Jahmal Mayfield
Jahmal Mayfield writes gritty crime novels that touch on large social issues. He was born in Virginia but currently resides in New Jersey. In addition to writing, he serves as the director of a nonprofit program that provides employment support to people with disabilities. Mayfield is a husband and father of two young adults who are both embarrassed by his frequent forays down the rabbit holes of YouTube to view old 90s hip hop videos. SMOKE KINGS was inspired by Kimberly Jones’ passionate viral video, “How can we win?”
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Rob Franklin
Born and raised in Atlanta, Rob Franklin is a writer of fiction and poetry, and a cofounder of Art for Black Lives. A Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and finalist for the New England Review Emerging Writer Award, he has published work in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Rumpus among others. Franklin lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches writing at the School of Visual Arts. Great Black Hope is his first novel.
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Jakob Kerr
Jakob Kerr is the author of Dead Money, coming soon from Bantam Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
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In addition to his work as an author, Jakob is a lawyer and communications executive in San Francisco's tech industry. He was one of the first employees at Airbnb and spent a decade shepherding the company from tiny startup to global phenomenon. Jakob has also been a bartender, sportswriter, and—for one disastrous afternoon—the driver of an ice cream truck. -
Elizabeth Heider
Elizabeth Heider is a PhD physicist whose most recent jobs include work for Microsoft’s AI4Science Research Program and the European Space Agency’s Human Spaceflight Program. Her short fiction has earned recognition from the Santa Fe Writer's Project Literary Awards and the New Century Writer Awards, as well as writing and research for military and government agencies where she worked as a scientist. She lived and worked in Naples Italy for several years, deploying as a civilian analyst aboard U.S. and European naval ships. She's based in The Hague.
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Originally from Utah, Elizabeth is the second of six children, all unrepentant bibliophiles. She's written stories for as long as she can remember.
Elizabeth holds a Bachelor's degree in physics -
Attica Locke
Attica Locke is a writer whose first novel, Black Water Rising, was nominated for a 2010 Edgar Award, a 2010 NAACP Image Award, as well as a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was shortlisted for an Orange Prize in the UK.
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Attica is also a screenwriter who has written movie and television scripts for Paramount, Warner Bros, Disney, Twentieth Century Fox, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, HBO, Dreamworks and Silver Pictures. She was also a fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmakers Lab and is a graduate of Northwestern University.
A native of Houston, Texas, Attica lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and daughter. -
József Debreczeni
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Henry Wise
Henry Wise is a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and the University of Mississippi MFA program. A writer across multiple genres, his poetry has been published in Shenandoah, Radar Poetry, Clackamas, Nixes Mate Review, and elsewhere. His nonfiction and photography have appeared in Southern Cultures. Holy City is his first novel.
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Richard Lange
Author of Joe Hustle, Rovers, The Smack, Sweet Nothing, Angel Baby, This Wicked World, and Dead Boys.
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Eric Rickstad
Eric Rickstad is a New York Times and International bestselling novelist.
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His latest novel, LILITH, will be published on March 19, 2024.
His previous novel, I AM NOT WHO YOU THINK I AM, was a New York Times Thriller of the Year.
He also wrote WHAT REMAINS OF HER, REAP, and The Canaan Crime Series — LIE IN WAIT, THE SILENT GIRLS, and THE NAMES OF DEAD GIRLS— which has sold more than a half million copies worldwide.
He lives in Vermont. -
Colin Barrett
Colin Barrett was born in 1982 and grew up in County Mayo. In 2009 he completed his MA in Creative Writing at University College Dublin and was awarded the Penguin Ireland Prize. His work has been published in The Stinging Fly magazine and in the anthologies, Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails (Stinging Fly Press, 2010) and Town and Country (Faber and Faber, 2013).
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Chris Pavone
CHRIS PAVONE is the New York Times-bestselling author of international thrillers including THE EXPATS and, most recently, TWO NIGHTS IN LISBON; his sixth novel, THE DOORMAN, publishes May 20, 2025. Chris's books have appeared on the bestseller lists of the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and IndieNext; have won both the Edgar and Anthony awards, and have been shortlisted for the Strand, Macavity, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize; are in development for film and television; and have been translated into more than two dozen languages.
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He has written for outlets including the New York Times Book Review and Magazine, the Telegraph, and Salon; has appeared on Face the Nation, Good Day New York, Al -
Joseph O'Neill
Joseph^O'Neill
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There is more than one author with this name on Goodreads.
