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.
Peter Allen David, often abbreviated PAD, is an American writer of comic books, novels, television, films and video games. His notable comic book work includes an award-winning 12-year run on The Incredible Hulk, as well as runs on Aquaman, Young Justice, Supergirl, Fallen Angel, Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2099, Captain Marvel and X-Factor.
A note is a string of text placed at the bottom of a page in a book or document or at the end of a chapter, volume, or the whole text. The note can provide an author's comments on the main text or citations of a reference work in support of the text.
Digression is a section of a composition or speech that marks a temporary shift of subject; the digression ends when the writer or speaker returns to the main topic. Digressions can be used intentionally as a stylistic or rhetorical device.
Nicholson Baker is an American novelist and essayist. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful description and characterization. His early novels such as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature were distinguished by their minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. Out of a total of ten novels, three are erotica: Vox, The Fermata and House of Holes.
Wolf is a 1994 American romantic horror film directed by Mike Nichols and starring Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer, James Spader, Kate Nelligan, Richard Jenkins, Christopher Plummer, Eileen Atkins, David Hyde Pierce, and Om Puri. It was written by Jim Harrison and Wesley Strick, and an uncredited Elaine May. The music was composed by Ennio Morricone and the cinematography was done by Giuseppe Rotunno.
Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-four novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won 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, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020. She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her "brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail", her "rigorous and artful style", and her "astute and open language."
The Hours is a 1998 novel written by Michael Cunningham. It won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was later made into an Oscar-winning 2002 film of the same name starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore.
Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003, Best American Short Stories 2008 and Best American Short Stories 2019. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House. A collection of her short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020 and won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2022.
Inspirational fiction is a sub-category within the broader categories of "inspirational literature" or "inspirational writing." It has become more common for booksellers and libraries to consider inspirational fiction to be a separate genre, classifying and shelving books accordingly. Reasons for this include the increased popularity of inspirational fiction in recent years, and the appeal of inspirational fiction beyond readers of the genre that these books would otherwise be classified in.
Stephen Wright is a novelist based in New York City known for his use of surrealistic imagery and dark comedy. His work has varied from hallucinatory accounts of war, a family drama among UFO cultists, carnivalesque novel on a serial killer, to a picaresque taking place during the Civil War.
Experimental literature is a genre of literature that is generally "difficult to define with any sort of precision." It experiments with the conventions of literature, including boundaries of genres and styles; for example, it can be written in the form of prose narratives or poetry, but the text may be set on the page in differing configurations than that of normal prose paragraphs or in the classical stanza form of verse. It may also incorporate art or photography. Furthermore, while experimental literature was traditionally handwritten, the digital age has seen an exponential use of writing experimental works with word processors.
The Law of Dreams is a historical fiction novel about the Great Famine of Ireland by Canadian author Peter Behrens. Published in 2006 by House of Anansi Press, it was the recipient of that year's Governor General's Award for English language fiction.
Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper is a non-fiction book by Nicholson Baker that was published in April 2001. An excerpt appeared in the July 24, 2000 issue of The New Yorker, under the title "Deadline: The Author's Desperate Bid to Save America's Past." This exhaustively researched work details Baker's quest to uncover the fate of thousands of books and newspapers that were replaced and often destroyed during the microfilming boom of the 1980s and 1990s. Double Fold is a controversial work and is not meant to be objective. In the preface, Baker says, "This isn't an impartial piece of reporting", and The New York Times characterized the book as a "blistering and thoroughly idiosyncratic attack".
Meditative poetry combines the religious practice of meditation with verse. Buddhist and Hindu writers have developed extensive theories and phase models for meditation.
When You Reach Me is a Newbery Medal-winning science fiction and mystery novel by Rebecca Stead, published in 2009. It takes place on the Upper West Side of New York during 1978 and 1979 and follows a sixth-grade girl named Miranda Sinclair. After Miranda finds a strange note, which is unsigned and addressed only to "M," in her school library book, a mystery is set into motion—one which Miranda ultimately must face alone. At the same time, Miranda juggles school, relationships with her peers, and helping her mom prepare to be on the game show The $20,000 Pyramid. Important characters in the story include Miranda's mother; Richard, her mom's good-natured boyfriend; Sal, Miranda's childhood best friend; and a homeless man who lives on Miranda's block and is referred to only as "the laughing man." Central themes in the novel include independence, redemption, and friendship.
Laura Miller is an American journalist and critic based in New York City. She is a co-founder of Salon.com.
House of Holes is a 2011 novel by American writer Nicholson Baker. It consists of a series of chapters that are more or less connected which tell of the sexual and emotional experiences of a variety of characters in a kind of sexual fantasy land, the titular "House of Holes". The third "dirty novel" by Baker after Vox and The Fermata, it is praised by many reviewers for the inventiveness of its language.
The Way the World Works is a 2012 book by Nicholson Baker that collects thirty-four previously published essays together. These essays were originally published in a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker.
4 3 2 1 is a novel by Paul Auster published in January 2017. At the time of its publication, it was the first new Auster novel to have appeared in seven years. Auster worked on the book seven days a week for three years and wrote it in long hand. At 866 pages, the novel is much longer than any of his previous works. In September 2017 it was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.
