Alexandra Petri
My new book is AP's US HISTORY: Important American Documents (I Made Up) and it comes out April 11, just in time for someone to make a horrible mistake in studying for the AP exam! This is my best wild spin on the book of documents -- sermons, poems, Federalist Papers -- that you were handed in high school and asked to write essays about, and I hope that it will make you laugh and be unable to see the Cross Of Gold speech the same way. If you like Raymond Chandler, spiders, the Muppets, horrifying 1950s gelatin dishes, or wonder what Little Women would have been like if the March sisters were 60 feet tall, this is the book for you!
I also wrote NOTHING IS WRONG AND HERE IS WHY, A FIELD GUIDE TO AWKWARD SILENCES, an issue of She-Hulk (Annual
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Betty Shamieh
Betty Shamieh (she/her) is the author of fifteen plays. Shamieh's debut novel, Too Soon, was published by Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in January 2025.
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Malvolio, an irreverent comedy and sequel to Twelfth Night, had its world premiere at the Classical Theatre of Harlem as part of their annual Uptown Shakespeare in the Park at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheatre in July 2023 (co-directed by Ian Belknap and Ty Jones). Malvolio was selected as a New York Times Critics Pick and nominated for ten AUDELCO Awards, including Best Play.
Her other off-Broadway premieres include The Black Eyed (New York Theatre Workshop, Director: Sam Gold) and Roar (The New Group, Director: Marion McClinton). Roar was selected as a New York Times Cr -
Lucy Knisley
Beginning with an love for Archie comics and Calvin and Hobbes, Lucy Knisley (pronounced "nigh-zlee") has always thought of cartooning as the only profession she is suited for. A New York City kid raised by a family of foodies, Lucy is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago currently pursuing an MFA at the Center for Cartoon Studies. While completing her BFA at the School of the Art Institute, she was comics editor for the award-winning student publication F News Magazine.
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Lucy currently resides in New York City where she makes comics. She likes books, sewing, bicycles, food you can eat with a spoon, manatees, nice pens, costumes, baking and Oscar Wilde. She occasionally has been known to wear amazing hats.
She can be reache -
Ed Park
I'm the author of the forthcoming story collection AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS (July 2025)—preorder it now!
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My novel SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS (2023) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction and the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature.
My debut novel, PERSONAL DAYS (2008), was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Asian American Literary Award, and the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize.
THREE TENSES, my memoir, will be out next year.
What else? I'm a founding editor of THE BELIEVER, and I've written for The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Bookforum, The Baffler, and many other places. (Check out ed-park.com or https://linktr.ee/edpark for some -
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the National Book Award finalist American Salvage, Women & Other Animals, and the novels Q Road and Once Upon a River. She is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, the AWP Award for Short Fiction, and Southern Review’s 2008 Eudora Welty Prize for “The Inventor, 1972,” which is included in American Salvage. Her work has appeared in Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and Ontario Review. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she studies kobudo, the art of Okinawan weapons, and hangs out with her two donkeys, Jack and Don Quixote.
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Olen Steinhauer
Olen Steinhauer grew up in Virginia, and has since lived in Georgia, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Texas, California, Massachusetts, and New York. Outside the US, he's lived in Croatia (when it was called Yugoslavia), the Czech Republic and Italy. He also spent a year in Romania on a Fulbright grant, an experience that helped inspire his first five books. He now lives in Hungary with his wife and daughter.
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He has published stories and poetry in various literary journals over the years. His first novel, The Bridge of Sighs (2003), the start of a five-book sequence chronicling Cold War Eastern Europe, one book per decade, was nominated for five awards.
The second book of the series, The Confession, garnered significant critical acclaim, and 36 Yal -
Kari Ferrell
Kari Ferrell is a producer, writer, speaker, activist, and creator. Her work is centered around incarceration and the justice system, mental health, human rights, and other issues she feels passionately about.
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Kari’s production company, Without Wax, is dedicated to uplifting and telling other WOC’s stories, across a variety of mediums. Every project that she works on is done with the mission of moving the needle toward a more compassionate society. She enjoys the work she does with Second Chance Studios, Books Through Bars, the ACLU, and other advocacy groups.
When she’s not working doing the above she enjoys spending time with her partner and rescue pup, crossword puzzles, eating x1000, boxing (to counteract the eating), getting stoned and w -
Emily Mester
Emily Mester is a writer from the suburban Midwest, where her family went to Costco every Sunday. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa, where she was the winner of the Prairie Lights Nonfiction Prize. She lives in New York.
