Profiles Index

Jonathan Ames
New York humorist Jonathan Ames is the author of numerous novels and essay collections. In much of his work, Ames unabashedly sheds a starkly honest light on his own sexual misadventures, experiences and neuroses. He is recently the creator of the popular HBO series "Bored to Death" starring Jason Schwartzman and featuring a Brooklyn writer-cum-private investigator by the name of Jonathan Ames.

Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams was a British comic author, most notably the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas worked with Graham Chapman of Monty Python fame, and has a writing credit in one episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Douglas Adams subsequently worked as a script editor of the BBC Television programme Doctor Who and wrote three serials for that series. DouglasAdams was never a prolific writer and usually had to be forced by others to do any writing.

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.

Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby is the author of the bestselling novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, as well as the memoir Fever Pitch. He is also the editor of the short story collection Speaking with the Angel. In 1999, he was the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award. He lives in North London.

Margaret Atwood
Known for sharp social commentary delivered via science fiction or speculative fiction, Margaret Atwood's books have been published in over thirty-five countries. She is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays.

Traci J. Macnamara
Traci J. Macnamara is a freelance writer and literary adventurer. She has an undergraduate degree in science from the University of Notre Dame and master's degrees in English literature, writing, and curriculum and instruction.

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.'

Jack Vance
Science fiction and fantasy writer Jack Vance is the award-winning author of such widely acclaimed works as The Dying Earth, the Lyonesse trilogy, the adventures of Cugel the Clever, and the Demon Princes series. He is a masterful writer who, according to lifelong fans Michael Chabon and Neil Gaiman, has never received due recognition.

Frank McCourt
Frank McCourt was the author of Angela's Ashes, his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir detailing an impoverished Irish childhood at the hands of an alcoholic father. McCourt followed with two memoirs, 'Tis, which picks up where Angela's Ashes left off, and Teacher Man, which recounts McCourt's 30 years as a creative writing teacher in New York City.

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.

Boulder Book Store - Boulder, CO
The Boulder Book Store, situated at the East end of the Pearl Street Mall, Boulder's lively pedestrian thoroughfare, is a destination for readers seeking solace from the big box chains, a book lover's Mecca. Boasting thousands of books, spread throughout three stories, the Boulder Book Store has the sort of seemingly random labyrinthine floor plan that is wonderfully easy to lose yourself in.

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).

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.

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.'