Articles Index
Rivka Galchen
Rivka Galchen's dual background in science in literature (she holds a medical M.D. and an MFA) is reflected in Atmospheric Disturbances, her debut novel about a psychiatrist who finds his wife has been replaced by a doppelganger and one of his patients who believes he is receiving messages in code from the Royal Academy of Meteorology. In 2010, she was selected as one of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" writers to watch.
Nicole Krauss
At the young age of 14, Nicole Krauss started writing, mostly poetry. At 28, she published her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, which was followed by The History of Love and then Great House in 2010. Krauss is married to fellow-author, Jonathan Safran Foer. In 2010, she was selected as one of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" writers to watch.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer who moved to the United States at the age of 19. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book and her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, an historical fiction that is set during the Nigerian-Biafran War and tells the story of two sisters, won the 2007 Orange Prize. Adichie was selected in 2010 as one of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" writers to watch.
Chris Adrian
Chris Adrian is an overachiever with eclectic tastes. He published his first novel, Gob's Grief, in 2002, the same year he earned his medical degree. After completing his residency in pediatrics in San Francisco, he began a divinity degree at Harvard Divinity School. His second novel, The Children's Hospital, is an epic apocalyptic tale in which a second biblical flood is visited upon the Earth and the only people spared are the occupants of a pediatric hospital.
Nell Freudenberger
Nell Freudenberger graduated from Harvard in 2000 and published her first book, Lucky Girls in 2003. Freudenberger's first novel, The Dissident (2006) is about a Chinese performance artist and dissident who moves to Los Angeles to teach at a prestigious girls' school. In 2010, Freudenberger was named one of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" authors to watch.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum has written short stories for the New Yorker and Tin House among other magazines. Her story "Accomplice" was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2004 and in the same year, her first novel, Madeleine is Sleeping, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. In 2010, she was named one of The New Yorker Magazine's "20 Under 40" fiction writers to watch.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer's debut novel, Everything is Illuminated (2002) is based on a trip Foer had taken to Eastern Europe to research his grandfather; his 2005 novel, entitled Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, surrounds the events of September 11, 2001; and his 2009 book Eating Animals examines the ethical, health, and environmental impact of factory-farmed meat. Foer lives in Brooklyn with is wife, the author Nicole Krauss, and their two children.
Wells Tower
Wells Tower has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. His short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (2009) was a finalist for The Story Pirze and was picked by Michiko Kakutani as one of her ten best books of 2009. In 2010, Tower was named one of The New Yorker magazine's list of the 20 best writers under 40.
Joshua Ferris
Joshua Ferris' work in an advertising agency was the inspiration for his hilariously satirical debut novel, Then We Came to the End. In January 2010, he follows with The Unnamed, a powerful story of one man's struggle with an anomalous disease that threatens to tear his life apart.
Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing, China. She moved to the United States in 1996 and pursued an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has published stories in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Yiyun Li has won numerous awards for her short story collections. She teaches English at U.C. Davis and serves as an editor for Brooklyn based literary magazine, A Public Space.
Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr is an award-winning American writer whose short stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. His second story collection, Memory Wall, was selected as a finalist for the 2010 Story Prize.
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.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro is the author of several novels, including The Remains of the Day, an international bestseller that won the Booker Prize and was adapted into an award-winning film, and Never Let Me Go, a dystopian science fiction novel set in England during the late 1990s.
William Gibson
William Gibson is known as the father of cyberpunk, a science fiction sub-genre which he created with his seminal work, Neuromancer in 1984. Here Gibson introduced his audience to the concept of cyberspace, to the newly important human-computer interface, and to the gritty and dangerous technological wasteland that became the backdrop for his novels.
Stephen King
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947. He made his first professional short story sale in 1967 to Startling Mystery Stories. In the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co. accepted the novel Carrie for publication, providing him the means to leave teaching and write full-time. He has since published over 40 books and has become one of the world's most successful writers.
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.
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.
Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami is known for his blending of the fantastic realism in his novels, and it's this magical realism, in combination with his flowing use of language, that gives Murakami's novels an ethereal, dreamlike quality.
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.
Jeff Alford
Jeff Alford is a writer and book collector in Brooklyn, NY. He has written for Rain Taxi Review of Books and also maintains a rare books blog called The Oxen of the Sun. When Jeff’s not wrestling his bookcases for additional shelf space, you can find him digging through bookshops or playing music with his band.
Kyle Thomas Smith
Kyle Thomas Smith is the author of the novel 85A (Bascom Hill, 2010). He is also a regular contributor to Edge, The Brooklyn Rail and WhiteHot Magazine.
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen's recent novels have been hailed as literary masterpieces. Both The Corrections and Freedom are sprawling, realist novels about the deterioration of the family in suburban, middle class America, as was his 1988 debut novel, The Twenty-Seventh City.
David Mitchell
British novelist David Mitchell is known for his non-linear, structurally experimental novels such as Cloud Atlas and number9dream , both shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His 2010 novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is an historical novel set at a Dutch East Indies Company trading post in early nineteenth century Japan.
Jessica Gribble
Jessica Gribble is an acquisitions editor at an academic book publishing company in Boulder, Colorado. When she’s not editing, she mountain bikes, hikes, caves, backpacks, and climbs ice with her husband. In the occasional minute or two left over, she rides her Honda Shadow, roots for the Cleveland Browns, and reads books in the bathtub.
José Saramago
Portugese novelist Jose Saramago was well known for the poignant brand of surrealist experimentation and allegory that since the 1970s earned him international acclaim. Saramago was born in 1922 in a small Portugese village and spent a good portion of his life working pursuing various other occupations before making his name as an author.