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Olen Steinhauer
Olen Steinhauer grew up in Virginia, and has since lived in Georgia, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Texas, California, Massachusetts, and New York. Outside the US, he's lived in Croatia (when it was called Yugoslavia), the Czech Republic and Italy. He also spent a year in Romania on a Fulbright grant, an experience that helped inspire his first five books. He now lives in Hungary with his wife and daughter.
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He has published stories and poetry in various literary journals over the years. His first novel, The Bridge of Sighs (2003), the start of a five-book sequence chronicling Cold War Eastern Europe, one book per decade, was nominated for five awards.
The second book of the series, The Confession, garnered significant critical acclaim, and 36 Yal -
Jess Walter
Jess Walter is the author of eight novels and one nonfiction book. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages and his essays, short fiction, criticism and journalism have been widely published, in Details, Playboy, Newsweek, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe among many others.
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Walter also writes screenplays and was the co-author of Christopher Darden’s 1996 bestseller In Contempt. He lives with his wife Anne and children, Brooklyn, Ava and Alec in his childhood home of Spokane, Washington. -
James Baldwin
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Works of American writer James Arthur Baldwin, outspoken critic of racism, include Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a novel, and Notes of a Native Son (1955), a collection of essays.
James Arthur Baldwin authored plays and poems in society.
He came as the eldest of nine children; his stepfather served as a minister. At 14 years of age in 1938, Baldwin preached at the small fireside Pentecostal church in Harlem. From religion in the early 1940s, he transferred his faith to literature with the still evident impassioned cadences of black churches. From 1948, Baldwin made his home primarily in the south of France -
Qian Julie Wang
Qian Julie was born in Shijiazhuang, China. At age 7, she moved to Brooklyn, New York, with her parents. For five years thereafter, the three lived in the shadows of undocumented life in New York City. Qian Julie's first book is a poignant literary memoir that follows the family through those years, as they grappled with poverty, manual labor in sweatshops, lack of access to medical care, and the perpetual threat of deportation.
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A graduate of Yale Law School and Swarthmore College—where she juggled classes and extracurriculars with four part-time jobs—Qian Julie is now a litigator. She wrote Beautiful Country on her iPhone, during her subway commute to and from work at a national law firm, where she was elected to partnership within two yea -
Colson Whitehead
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COLSON WHITEHEAD is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of eleven works of fiction and nonfiction, and is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, for The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad, which also won the National Book Award. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he lives in New York City.
Harlem Shuffle is the first book in The Harlem Trilogy. The second, Crook Manifesto, will be published in 2023. -
Louise Erdrich
Karen Louise Erdrich is a American author of novels, poetry, and children's books. Her father is German American and mother is half Ojibwe and half French American. She is an enrolled member of the Anishinaabe nation (also known as Chippewa). She is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant Native writers of the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance.
For more information, please see http://www.answers.com/topic/louise-e...
From a book description:Author Biography:
Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of contemporary Native American novelists. Born in 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, she grew up mostly in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught at Bur
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Mary Roach
Mary Roach is a science author who specializes in the bizarre and offbeat; with a body of work ranging from deep-dives on the history of human cadavers to the science of the human anatomy during warfare.
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Mary Roach is the author of the New York Times bestsellers STIFF: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers; GULP: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, PACKING FOR MARS: The Curious Science of Life in the Void; BONK: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex; and GRUNT: The Curious Science of Humans at War.
Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, Discover, New Scientist, the Journal of Clinical Anatomy, and Outside, among others. She serves as a member of the Mars Institute's Advisory Board and the Usage Panel of American Heritage Dictionary -
Dave Barry
Dave Barry is a humor writer. For 25 years he was a syndicated columnist whose work appeared in more than 500 newspapers in the United States and abroad. In 1988 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. Many people are still trying to figure out how this happened.
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Dave has also written many books, virtually none of which contain useful information. Two of his books were used as the basis for the CBS TV sitcom "Dave's World," in which Harry Anderson played a much taller version of Dave.
Dave plays lead guitar in a literary rock band called the Rock Bottom Remainders, whose other members include Stephen King, Amy Tan, Ridley Pearson and Mitch Albom. They are not musically skilled, but they are extremely loud. Dave has also made many TV appeara -
Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy is an Indian writer who is also an activist who focuses on issues related to social justice and economic inequality. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, The God of Small Things, and has also written two screenplays and several collections of essays.
