Michael Chabon is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer. Born in Washington, D.C., he spent a year studying at Carnegie Mellon University before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, graduating in 1984. He subsequently received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine.
Bret Easton Ellis is an American author and screenwriter. Ellis was one of the literary Brat Pack and is a self-proclaimed satirist whose trademark technique, as a writer, is the expression of extreme acts and opinions in an affectless style. His novels commonly share recurring characters.
David John Lodge CBE is an English author and critic. A literature professor at the University of Birmingham until 1987, some of his novels satirise academic life, notably the "Campus Trilogy" – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) and Nice Work (1988). The second two were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Another theme is Roman Catholicism, beginning from his first published novel The Picturegoers (1960). Lodge has also written television screenplays and three stage plays. After retiring, he continued to publish literary criticism. His edition of Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (1972) includes essays on 20th-century writers such as T. S. Eliot. In 1992, he published The Art of Fiction, a collection of essays on literary techniques with illustrative examples from great authors, such as Point of View, The Stream of Consciousness and Interior Monologue, beginning with Beginning and ending with Ending.
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.
Soulcalibur II is a 2002 fighting game developed by Project Soul and published by Namco and the third installment in the Soulcalibur series of weapon-based fighting games. It is the sequel to Soulcalibur, which was released in July 1998. Originally intended to be released on Sega's NAOMI board, the game was released on the Namco System 246 arcade board before being ported to the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox in 2003.
Harold Brodkey, born Aaron Roy Weintraub, was an American short-story writer and novelist.
The Mad Man is a literary novel by Samuel R. Delany, first published in 1994 by Richard Kasak. In a disclaimer that appears at the beginning of the book, Delany describes it as a "pornotopic fantasy". It was originally published in 1994, republished and slightly revised in 1996, and republished again with significant changes in 2002 and again in an e-book version with further corrections in 2015. Delany considers the 2015 version the definitive edition.
Kafka on the Shore is a 2002 novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Its 2005 English translation was among "The 10 Best Books of 2005" from The New York Times and received the World Fantasy Award for 2006. The book tells the stories of the young Kafka Tamura, a bookish 15-year-old boy who runs away from his Oedipal curse, and Satoru Nakata, an old, disabled man with the uncanny ability to talk to cats. The book incorporates themes of music as a communicative conduit, metaphysics, dreams, fate, the subconscious.
Soulcalibur III is a fighting video game produced by Namco as a sequel to Soulcalibur II and the fourth installment in the Soulcalibur series. It was originally released for the PlayStation 2 in 2005. An improved arcade version, Soulcalibur III: Arcade Edition, was released in 2006. It was the last Soulcalibur game to receive an arcade version, as IV onwards did not have an arcade release, and was also the last to be released by Namco as an independent company, as it would merge with Bandai's video game division to form Bandai Namco Entertainment in 2006. It is the second in the Soulcalibur series’ 1590 A.D. trilogy games, between II and IV.
Gordon Lish is an American writer. As a literary editor, he championed many American authors, particularly Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Rick Bass, and Richard Ford. He is the father of the novelist Atticus Lish.
The World Is the Home of Love and Death: Stories is a collection of short stories written by Harold Brodkey and first published posthumously in 1997. Most of the stories were written to be part of his novel The Runaway Soul and concern its characters. Four of the eleven stories were originally printed in The New Yorker and one ("Religion") in Glimmer Train, from 1986 to 1996. The Runaway Soul stories are from the perspective of that novel's protagonist, Wiley Silenowicz. They detail his life from infancy, as a deathly ill child separated from his biological mother; through his childhood, living with stepparents Lila and S.L. and sister Nonie; adolescence, caring for the dying S.L.; and finally into adulthood, where he finds acceptance from the artistic community for his exceptional writing talents.
A sense of wonder is an intellectual and emotional state frequently invoked in discussions of science and biology, higher consciousness, science fiction, and philosophy.
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode is a short story collection by the American writer Harold Brodkey, published in 1988 by Alfred A. Knopf. Most of the stories were published in The New Yorker, between 1963 and 1988. It was Brodkey's first book in 30 years, and presaged his much-heralded but ultimately disappointing first novel The Runaway Soul. In fact, much of the material that would make up The Runaway Soul appeared in short story form in Stories in an Almost Classical Mode.
A dialogue tree, or conversation tree, is a gameplay mechanic that is used throughout many adventure games and role-playing video games. When interacting with a non-player character, the player is given a choice of what to say and makes subsequent choices until the conversation ends. Certain video game genres, such as visual novels and dating sims, revolve almost entirely around these character interactions and branching dialogues.
Anne Rice was an American author of gothic fiction, erotic literature, and Christian literature. She was best known for her series of novels The Vampire Chronicles. The first book became the subject of a film adaptation—Interview with the Vampire (1994).
Lolita is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is notable for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, a middle-aged literature professor under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert, is obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, Dolores Haze, whom he kidnaps and sexually abuses after becoming her stepfather. "Lolita", the Spanish nickname for Dolores, is what he calls her privately. The novel was originally written in English and first published in Paris in 1955 by Olympia Press.
Mating (1991) is a novel by American author Norman Rush. It is a first-person narrative by an unnamed American anthropology graduate student in Botswana around 1980. It focuses on her relationship with Nelson Denoon, a controversial American social scientist who has founded an experimental matriarchal village in the Kalahari desert.
Unwind is a 2007 dystopian novel by young adult literature author Neal Shusterman. It takes place in the United States in the near future. After the Second Civil War, which was labeled "The Heartland War", was fought over abortion, a compromise was reached, allowing parents to sign an order for their children between the ages of 13 and 18 to be "unwound" — taken to "harvest camps" and dissected into their body parts for later use. The reasoning is that, since 99.44% of the body is used, unwinds do not technically die because their individual body parts live on.
Soon-Yi Previn is the adopted daughter of actress Mia Farrow and musician André Previn. She is married to filmmaker Woody Allen, with whom she has two adopted children.