Joseph O'Neill was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1964 and grew up in Mozambique, South Africa, Iran, Turkey, and Holland. His previous works include the novels This is the Life and The Breezes, and the non-fiction book Blood-Dark Track, a family history centered on the mysterious imprisonment of both his grandfathers during World War II, which was an NYT Notable Book. He writes regularly for The Atlantic. He lives with his family in New York City." -
Rachel Kushner
Rachel Kushner is the bestselling author of three novels: the Booker Prize- and NBCC Award–shortlisted The Mars Room; The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times top ten book of 2013; and Telex from Cuba, a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been awarded prizes and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her novels are translated into 26 languages. She lives in Los Angeles and wants you to know that if you're reading this and curious about Rachel, whatever is unique and noteworthy in her biography that you might want to find out about is in her new book, The Hard Crowd, which will be published in April 2021. An excerpt of it appeared in the New Yo
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Dinaw Mengestu
Left Ethiopia at age two and was raised in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. Graduated from Georgetown University and received his MFA from Columbia University. In 2010 he was chosen as one of the 20 best writers under 40 by The New Yorker.
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Duane Swierczynski
Duane Swierczynski is an American crime writer who has written a number of non-fiction books, novels and also writes for comic books.
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Jean Hanff Korelitz
Author of nine novels: THE SEQUEL (2024), THE LATECOMER (2022), THE PLOT (The Tonight Show's "Summer Reads" pick for 2021), THE UNDOING, originally published as YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN (adapted by David E. Kelley for HBO and starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant and Donald Sutherland), ADMISSION (adapted as the 2013 film of the same name, starring Tina Fey, Lily Tomlin and Paul Rudd), THE DEVIL AND WEBSTER, THE WHITE ROSE, THE SABBATHDAY RIVER and A JURY OF HER PEERS, as well as a middle-grade reader, INTERFERENCE POWDER, and a collection of poetry, THE PROPERTIES OF BREATH.
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Watch for television adaptations of THE PLOT and THE LATECOMER!
I'm the founder of BOOKTHEWRITER, a New York City based service that offers "Pop-Up Book Groups" where readers -
Don Winslow
Don Winslow is the author of twenty-one acclaimed, award-winning international bestsellers, including the New York Times bestsellers The Force and The Border, the #1 international bestseller The Cartel, The Power of the Dog, Savages, and The Winter of Frankie Machine. Savages was made into a feature film by three-time Oscar-winning writer-director Oliver Stone. The Power of the Dog, The Cartel and The Border sold to FX in a major multimillion-dollar deal to air as a weekly television series beginning in 2020.
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A former investigator, antiterrorist trainer and trial consultant, Winslow lives in California and Rhode Island.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more informatio -
Danzy Senna
Danzy Senna is an American novelist, born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts in 1970. Her parents, Carl Senna, an Afro-Mexican poet and author, and Fanny Howe, who is Irish-American writer, were also civil rights activists.
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She attended Stanford University and received an MFA from the University of California at Irvine. There, she received several creative writing awards.
Her debut novel, Caucasia (later republished as From Caucasia With Love), was well received and won several awards including the Book-Of-The-Month Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, and the Alex Award from the American Library Association.
Her second novel, Symptomatic, was also well received. Both books feature a biracial protagonist and offer a unique view on life from -
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. -
Nilanjana Roy
Nilanjana Roy is the author of The Wildings, published by Aleph Book Company in 2012. This is her first novel and stars a clan of cats in Nizamuddin. A collection of literary journalism, How To Read In Indian, will be published by HarperCollins in 2013.
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Her column on the reading life for the Business Standard has run for over 15 years; she has also written columns for the International Herald Tribune and the Kolkata Telegraph on gender issues in India. Over a decade-and-a-half in media and publishing, Nilanjana has been chief editor at Westland/ Tranquebar, edited and contributed to the Outlook Books page, Biblio and several other literary magazines/ periodicals, served on the jury for the Crossword Prize and the DSC Prize among others, and -
Justin Taylor
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
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Justin Taylor is the author of the novel “The Gospel of Anarchy” and the story collection “Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever.”
The Millions called “The Gospel of Anarchy” a “bold casserole of sensual encounter and deranged proclamation… Loudly, even rapturously, Taylor succeeds in making the clamoring passion of his characters real, their raw, mercurial yearning a cry for ‘a world newly established.’ In terms of acts of God, The Gospel of Anarchy is a tornado, tearing up the hill where rock ‘n roll and cult meet.”
And the New York Times raved that “Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever ” is a “spare, sharp book” which “documents a deep authority on th -
Robyn Gigl
Robyn Gigl is an author, attorney and advocate. TIME Magazine selected her novel, SURVIVOR’S GUILT, as one of the 100 best Mystery and Thriller books of All Time. Her first novel, BY WAY OF SORROW, was called “quietly groundbreaking” by the NY Times and named one of the best crime novels of 2021 by CrimeReads. SURVIVOR’S GUILT was also named one of the best crime novels of 2022 by the NY Times, and won the Joseph Hansen Award for LGBTQ+ Crime Writing. Robyn’s third novel, REMAIN SILENT, was published in May 2023 and was also nominated for the Joseph Hansen Award. Her fourth novel, NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH, was published in June 2024 and the NY Times called Erin McCabe "one of the best series characters around."
