William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences; he was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated "Shotgun Art".
Henry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
Master and Commander is a nautical historical novel by the English author Patrick O'Brian, first published in 1969 in the US and 1970 in the UK. The book proved to be the start of the 20-novel Aubrey–Maturin series, set largely in the era of the Napoleonic Wars, on which O'Brian continued working until his death in 2000.
Truman Garcia Capote was an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and actor. Several of his short stories, novels, and plays have been praised as literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966). His works have been adapted into more than 20 films and television productions.
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was an American writer. The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction states that "Wolfe was a major American novelist of the first half of the twentieth century, whose longterm reputation rests largely on the impact of his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929), and on the short fiction that appeared during the last years of his life." Along with William Faulkner, he is considered one of the two most important authors of the Southern Renaissance within the American literary canon. He remains an important writer in modern American literature, as one of the first masters of autobiographical fiction, and is considered among North Carolina's most famous writers.
The Ern Malley hoax, also called the Ern Malley affair, is Australia's most famous literary hoax. Its name derives from Ernest Lalor "Ern" Malley, a fictitious poet whose biography and body of work were created in one day in 1943 by conservative writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart in order to hoax the Angry Penguins, a modernist art and literary movement centred around a journal of the same name, co-edited by poet Max Harris and art patron John Reed, of Heide, Melbourne.
Stella Dorothea Gibbons was an English author, journalist, and poet. She established her reputation with her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932) which has been reprinted many times. Although she was active as a writer for half a century, none of her later 22 novels or other literary works—which included a sequel to Cold Comfort Farm—achieved the same critical or popular success. Much of her work was long out of print before a modest revival in the 21st century.
For Special Services, first published in 1982, was the second novel by John Gardner featuring Ian Fleming's secret agent, James Bond. Carrying the Glidrose Publications copyright, it was first published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape and in the United States by Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. Cover designed by Bill Botten.
Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet.
Ravelstein is Saul Bellow's final novel. Published in 2000, when Bellow was eighty-five years old, it received widespread critical acclaim. It tells the tale of a friendship between a university professor and a writer, and the complications that animate their erotic and intellectual attachments in the face of impending death. The novel is a roman à clef written in the form of a memoir. The narrator is in Paris with Abe Ravelstein, a renowned professor, and Nikki, his lover. Ravelstein, who is dying, asks the narrator to write a memoir about him after he dies. After his death, the narrator and his wife go on holiday to the Caribbean. The narrator catches a tropical disease and flies back to the United States to convalesce. Eventually, on recuperation, he decides to write the memoir.
Charles William Goyen was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, editor, and teacher. Born in a small town in East Texas, these roots would influence his work for his entire life.
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is a novel by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. It was written in 1945, a full decade before the two authors became famous as leading figures of the Beat Generation, and remained unpublished in complete form until 2008.
Thomas Mallon is an American novelist, essayist, and critic. His novels are renowned for their attention to historical detail and context and for the author's crisp wit and interest in the "bystanders" to larger historical events. He is the author of ten books of fiction, including Henry and Clara, Two Moons, Dewey Defeats Truman, Aurora 7, Bandbox, Fellow Travelers, Watergate, Finale, Landfall, and most recently Up With the Sun. He has also published nonfiction on plagiarism, diaries, letters and the Kennedy assassination, as well as two volumes of essays.
Henry Blake Fuller was an American novelist and short story writer. He was born and worked in Chicago, Illinois. He is perhaps the earliest novelist from Chicago to gain a national reputation. His exploration of city life was seen as revelatory, and later in his life he was perhaps the earliest established American author to explore homosexuality in fiction.
A House and Its Head is a 1935 novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett, republished in 2001 by New York Review Books with an afterword by Francine Prose and in 2021 by Pushkin Press with an introduction by Hilary Mantel. The novel, which focuses on an upper-middle class Victorian household in the 1880s, explores themes such as family secrets and the subordination of women by men. When asked in 1962 which of her novels were her favourites, Compton-Burnett referred to Manservant and Maidservant and "the first two-thirds" of A House and Its Head.
Robert Schaeffer Phillips was an American poet and professor of English at the University of Houston. He was the author or editor of more than 30 volumes of poetry, fiction, poetry criticism and other works.
Philipp Meyer is an American fiction writer, and is the author of the novels American Rust and The Son, as well as short stories published in The New Yorker and other places. Meyer also created and produced the AMC television show based on his novel. Meyer won the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship and was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize. He won the 2014 Lucien Barrière prize in France and the 2015 Prix Littérature-Monde Prize in France. In 2017 he was named a Chevalier (Knight) in France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Reginald Gibbons is an American poet, fiction writer, translator, and literary critic. He is the Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities, Emeritus, at Northwestern University. Gibbons has published numerous books, including 11 volumes of poems, translations of poetry from ancient Greek, Spanish, and co-translations from Russian. He has published short stories, essays, reviews and art in journals and magazines, has held Guggenheim Foundation and NEA fellowships in poetry and a research fellowship from the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C. For his novel, Sweetbitter, he won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; for his book of poems, Maybe It Was So, he won the Carl Sandburg Prize. He has won the Folger Shakespeare Library's O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize, and other honors, among them the inclusion of his work in Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. His book Creatures of a Day was a Finalist for the 2008 National Book Award for poetry. His other poetry books include Sparrow: New and Selected Poems, Last Lake and Renditions, his eleventh book of poems. Two books of poems are forthcoming: Three Poems in 2024 and Young Woman With a Cane in 2025. He has also published two collections of very short fiction, Five Pears or Peaches and An Orchard in the Street.
John Stewart Wynne is an American author of novels, short stories and poetry, as well as a Grammy-nominated producer of spoken word recordings.
Parents' Day is a 1951 novel by Paul Goodman. Written as autobiographical fiction based on the author's experiences teaching at the upstate New York progressive boarding school Manumit during the 1943–1944 year, the book's narrator grapples with his homosexuality and explores a series of sexual attractions and relationships that culminates in his being fired by the school. Goodman wrote the novel as part of a Reichian self-analysis begun in 1946 to better understand his own life. He struggled to find a publisher and ultimately self-published through a friend's small press. Reviewers remarked on unease in Goodman's sexual revelations, lack of self-awareness, and lack of coherence in the text. Parents' Day sold poorly and has been largely forgotten, save for some recognition as an early gay American novel.