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For her work as an activist she received the Cultural Freedom Prize awarded by the Lannan Foundation in 2002. -
Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is best known for his 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Eggers is also the founder of several notable literary and philanthropic ventures, including the literary journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the literacy project 826 Valencia, and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness. Additionally, he founded ScholarMatch, a program that connects donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in numerous prestigious publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.
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Mark Twain
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner. -
Alyssa Mastromonaco
Alyssa Mende Mastromonaco is the Chief Operating Officer of Vice Media. She is also a contributing editor at Marie Claire magazine. She previously served as White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations in the administration of President Barack Obama from 2011 to 2014.She was the youngest woman to hold that position. Mastromonaco had worked for Obama since 2005 when he was on the United States Senate as his Director of Scheduling.
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Matt Baume
Matt Baume is a writer, podcaster, and video-maker based in Seattle whose work focuses on pop culture, queer history, and all things strange and nerdy.
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He is the creator of the the YouTube pop culture series Culture Cruise; the queer entertainment podcast The Sewers of Paris; and is co-creator of Queens of Adventure, a live show and podcast featuring drag queens playing Dungeons & Dragons.
He was nominated for a GLAAD award for journalism, and his work has been recognized by the New York Times as “thoughtful and thorough … informative and funny,” and after he appeared as a pop culture critic in the Showgirls documentary You Don’t Nomi, Forbes called his observations on the film “potentially intriguing,” which is probably a compliment.
You can -
Ray Nayler
Hugo and Locus Award winning author Ray Nayler was born in Quebec and raised in California. He lived and worked abroad for two decades in Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Balkans, and in Vietnam.
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Ray's Locus Award winning first novel was The Mountain in the Sea, which was also a finalist for the Nebula, the Arthur C. Clarke, and the Los Angeles Times' Ray Bradbury Awards.
Ray's novella The Tusks of Extinction won the 2025 Hugo Award, and was also a Nebula and Locus Award finalist.
His third book, the cybernetic political thriller Where the Axe is Buried, was published in April of 2025.
Ray most recently served as international advisor to the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, -
Emerson Spartz
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Spartz founded the Harry Potter site www.MuggleNet.com at age 12 in 1999.
He co-authored books about the Harry Potter series.
He is the CEO of Spartz media. Spartz media have many interests. In January 2010 Spartz launched OMG Facts. OMG-Facts.com receives 30 million monthly page views, has 500,000 subscribers on YouTube,and 4.5 million followers on Twitter
He graduated in May 2009 with a degree in management from the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business. -
Samhita Mukhopadhyay
Samhita Mukhopadhyay is an American writer and the former executive editor of Teen Vogue. She writes about feminism, culture, race, politics, and dating. She is the author of Outdated: Why Dating is Ruining Your Love Life and the co-editor of the anthology, Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America.
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Samantha Harvey
Samantha Harvey has completed postgraduate courses in philosophy and in Creative Writing. In addition to writing, she has traveled extensively and taught in Japan and has lived in Ireland and New Zealand. She recently co-founded an environmental charity and lives in Bath, England.
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Her first novel, The Wilderness, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009, longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and won the 2009 Betty Trask Prize. -
David Thorne
David Thorne is an Australian humourist, satirist, Internet personality and New York Times best-selling author. His work has been featured on the BBC, The Late Show with David Letterman, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Thorne gained public recognition in late 2008 for an email exchange in which he attempts to pay an overdue bill with a drawing of a seven-legged spider. The exchange spread virally via email and social networking sites, leading to a surge of visitors to his website 27b/6 (27bslash6). 27b/6 features a collection of humorous emails and articles from Thorne's life. These and additional essays appear in Thorne's book, The Internet is a Playground. Published by Penguin Group and released on 28 April 20
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Mark Harris
Mark Harris’s first book, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, was published this year. He writes the “Final Cut” column for Entertainment Weekly and has also written about pop culture for many other publications, most recently The New York Times, Details, GQ, Portfolio, The Washington Post, Slate, The Guardian, and The Observer Film Quarterly. A graduate of Yale University, he lives in New York City with his husband, Tony Kushner.
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By the way: He is not the author of Grave Matters. That's a very good book by a different Mark Harris. -
Mike Pesca
Mike Pesca covered sports for National Public Radio for ten years. He has contributed to the Washington Post, Basketball Prospectus, Baseball Prospectus, and Inside the NFL. He is the host of Slate's daily news and opinion podcast The Gist.
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