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Robyn can be found on X @robyngi -
Vinson Cunningham
Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer and a theatre critic at The New Yorker. His essays, reviews, and profiles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Fader, Vulture, The Awl, and McSweeney’s. A former staffer on Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign and in his White House, Cunningham has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Yale School of Art, and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He lives in New York City.
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Whiskey Leavins
Whiskey Leavins has lived a nomadic life. For him, the simple question, “Where are you from?” is way harder to answer than it should be. He has lived in multiple cities and states north and south of the Rio Bravo -- east and west of the Mississippi. But now he loves life in Santa Cruz, California after having taken up residence there seven or eight years ago. Despite possible objections from natives, he now considers himself a proud Santa Cruzian and wears Santa Cruz t-shirts damn near every day. He anticipates living in the Cruz, writing goofy stories, until he is no more. Like the devil Lucifestus, the star of his first collection of short stories, Whiskey Leavins enjoys a good dive bar, a good drink, and is an inveterate gambler.
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Victor Suthammanont
Victor Suthammanont is the author of HOLLOW SPACES (Counterpoint Press), his debut novel. He lives in New York City, where he is a lawyer. He obtained a BFA in Drama from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and his law degree from New York Law School. He has performed in various plays and stand-up comedy. He is a windowsill gardener and practices martial arts. Victor is the author of the Audible Original LITTLE SURRENDERS.
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Erin Young
THE FIELDS was Erin’s debut crime thriller, featuring Sergeant Riley Fisher of Black Hawk County, in the first of a planned series.
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THE FIELDS has been published in North America and Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands and Taiwan.
On publication in 2022, THE FIELDS was a Glamour book of the year, a Times thriller of the month, an Amazon USA pick of the month, and was shortlisted for hardcover of the year at the ITW thriller awards.
Erin was named in Oprah Daily as one of the best emerging female thriller writers of the year. THE FIELDS is in development for TV by the producers of Big Little Lies and City on a Hill.
The sequel, ORIGINAL SINS, will be published in 2024.
Erin lives and writes in Brig -
Robyn Gigl
Robyn Gigl is an author, attorney and advocate. TIME Magazine selected her novel, SURVIVOR’S GUILT, as one of the 100 best Mystery and Thriller books of All Time. Her first novel, BY WAY OF SORROW, was called “quietly groundbreaking” by the NY Times and named one of the best crime novels of 2021 by CrimeReads. SURVIVOR’S GUILT was also named one of the best crime novels of 2022 by the NY Times, and won the Joseph Hansen Award for LGBTQ+ Crime Writing. Robyn’s third novel, REMAIN SILENT, was published in May 2023 and was also nominated for the Joseph Hansen Award. Her fourth novel, NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH, was published in June 2024 and the NY Times called Erin McCabe "one of the best series characters around."
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Robyn can be found on X @robyngi -
Eli Cranor
Eli Cranor played quarterback at every level: peewee to professional, and then coached high school football for five years. These days, he's traded in the pigskin for a laptop, writing from Arkansas where he lives with his wife and kids.
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Eli's novel Don't Know Tough was awarded the Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest and will be published by Soho Press in 2022. Over the course of his career, Eli's fiction has garnered multiple awards (2018-The Missouri Review; 2017-Greensboro Review). Along with fiction, Eli writes a nationally-syndicated sports column, and his craft column, "Shop Talk," appears monthly over at CrimeReads. Eli is currently at work on his next novel. -
Katrina Carrasco
Katrina Carrasco's debut novel, THE BEST BAD THINGS (2018, MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux), was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards and Washington State Book Awards, and won the Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel. It was also a 2018 A.V. Club Favorite Book, Buzzfeed Best Thriller, and Vulture Best Crime Book. Her second novel, ROUGH TRADE (MCD/FSG), was published in April 2024. ROUGH TRADE was a New Yorker Best Books We've Read in 2024 pick, a New York Times Best Crime Novels of the Year 2024 pick, and a Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2024 pick. ROUGH TRADE is a 2025 Edgar Award Best Novel finalist, and received a starred Publisher's Weekly review. Katrina's short stories and essays have appeared in Witness, Post Road, Literary Hub,
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Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr was born in Dakar in 1990. He studied literature and philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Terre ceinte (Brotherhood), his first novel, won the Grand Prix du Roman Métis, the Prix Ahmadou Kourouma, and the French Voices Grand Prize. The president of Senegal named him a Chevalier of the National Order of Merit. La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (The Most Secret Memory of Men) won the 2021 Goncourt Prize.
