David Foster Wallace was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing. Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. His posthumous novel, The Pale King (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. The Los Angeles Times's David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years".
Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
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.
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.
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.
Paul Joseph Ingrassia was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who served as managing editor of Reuters from 2011 to 2016. He was also an editor at the Revs Institute, an automotive history and research center in Naples, Florida, and the (co-)author of three books. He was awarded the Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for financial journalism.
The Twenty-Seventh City is Jonathan Franzen's debut novel, published in 1988. A complex, partly satirical thriller that studies a family unraveling under intense pressure, the novel is set amidst intricate political conspiracy and financial upheaval in St. Louis, Missouri, in the year 1984.
Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish is a 2001 novel by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan. Gould's Book of Fish was Flanagan's third novel.
Adam Johnson is an American novelist and short story writer. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2012 novel, The Orphan Master's Son, and the National Book Award for his 2015 story collection Fortune Smiles. He is also a professor of English at Stanford University with a focus on creative writing.
Jacki Lyden is an American journalist and author of the memoir, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba (1999).
American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America's Pastime is a book written by Teri Thompson, Michael O'Keeffe, Nathaniel Vinton & Christian Red, four sportswriters from the New York Daily News, that was released in 2009. It focuses on seven-time Cy Young Award-winning pitcher Roger Clemens' alleged use of steroids, relationship with trainer Brian McNamee, and both their testimonies in front of Congress regarding the Mitchell Report (2007). The book received a very positive review from Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times. Clemens gave a rare radio interview to ESPN's Mike and Mike in the Morning on the book's release date to combat its claims.
Freedom is a 2010 novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. It was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Freedom received general acclaim from book critics, was ranked one of the best books of 2010 by several publications, and called by some critics the "Great American Novel". In 2022, it was announced that Freedom would be adapted for television.
Going Rogue: An American Life (2009) is a personal and political memoir by politician Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican candidate for U.S. Vice President on the ticket with Senator John McCain. She wrote it with Lynn Vincent.
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline is a book of short stories and a novella by the American writer George Saunders. Published in 1996, it was Saunders's first book. Many of the stories initially appeared in different forms in various magazines, including Kenyon Review, Harper's, The New Yorker and Quarterly West. The collection was listed as a Notable Book of 1996 by The New York Times, as well as a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award.
A Gate at the Stairs is a novel by American fiction writer Lorrie Moore. It was published by Random House in 2009. The novel won Amazon.com's "best of the month" designation and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Kate Zernike is an American journalist who is national correspondent for The New York Times, where she has been since April 2000, covering education, criminal justice, Congress, and national elections, and where she covered Hurricane Katrina. She was previously a reporter at The Boston Globe (1995–2000), where she was responsible for covering education and special projects. She is the author of Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America (2010), on the Tea Party movement. Marjorie Kehe of The Christian Science Monitor remarked in 2010 that it was likely that "no other journalist in the United States has devoted as much time to covering the tea party movement".
Kevin Powers is an American fiction writer, poet, and Iraq War veteran.
Purity is a novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. His fifth novel, it was published on 1 September 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Can't Buy Me Love, subtitled The Beatles, Britain, and America, is a book by American author Jonathan Gould that was published in October 2007. A biography of the English rock band the Beatles, it provides a musicological assessment of their work and a study of the cultural impact they had during the 1960s. It was first published in the United States by Harmony Books and took Gould seventeen years to complete, after he had begun working on the project with editor William Shawn for the Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishing company. It was the first book by Gould, who was formerly a professional musician.
