American novelist and an Assistant Professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles. He won the First Novelist Award for his semi-autobiographical novel We the Animals which was also a Publishing Triangle Award finalist and a NAACP Image Award nominee. We the Animals has been adapted into a film and awarded the Next Innovator Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
David Francis is an Australian novelist, lawyer and academic.
Charles Blackstone is an American writer. His most recent novel is the semi-autobiographical Vintage Attraction (2013).
Francie Lin is a Taiwanese-American novelist, whose debut novel The Foreigner (2008) won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author.
John Smelcer is an American poet and novelist whose claims to Native American (Ahtna) heritage and citizenship have been the subject of multiple controversies.
A Beautiful Crime is a 2020 crime fiction novel by the American writer and editor Christopher Bollen. It is Bollen's fourth novel and was written in 2018 during a residency in Paris. The novel was first published in the United States by Harper on January 28, 2020.
Young Mungo is a 2022 novel by Scottish-American writer Douglas Stuart. It was published by Grove Press on 5 April 2022 and by Picador on 14 April 2022. The novel follows Mungo Hamilton, a gay teenager living in early 1990s Glasgow who falls in love with a boy named James and must confront the homophobia, toxic masculinity and religious conflicts of the society of his time. It is Stuart's second novel, following his Booker Prize-winning debut Shuggie Bain (2020). The novel was critically acclaimed and was chosen as one of the books of the year by publications such as The Washington Post, Time, Reader's Digest, The Telegraph and Vanity Fair.
Andrew Winer is an American novelist. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction and author of the novels The Marriage Artist (2010) and The Color Midnight Made (2003), he writes and speaks about literary, philosophical, and artistic matters. Presently he is completing his third novel and a book on the contemporary relevance of Friedrich Nietzsche’s central philosophical idea, the affirmation of life. Andrew Winer is also an artist.
