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".
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.
Ben Marcus is an American author and professor at Columbia University. He has written four books of fiction. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Times, GQ, Salon, McSweeney's, Time, and Conjunctions. He is also the fiction editor of The American Reader. His latest book, Notes From The Fog: Stories, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in August 2018.
George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, "American Psyche", to The Guardian's weekend magazine between 2006 and 2008.
The National Magazine Awards, also known as the Ellie Awards, honor print and digital publications that consistently demonstrate superior execution of editorial objectives, innovative techniques, noteworthy enterprise and imaginative design. Originally limited to print magazines, the awards now recognize magazine-quality journalism published in any medium. They are sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) in association with Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and are administered by ASME in New York City. The awards have been presented annually since 1966.
Ann Beattie is an American novelist and short story writer. She has received an award for excellence from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story form.
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.
James C. Kaplan is an American novelist, journalist, and biographer.
Elizabeth Tallent is an American fiction writer, academic, and essayist.
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.
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.
Richard Rayner is a British author who now lives in Los Angeles.
Emporium is the debut short-story collection by San Francisco writer and Stanford University Jones Lecturer Adam Johnson. Emporium collected nine stories that previously appeared in American literary journals and magazines. Penguin published the paperback edition in 2003. Translated into French, Japanese, Serbian, German and Catalan, Emporium was named “Debut of the Year” by Amazon.com. Described as a “remarkable debut” by the New Yorker and “The Arrival of a talented new writer” by the New York Times, Johnson’s Emporium was nominated for a Young Lions Fiction Award by the New York Public Library. According to Daniel Mendelsohn, writing for New York Magazine, “Johnson's oh-so-slightly futuristic flights of fancy, his vaguely Blade Runner–esque visions of a cluttered, anaerobic American culture, illustrate something very real, very current: the way we must embrace the unknown, take risks, in order to give flavor and meaning to life.”
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon is a non-fiction book by American author David Grann. Published in 2009, the book recounts the activities of the British explorer Percy Fawcett who, in 1925, disappeared with his son in the Amazon rainforest while looking for the ancient "Lost City of Z". In the book, Grann recounts his own journey into the Amazon, by which he discovered new evidence about how Fawcett may have died.
The Pale King is an unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace, published posthumously on April 15, 2011. It was planned as Wallace's third novel, and the first since Infinite Jest in 1996, but it was not completed at the time of his death. Before his suicide in 2008, Wallace organized the manuscript and associated computer files in a place where they would be found by his widow, Karen Green, and his agent, Bonnie Nadell. That material was compiled by his friend and editor Michael Pietsch into the form that was eventually published. Wallace had been working on the novel for over a decade. Even incomplete, The Pale King is a long work, with 50 chapters of varying length totaling over 500 pages.
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.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is a 2012 short story collection by the American writer Nathan Englander. The book was first published on February 7, 2012, through Knopf and collects eight of Englander's short stories, including the title story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank."
Cristina Henríquez is an American author best known for her 2014 novel The Book of Unknown Americans.
A Spool of Blue Thread, published in 2015, is Anne Tyler’s 20th novel.
Pain Hustlers is a 2023 American crime drama film directed by David Yates from a screenplay by Wells Tower, based on the 2022 book of the same name by Evan Hughes, which tells the inside story of a band of entrepreneurial upstarts who made millions selling painkillers—until their scheme unraveled, putting them at the center of a landmark criminal trial. The film stars Emily Blunt, Chris Evans, Andy García, Catherine O'Hara, Jay Duplass, Brian d'Arcy James, and Chloe Coleman. Its plot centers on a high school dropout who lands a job with a failing pharmaceutical company in Central Florida, where she soon finds herself at the center of a criminal conspiracy.