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Callan Wink
Callan Wink is the author of the novels Beartooth and August and the story collection Dog Run Moon. He has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His stories and essays appear widely, including in The New Yorker, Granta, Playboy, Men’s Journal and The Best American Short Stories Anthology. He works as a fly fishing guide on the Yellowstone River in Montana.
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Nilanjana Roy
Nilanjana Roy is the author of The Wildings, published by Aleph Book Company in 2012. This is her first novel and stars a clan of cats in Nizamuddin. A collection of literary journalism, How To Read In Indian, will be published by HarperCollins in 2013.
Buy books on Amazon
Her column on the reading life for the Business Standard has run for over 15 years; she has also written columns for the International Herald Tribune and the Kolkata Telegraph on gender issues in India. Over a decade-and-a-half in media and publishing, Nilanjana has been chief editor at Westland/ Tranquebar, edited and contributed to the Outlook Books page, Biblio and several other literary magazines/ periodicals, served on the jury for the Crossword Prize and the DSC Prize among others, and -
Walter Mosley
Walter Mosley (b. 1952) is the author of the bestselling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins, as well as numerous other works, from literary fiction and science fiction to a young adult novel and political monographs. His short fiction has been widely published, and his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and the Nation, among other publications. Mosley is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Grammy, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in New York City.
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Justin Taylor
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
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Justin Taylor is the author of the novel “The Gospel of Anarchy” and the story collection “Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever.”
The Millions called “The Gospel of Anarchy” a “bold casserole of sensual encounter and deranged proclamation… Loudly, even rapturously, Taylor succeeds in making the clamoring passion of his characters real, their raw, mercurial yearning a cry for ‘a world newly established.’ In terms of acts of God, The Gospel of Anarchy is a tornado, tearing up the hill where rock ‘n roll and cult meet.”
And the New York Times raved that “Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever ” is a “spare, sharp book” which “documents a deep authority on th -
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr was born in Dakar in 1990. He studied literature and philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Terre ceinte (Brotherhood), his first novel, won the Grand Prix du Roman Métis, the Prix Ahmadou Kourouma, and the French Voices Grand Prize. The president of Senegal named him a Chevalier of the National Order of Merit. La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (The Most Secret Memory of Men) won the 2021 Goncourt Prize.
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Katrina Carrasco
Katrina Carrasco's debut novel, THE BEST BAD THINGS (2018, MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux), was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards and Washington State Book Awards, and won the Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel. It was also a 2018 A.V. Club Favorite Book, Buzzfeed Best Thriller, and Vulture Best Crime Book. Her second novel, ROUGH TRADE (MCD/FSG), was published in April 2024. ROUGH TRADE was a New Yorker Best Books We've Read in 2024 pick, a New York Times Best Crime Novels of the Year 2024 pick, and a Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2024 pick. ROUGH TRADE is a 2025 Edgar Award Best Novel finalist, and received a starred Publisher's Weekly review. Katrina's short stories and essays have appeared in Witness, Post Road, Literary Hub,
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Ernesto Quiñonez
Ernesto Quiñonez (born 1966) is an American novelist. His work received the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers designation, the Borders Bookstore Original New Voice selection, and was declared a “Best Book” by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
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N.J. Campbell
N.J. Campbell was born in the Midwest. He has won the Little Tokyo Short Story Contest, received accolades from the California State Legislature, and has been anthologized in the collection American Fiction from New Rivers Press. Found Audio is his first novel.
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Gary Phillips
GARY PHILLIPS has been a community activist, labor organizer and delivered dog cages. He’s published various novels, comics, short stories and edited several anthologies including South Central Noir and the Anthony award-winning The Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir. Violent Spring, first published in 1994 was named in 2020 one of the essential crime novels of Los Angeles. He was also a writer/co-producer on FX’s Snowfall (streaming on Hulu), about crack and the CIA in 1980s South Central where he grew up. Recent novels include One-Shot Harry and Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem. He lives with his family in the wilds of Los Angeles.
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Dane Bahr
Dane Bahr was born in Minnesota. He lives in Washington state with his wife and sons. He is the author of The Houseboat.
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Matt Phillips
Matt Phillips lives in San Diego. His books are A GOOD RUSH OF BLOOD, QUIET AND THE DARKNESS, TO BRING MY SHADOW, COUNTDOWN, KNOW ME FROM SMOKE, THE BAD KIND OF LUCKY, ACCIDENTAL OUTLAWS, REDBONE, BAD LUCK CITY, and THREE KINDS OF FOOL. His short fiction has been published in Tough, Mystery Tribune, Retreats from Oblivion, Shotgun Honey, and Out of the Gutter. More info at www.mattphillipswriter.com
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