Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism, along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Hiromi Kawakami is a Japanese writer known for her off-beat fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. She has won numerous Japanese literary awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Yomiuri Prize, and the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature. Her work has been adapted for film, and has been translated into more than 15 languages.
Jenny Offill is an American novelist and editor. Her novel Dept. of Speculation was named one of "The 10 Best Books of 2014" by The New York Times Book Review.
Danzy Senna is an American novelist and essayist. She is the author of six books and numerous essays about race, gender and American identity, including Caucasia (1998), Symptomatic (2003),New People (2017), named by Time as one of the Top Ten Novels of the year, and Colored Television (2024). Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker,The Atlantic,Vogue, and The New York Times. She is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Parable of the Sower is a 1993 speculative fiction novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler. It is set in a post-apocalyptic Earth heavily affected by climate change and social inequality. The novel follows Lauren Olamina, a young woman who can feel the pain of others and becomes displaced from her home. Several characters from various walks of life join her on her journey north and learn of a religion she has envisioned and titled Earthseed. The main tenets of Earthseed are that "God is Change" and believers can "shape God" through conscious effort to influence the changes around them. Earthseed also teaches that it is humanity's destiny to inhabit other planets and spread the "seeds" of the Earth.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her licence ès lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
Karen Karbo is an American novelist, non-fiction writer and journalist.
Tana French is an American-Irish writer and theatrical actress. She is a longtime resident of Dublin, Ireland. Her debut novel In the Woods (2007), a psychological mystery, won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry awards for best first novel. The Independent has referred to her as "the First Lady of Irish Crime".
Leslie Sierra Jamison is an American novelist and essayist. She is the author of the 2010 novel The Gin Closet and the 2014 essay collection The Empathy Exams. Jamison also directs the nonfiction concentration in writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.
Megan Abbott is an American author of crime fiction and of non-fiction analyses of hardboiled crime fiction. Her novels and short stories have drawn from and re-worked classic subgenres of crime writing from a female perspective. She is also an American writer and producer of television.
Sherri L. Smith is an American writer. Her novel Flygirl was selected as one of the American Library Association's 2010 Best Books for Young Adults.
Speedboat is a 1976 modernist novel by Renata Adler that offers a fragmentary account of the experiences of Jen Fain, a young journalist living in New York City.
Steph Cha is a Korean American novelist and fiction writer, who has released three novels in the crime fiction genre about her detective protagonist Juniper Song: Follow Her Home (2013), Beware Beware (2014), and Dead Soon Enough (2015). Her most recent book, stand-alone crime fiction novel Your House Will Pay (2019), won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery.
Gina Lourdes Delgado Apostol is a Filipino-born writer based in the United States. She won the 2023 Rome Prize in Literature for her proposed novel, The Treatment of Paz.
Hermione Hoby is a British author, journalist, and cultural critic. In her career as a journalist she writes on books, music, theatre and feminism. She is the author of the novels Neon in Daylight and Virtue.
Darcie Little Badger is an American novelist, short story writer, and Earth scientist. Her writings are specialized in speculative fiction, especially horror, science fiction, and fantasy. She is a member of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas. She develops her stories with Apache characters and themes. She has also added her voice to Indigenous Futurism, a movement among Native artists and authors to write science fiction from their historical and cultural perspectives. Her works also feature characters who reconfirm the presence and importance of LGBTQ community members.
Dept. of Speculation is a 2014 novel by American author Jenny Offill. The novel received positive reviews, and has been compared to Offill's later work, Weather.
Indelicacy is a 2020 novel by American writer Amina Cain. The novel follows the life of its narrator, Vitória, from shortly before her marriage until shortly after its dissolution.
Sarah Rhiannon Ward (living) is an English novelist and critic living in the Peak District of rural Derbyshire. She writes a crime fiction series as Sarah Ward and has also written a Gothic thriller as Rhiannon Ward.
The End of Everything is a 2011 novel by American author Megan Abbott. It follows Lizzie Hood, a thirteen-year-old girl, after the alleged kidnapping of her best friend, Evie Verver. Lizzie finds herself growing closer to Evie's family, particularly her father Mr. Verver, as she tries to uncover what happened to her friend. The novel, which has drawn comparisons to the novel Lolita and to the Oakland County Child Killer case, is Abbott's first novel not to fall within the period noir genre.
