Profiles Index - page 2
Daniel Handler
Daniel Handler's alter-ego Lemony Snicket is the author and narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events, a children's book series. Daniel Handler's adult novels are The Basic Eight, based loosely around Handler's experiences at San Francisco's Lowell High School; Watch Your Mouth, a rather experiemental novel that Handler has described as an "opera in book form;" and Adverbs (2006), a narrative web of a novel in which intersecting stories explore the theme of love.
Julian Barnes
Since 1980, Julian Barnes has published a novel just about every two or three years. Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005) were all shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Arthur & George is based on the true story of George Edalji, a man wrongly imprisoned, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who came to his aid. He has also published four crime novels under the name Dan Kavanaugh.
Jay McInerney
Jay McInerney had a strong start with his highly successful debut novel, Bright Lights, Big City in 1984. He has followed this with 6 more novels, the most recent of which is The Good Life (2006). McInerney is included in a group of witers who emerged in the 1980's known as the brat pack. This group includes Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz.
Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith was born in London on October 27, 1975 to an English father and a Jamaican mother. Zadie Smith's talent was recoginized early by the publishing world. While studying English literature at Kings College, Cambridge, she was offered a contract for her first novel solely on the basis a handful of short stories. White Teeth was published in 2000 to international acclaim.
Ali Smith
Ali Smith was born in Inverness, Scotland in 1962 and currently resides in Cambridge, England. After contracting chronic fatigue syndrome. left her job as a lecturer at Strathclyde University to focus on her writing. The Accidental (2005) was shortlisted for The Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Novel Award.
Dan Brown
Dan Brown was born in 1964 in Exeter, New Hampshire, where he attended prep school at Phillips Exeter Acadamy. He later studied Englsih at Amherst College in Massachusetts and returned to Phillips Exeter to teach English before pursuing a writing career. Brown has authored four detective thrillers: Digital Fortress (1997), Angels and Demons (2000), Deception Point (2001), and The Da Vinci Code (2003).
Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer's short work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. His debut novel, Everything is Illuminated (2002) won a National Jewish Book Award and was based on a trip Foer had taken to Eastern Europe to research his family. His 2005 novel is entitled Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It surrounds the events of September 11, 2001.
Russell Banks
Born in 1940, Russell Banks was raised in the working class world depicted in much of his writing. A native of Newton, Massachusetts, Banks graduated from The University of North Carolina in 1967 and tried his hand at a variety of work before he began submitting short fiction and poetry to magazines and found himself able to survive as a writer.
Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson was well-known for his eccentric drug and firearm centric lifestyle and his acerbic attacks on the establishment, but some of his greatest work is that which highlights his strengths as a gonzo journalist proper. If you've never read any of Hunter Thompson's books, may I suggest Hell's Angels in which he paints a vivid portrait of the lives of the members of the outlaw biker gang in true gonzo style by inserting himself into their experiences.
Ian McEwan
British author, Ian McEwan, was born in Aldershot, England in 1948. The son of a military man, McEwan spent his childhood abraod in various locales in Africa, Asian, and Europe. In 1998, McEwan was awarded the Booker Prize for Amsterdam, and his 2001 novel, Atonement, was nominated for the Booker. His 2005 novel is entitled Saturday and recounts a single day in the life of a successful English neurosurgeon.
Doris Lessing
British author, Doris Lessing, was born in Persia (Iran) in 1919. She grew up poor in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia on her family's farm. Lessing has written in a variety of styles and genres from the psychological to the politically-motivated, from feminist novels to science fiction. Her Canopus in Argos series are rooted in sufiism.
Stanislaw Lem
Polish writer, Stanislaw Lem, was born in 1921. A doctor's son, Lem studied medicine until World War II and the Nazi occupation of Poland when he worked as a car mechanic and a welder and joined the anti-German resistance. Lem later resumed his medical studies, worked as a research assistant, and wrote stories in his spare time. Much of Stanislaw Lem's work was science fiction in nature, and he was awarded an honorary membership in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1973.
Ismail Kadare
Albanian author, Ismail Kadare, was born in 1936 in Gjirokaster, Albania. Some believe Kadare used his writing for the purpose of dissent during the rule of Communism. In 1990, Kadare moved to France and is a member of the French Association of Writers.
