Caleb Casey McGuire Affleck-Boldt is an American actor. He is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and a Golden Globe Award. The younger brother of actor Ben Affleck, he began his career as a child actor, appearing in the PBS television film Lemon Sky (1988). He later appeared in three Gus Van Sant films: To Die For (1995), Good Will Hunting (1997), Gerry (2002), and in Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's film series (2001–2007). His first leading role was in Steve Buscemi's independent comedy-drama Lonesome Jim (2006).
David Talbot is an American journalist, author, activist and independent historian. Talbot is known for his books about the "hidden history" of U.S. power and the liberal movements to change America, as well as his public advocacy. He was also the founder and former editor-in-chief of the pioneering web magazine, Salon.
Helon Habila Ngalabak is a Nigerian novelist and poet, whose writing has won many prizes, including the Caine Prize in 2001. He worked as a lecturer and journalist in Nigeria before moving in 2002 to England, where he was a Chevening Scholar at the University of East Anglia, and now teaches creative writing at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.
William Edward Vickers (1889–1965) was an English mystery writer better known under his pen name Roy Vickers, but used also the pseudonyms Roy C. Vickers, David Durham, Sefton Kyle, and John Spencer. He is the author of over 60 crime novels and 80 short stories. Vickers is now remembered mostly for his attribution to Scotland Yard of a Department of Dead Ends, specialized in solving old, sometimes long-forgotten cases, mostly by chance encounters of odd bits of strange and apparently disconnected evidence.
Binnie Kirshenbaum is an American novelist and short story writer. She is a professor of the Writing Program at Columbia University School of the Arts.
Wizard of the Crow is a 2006 novel written by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and translated from the original Kikuyu into English by the author, his first novel in 20 years. The story is set in the imaginary Free Republic of Aburĩria, autocratically governed by one man, known only as the Ruler. The novel received the 2008 Tähtifantasia Award for the best foreign fantasy novel released in Finland in 2007.
Yann Martel, is a Canadian author who wrote the Man Booker Prize–winning novel Life of Pi, an international bestseller published in more than 50 territories. It has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide and spent more than a year on the bestseller lists of the New York Times and The Globe and Mail, among many other best-selling lists. Life of Pi was adapted for a movie directed by Ang Lee, garnering four Oscars including Best Director and winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.
Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a Scottish writer and filmmaker. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest (2002), and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018).
Paul Yoon is an American fiction writer. In 2010 The National Book Foundation named him a 5 Under 35 honoree.
Meredith Maran is an American author, book critic, and journalist. She has published twelve nonfiction books, several of them San Francisco Chronicle best-sellers, and a successful first novel. She writes features, essays, and reviews for People, More, Good Housekeeping, Salon.com, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Boston Globe.
Viken Berberian is a writer and essayist whose works rely on satire and defy easy categorization. Berberian's fiction and essays have appeared in print and online in The New York Times, le Monde Diplomatique, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, Granta, BOMB, The Nation, and the New York Review of Books. His novels have been translated to French, Hebrew, Italian, German and Dutch. They are marked by keen wit and a sense of economic and political injustice.
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is a 2012 novel by American writer Robin Sloan. It was chosen as one of the best 100 books of 2012 by the San Francisco Chronicle, was a New York Times Editor's Choice, and was on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction Best Seller list as well as the NPR Hardcover Fiction Bestseller List. The US book cover, which glows in the dark, was done by Rodrigo Corral and chosen as one of the 25 best book covers for 2012 by BookPage.
Five Star Billionaire is a novel by Tash Aw, published in 2013.
The Orchard of Lost Souls is a 2013 novel by the Somali-British author Nadifa Mohamed. It is set in Somalia on the eve of the civil war. Her second book, coming four years after her award-winning debut work Black Mamba Boy (2009), it was published by Simon & Schuster.
Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 is a collection of short stories by Annie Proulx published in 2004. It was not as well received by critics in comparison with Proulx's 1999 Close Range: Wyoming Stories.
Shawna Yang Ryan is a Taiwanese-American novelist, short story writer and creative writing professor, who has published the novels Water Ghosts (2009) and Green Island (2016) (Knopf). She currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest is a 2002 book by Aminatta Forna about her childhood and an investigation into the execution of her father, Mohamed Forna. It was serialised as a Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 and was runner-up for the 2003 Samuel Johnson Prize.
Ancestor Stones (2006) is a novel by British writer Aminatta Forna about the experiences of four women in a polygamous family in West Africa.
The Memory of Love is a 2010 novel by Aminatta Forna about the experiences of three men in Sierra Leone. In 2022, it was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, selected to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II.
