The Accidental Tourist is a 1985 novel by Anne Tyler that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1985 and the Ambassador Book Award for Fiction in 1986. The novel was adapted into a 1988 award-winning film starring William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, and Geena Davis, for which Davis won an Academy Award.
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.
The Ghost Writer is a 1979 novel by the American author Philip Roth. It is the first of Roth's novels narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, one of the author's putative fictional alter egos, and constitutes the first book in his Zuckerman Bound trilogy. The novel touches on themes common to many Roth works, including identity, the responsibilities of authors to their subjects, and the condition of Jews in America. Parts of the novel are a reprise of The Diary of Anne Frank.
Arthur Phillips is an American novelist. His books include Prague (2002), The Egyptologist (2004), Angelica (2007), The Song Is You (2009), The Tragedy of Arthur (2011), and The King at the Edge of the World (2020).
The Volcano Lover is an historical novel by Susan Sontag, published in 1992. Set largely in Naples, it focuses upon Emma Hamilton, her marriage to Sir William Hamilton, the scandal relating to her affair with Lord Nelson, her abandonment, and her descent into poverty. The title comes from William Hamilton's interest in volcanoes, and his investigations of Mount Vesuvius.
Independence Day is a 1995 novel by Richard Ford and the sequel to Ford's 1986 novel The Sportswriter. This novel is the second in what is now a five-part series, the first being The Sportswriter. It was followed by The Lay of the Land (2006), Let Me Be Frank With You (2014) and Be Mine (2023). Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1996, becoming the first novel ever to win both awards in a single year.
Cynthia Kadohata is a Japanese American children's writer best known for her young adult novel Kira-Kira which won the Newbery Medal in 2005. She won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2013 for The Thing About Luck.
Michiko Kakutani is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for The New York Times from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998.
Breathing Lessons is a Pulitzer Prize–winning 1988 novel by American author Anne Tyler. It is her eleventh novel and won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Black Dogs is a 1992 novel by the British author Ian McEwan. It concerns the aftermath of the Nazi era in Europe, and how the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s affected those who once saw Communism as a way forward for society. The main characters travel to France, where they encounter disturbing residues of Nazism still at large in the French countryside. Critical reception was polarized.
The Godfather Returns is a novel written by author Mark Winegardner, published in 2004. It is the sequel to Mario Puzo's 1969 novel The Godfather and The Sicilian (1984). The publisher, Random House, selected Winegardner to write a sequel after Puzo's death. As the original novel covered the years 1945 to 1955, and included significant backstory on Don Vito Corleone's life, Returns covers the years 1955 to 1962, and includes significant backstory on Michael Corleone's life prior to the first novel. It is the third book in The Godfather series of novels.
James Wilcox is an American novelist and a professor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. James Wilcox worked at Random House and Doubleday in New York after graduating from Yale. Wilcox was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986.
On Beauty is a 2005 novel by British author Zadie Smith, loosely based on Howards End by E. M. Forster. The story follows the lives of a mixed-race British/American family living in the United States, addresses ethnic and cultural differences in both the USA and the UK, as well as the nature of beauty, and the clash between liberal and conservative academic values. It takes its title from an essay by Elaine Scarry—"On Beauty and Being Just". The Observer described the novel as a "transatlantic comic saga".
Jane Simone Mendelsohn is an American writer. Her novels are known for their mythic themes, poetic imagery, and allegorical content, as well as themes of female and personal empowerment. Mendelsohn's novel I Was Amelia Earhart was an international bestseller in 1996 and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
American Rust is a novel by American writer Philipp Meyer, published in 2009. It is set in the 2000s, in the fictional town of Buell in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, which is in a rural region referred to as "the Valley" of dilapidated steel towns. The novel focuses on the decline of the American middle class and well-paying manufacturing jobs, and the general sense of economic and social malaise. Meyer's novel received positive reviews, and many publications ranked it one of the best novels of the year.
City on Fire is a 2015 novel by Garth Risk Hallberg, published by Alfred A. Knopf. The novel takes place in New York City in the 1970s. It is Hallberg's first published novel. Hallberg received an advance of $2 million for the novel, which was rumored at the time to be the highest ever for a debut novel. However, other debut novels acquired around the same time also received seven-figure advances.
Omar El Akkad is an Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist, whose novel What Strange Paradise was the winner of the 2021 Giller Prize.
Fiskadoro is post-apocalyptic novel by Denis Johnson published in 1985 by Alfred A. Knopf.
I Was Amelia Earhart is Jane Mendelsohn’s debut novel, published by Knopf in 1996. It tells a fictional account of what happened to Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, after they disappeared off the coast of New Guinea in 1937. The book was shortlisted for the 1997 Orange Prize for Fiction and appeared on the New York Times Best Seller List for fourteen weeks.
The Rape of Shavi is a 1983 fiction novel written by Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta. It was first published in 1983 by George Braziller.