Milan Kundera
Czech writer, Milan Kundera was born in Brno in 1929. He was, along with Vaclav Havel and a number of other Czech artists, a political activist critical of the Soviets during Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring of 1968. In 1975, Kundera escaped Soviet-run Czechoslovakia to France. In 1984, he published The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a novel in which a Czech couple struggle to adjust to life during the Soviet occupation.
Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto, Japan in 1949, the son of a Buddhist priest. After receiving a degree in drama from Waseda University in Tokyo, Murakami opened a jazz bar called "Peter Cat" which he ran from 1974-1982. He wrote his first novel, "Hear the Wind Sing," when he was 30 years old...
Kenzaburo Oe
Kenzaburo Oe was born on the island of Shikoku in Southern Japan. He studied French Literature at the University of Tokyo and took particular interest in the work of Jean-Paul sartre and Albert Camus. Twenty of Kenzaburo Oe's books have been translated into English. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994. His most recent novel, Somersault (1999), explores "charisma of leaders, the danger of zealotry, and the mystery of faith."
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag's first novel, The Benefactor was published in 1963 and was followed by three more novels. Susan Sontag wrote 17 books in all. She will be primarily remembered for her essays, her first collection of which, "Against Interpretation," was published in 1966. She wrote about a variety of subject, from film to photography to breast cancer. In 1998, Susan Sontag was diagnnosed with uterine cancer from which she died on December 28, 2004.
Alice Munro
Alice Munro is the author of eleven books, and is largely known and celebrated for her short stories exploring the inner lives of female protagonists. was born Alice Ann Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario to a family of farmers. In 1998, Munro won Canada's Giller Prize for The Love of a Good Woman, and she won the 2004 Giller Prize for Runaway. Both are short story collections.
Rick Moody
Rick Moody is the author of "Demonology," "Purple America," "The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven," "The Ice Storm," which was made into a movie in 1997, and "Garden State." He is a past recipient of the Addison Metcalf Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. Moody has contributed fiction and essays to most major publications and has been widely anthologized. He lives in New York.
Isabel Allende
Chilean Author, Isabel Allende was born on this day in Peru in 1942. In the 1960s and 1970s, Allende worked as a Journalist for a number of publications in both Chile and Venezuela. er first novel, "The HOuse of the Spirits," was published in 1982. Since that time, she's written many novels and collections of short stories for which she's won numerous awards around the world.
Larry McMurtry
Larry McMurtry, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove, is the author of twenty-seven novels, two collections of essays, three memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, and is the editor of an anthology of modern Western fiction. He lives in Archer City, Texas.
David Leavitt
David Leavitt's first collection of stories, Family Dancing, was published when he was just twenty-three and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Prize. The Lost Language of Cranes was made into a BBC film, and While England Sleeps was short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize. With Mark Mitchell, he coedited The Penguin Book of Short Stories, Pages Passed from Hand to Hand, and cowrote Italian Pleasures.
Sarah Dunant
Sarah Dunant has written eight novels and edited two books of essays. She has worked widely in print, television, and radio, and until recently hosted the leading BBC Radio arts program, Night Waves. Now a full-time writer, she is adapting her novels Transgressions and Mapping the Edge for the screen. Dunant has two children and lives in London and Florence. The Birth of Venus (Random House, 2004) is her first historical novel.
Thomas Mallon
Thomas Mallon is a novelist and critic and the author of previous novels, Henry and Clara, Two Moons, Dewey Defeats Truman, and Aurora 7, as well as four works of nonfiction. He is the former literary editor of GQ and has contributed frequently to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The American Scholar, and Harper's. His 2004 novel, Bandbox, centers around New York magazine wars during the 'Roaring Twenties.'
Debra Weinstein
Debra Weinsteinis received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship for poetry and a New York State Foundation for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship for Fiction. She also received NYU’s Bobst Literary Award for Emerging Writers for Rodent Angel, a volume of poetry. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Tikkun, and The Portable Lower East Side. She lives in Manhattan.