Profiles Index

David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace is the author of Infinite Jest, The Broom of the System, Girl With Curious Hair, and Oblivion, a collection of short stories. His essays and stories have appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, Playboy, Paris Review, Conjunctions, Premiere, Tennis, The Missouri Review, and The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and he has received numerous awards for his work.

Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe is one of Africa's most influential and widely published writers. He has written twenty-one novels, short-stories and collections of poetry. His first and best-known post-colonial landmark novel, 'Things Fall Apart' (1958).

Audrey Niffenegger
Audrey Niffenegger is the author of the outstanding debut novel, 'The Time Traveler's Wife,' an inventive and unconventionally rendered tale of Clare, a luminously beautiful artist, and Henry, a time-traveler. She also teaches writing, letterpress printing, lithography, intaglio, and book making at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago.

Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity, and What is the What. He is the founder of McSweeney's independent publishing house and the 826 Valencia writing lab, which has since expanded to 826 National, writing workshops for teens around the U.S.

Edward Abbey
Edward Abbey has been long revered as a leading writer of nature and ecology who Frequently challenged the system that destroys the wild he thrusts himself and his readers into. Among his work is 'Desert Solitaire,' a memoir of the time Abbey spent as a park ranger and fire lookout at Arches national Monument, and 'The Monkey Wrench Gang,' Abbey's famous novel about a gang of rebellious eco-warriors.

Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie, the son a Spokane Indian mother and a Coeur d’Alene Indian father, grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, WA. Alexie is known not only for his novels and short stories, which debunk the notion of the nobly suffering Indian, he is also a songwriter and film-maker, and the recipient of numerous literary awards and honors.

Salman Rushdie
Born in Bombay in 1947, Salman Rushdie is the author of numerous novels, including 'Midnight's Children,' 'The Satanic Verses,' 'The Moor's Last Sigh,' and 'The Enchantress of Florence.' His numerous literary prizes include the Booker Prize for 'Midnight's Children' and the Whitbread Prize for 'The Satanic Verses.'

T.C. Boyle
T.C. Boyle is known for his humor and his biting satire. Over the course of his career as a novelist, he has shown a propensity for writing about famous and fascinating American eccentrics such as sexual-behavior scientist Alfred Kinsey in 'The Inner Circle' (2004), cereal inventor John Harvey Kellogg in 'The Road to Wellville,' and most recently, Frank Lloyd Wright in 'The Women.'

Dylan de Thomas
Dylan is a freelance writer by day, editor for Business Wire by night, and all-around family man living in Portland, OR. He is available to all at dydeth at yahoo dot com.

Cornelia Funke
Sometimes regarded as the German J.K. Rowling, Cornelia Funke is the author of numerous works of fiction. She is most widely known for her fantasy novels Drangonrider, The Thief Lord, and Inkheart, all of which have become international bestsellers.

J.K. Rowling
J.K. Rowling (born Joanne Rowling on July 31, 1965) is the famous author of the Harry Potter series, which has sold hundreds of millions of copies around the world. She was estimated to be a billionare by Forbes magazine in 2004.

John Updike
John Updike wrote and published over 60 books, including novels and collections of short stories, poetry, and essays. Throughout his career, he won nearly every literary award available. [i]The Early Stories 1953-1975[/i], a large anthology of the author's short stories published in 2003, won him the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and in 2006 he was awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story. John Updike died of lung cancer in January 2009. He was 76

Brenda Hadenfeldt
Brenda Hadenfeldt is a freelance editor, an avid mystery reader, and an enthusiastic baseball and Formula One fan. She lives near Boulder, Colorado, with her fabulous husband and two adventurous felines.

Joan Didion
Joan Didion, born in California in 1934 and a graduate from Berkeley in 1956, wrote her first novel in the early 1960's and has written four since then. Her most highly esteemed work - that which made her famous as a chronicler of American culture and politics - is her narrative nonfiction.

Sue Monk Kidd
Sue Monk Kidd is the author of three spiritual memoirs and the modern classic bestseller, 'The Secret Life of Bees,' the coming-of-age spiritual story of a fourteen-year-old girl in the South in 1964 and her black housekeeper.

Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell's phenomenal bestseller 'The Tipping Point' (2000) captured the world's attention with its theory that a curiously small change can have unforeseen effect; 'Blink' (2005) is about how we think without thinking; and 'Outliers' (2008) considers the role of environment and cultural heritage in the success of high achievers.

Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon is the author of many and varied works of bestselling fiction including 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,' and 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union.'

Kelly Link
Kelly Link is the author of three collection of short stories - Stranger Things Happen, Magic For Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. Her writing is often deeply steeped in fantasy or horror, though she is sometimes more subtle in her application of magical realism.

Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessen is the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, including Shadow Country and The Snow Leopard. His fiction includes At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which was nominated for a National Book Award, Far Tortuga, and Shadow Country.

Michael Crichton
Michael Crichton is the author of best-selling novels like 'The Andromeda Strain' and 'Jurassic Park' as well as a writer, director, and producer of television and movies. He created, wrote, and directed the television blockbuster, 'ER.'

Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson is the author of three highly acclaimed novels, 'Housekeeping,' 'Gilead,' and 'Home,' all of which are written in clear, spare prose about the struggles of life in the Midwest.

David Wroblewski
David Wroblewski is the author of the Oprah's Book Club selection 'The Story of Edgar Sawtelle,' a suspense novel about the adventures of a mute teenager and his faithful companion who, with the sudden death of Edgar's father and the arrival of a conniving uncle, must abandon their idyllic lives on a rural Wisconsin farm.

Philip Roth
Philip Roth is a prolific and award-winning American author of novels and novellas centered thematically around the modern Jewish-American experience. From his National Book Award winning debut 'Goodbye Columbus' in 1959 to his alternate American history, 'The Plot Against America' (2004), Roth's oftentimes self-referential work has made him one of the most important contemporary American authors today.

Paul Auster
American author Paul Auster was born and raised in Newark, NJ. He graduated from Columbia University in 1970 and moved to Paris, where he made his living translating the works of French authors. He returned to the states in 1974 to begin writing essays, poems, and novels of his own.

Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem is the son of an artist father and an activist mother. He was raised in a Brooklyn commune and attended the Hisgh School of Music and Art in New York. A couple years into college, Lethem dropped out and moved to California to pursue writing. Lethem's novels, which include 'Motherless Brooklyn' and 'Fortress of Solitude' have persistently included science fiction, the detective story, and autobiographical elements.