James Purdy
James Otis Purdy was an American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and playwright who, from his debut in 1956, published over a dozen novels, and many collections of poetry, short stories, and plays. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages and in 2013 his short stories were collected in The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy.
He has been praised by writers as diverse as Edward Albee, James M. Cain, Lillian Hellman, Francis King, Marianne Moore, Dorothy Parker, Dame Edith Sitwell, Terry Southern, Gore Vidal (who described Purdy as "an authentic American genius"), Jonathan Franzen (who called him, in Farther Away, "one of the most undervalued and underread writers in America"), A.N. Wilson, and both Jane Bowle
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Éric Jourdan
Éric Jourdan was the pen name of Jean Roger Éric Gaytérou, later changed in Jean-Éric Green after his adoption by american writer Julien Green.
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His first book was the 1955's novel Les Mauvais Anges, (lit. "Evil Angels"), published at fifteen years old, which was banned for his homosexual, violent and controversial content. However it was later published in english in a special edition with the title Two, translated by Richard Howard.
Jourdan, proudly independent, always rejected to be included in the Parisian literary and intellectual world, as any political party. After his parents' death he was adopted by writer Julien Green. He changed his identity numerous times and wrote under many pseudonyms which he never revelead.
He was buried next -
Fran Ross
Fran Ross was an African American author best known for her novel Oreo.
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Born on June 25, 1935, in Philadelphia, she was the eldest daughter of Gerald Ross, a store clerk, and Bernatta Bass Ross, a welder. Recognized for her scholastic, artistic and athletic talents, she earned a scholarship to Temple University after graduating from Overbrook High School at the age of 15.
Ross graduated from Temple University in 1956 with a B. S. degree in Communications, Journalism and Theatre. She worked for a short time at the Saturday Evening Post. Ross moved to New York in 1960, where she applied to work for McGraw-Hill and later Simon and Schuster as a proofreader, working on Ed Koch's first book, among others. Ross began her novel Oreo hoping for a car -
Travis Jeppesen
Travis Jeppesen is the author of Settlers Landing, Victims, Wolf at the Door, The Suiciders, All Fall, 16 Sculptures, and See You Again in Pyongyang, among other books.
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Juliet Escoria
JULIET ESCORIA is the author of the novel JULIET THE MANIAC, forthcoming from Melville House in May 2019. She also wrote the poetry collection WITCH HUNT (Lazy Fascist Press 2016) and the story collection BLACK CLOUD (CCM/Emily Books 2014), which were both listed in various best of the year roundups. Her writing can be found in places like Lenny, Catapult, VICE, Prelude, Dazed, and Hobart and has already been translated into many languages. She lives in West Virginia with her husband, the writer Scott McClanahan.
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Don DeLillo
Donald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports.
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DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the -
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1973 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
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Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973). Rumors of a historical novel about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had circulated as early as -
Christopher Isherwood
English-born American writer Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood portrayed Berlin in the early 1930s in his best known works, such as Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the basis for the musical Cabaret (1966). Isherwood was a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist.
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With W.H. Auden he wrote three plays— The Dog Beneath the Skin (1932), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938). Isherwood tells the story in his first autobiography, Lions and Shadows .
After Isherwood wrote joke answers on his second-year exams, Cambridge University in 1925 asked him to leave. He briefly attended medical school and progressed with his first two novels, All the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932) -
Muriel Spark
Dame Muriel Spark, DBE was a prolific Scottish novelist, short story writer and poet whose darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
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Spark received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992 and the David Cohen Prize in 1997. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, in recognition of her services to literature. She has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in 1969 for The Public Image and in 1981 for Loitering with Intent. In 1998, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN f -
Flann O'Brien
Pseudonym of Brian Ó Nualláin , also known as Brian O'Nolan.
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His English novels appeared under the name of Flann O’Brien, while his great Irish novel and his newspaper column (which appeared from 1940 to 1966) were signed Myles na gCopaleen or Myles na Gopaleen – the second being a phonetic rendering of the first. One of twelve brothers and sisters, he was born in 1911 in Strabane, County Tyrone, into an Irish-speaking family. His father had learned Irish while a young man during the Gaelic revival the son was later to mock. O’Brien’s childhood has been described as happy, though somewhat insular, as the language spoken at home was not that spoken by their neighbours. The Irish language had long been in decline, and Strabane was n -
Edmund White
Edmund Valentine White III was an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer, and essayist. He was the recipient of Lambda Literary's Visionary Award, the National Book Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. France made him Chevalier (and later Officier) de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.
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White was known as a groundbreaking writer of gay literature and a major influence on gay American literature and has been called "the first major queer novelist to champion a new generation of writers." -
Dennis Cooper
Dennis Cooper was born on January 10, 1953. He grew up in the Southern California cities of Covina and Arcadia.
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He wrote stories and poems from early age but got serious about writing at 15 after reading Arthur Rimbaud and The Marquis de Sade. He attended LA county public schools until the 8th grade when he transferred to a private school, Flintridge Preparatory School for Boys in La Canada, California, from which he was expelled in the 11th grade.
While at Flintridge, he met his friend George Miles, who would become his muse and the subject of much of his future writing. He attended Pasadena City College for two years, attending poetry writing workshops taught by the poets Ronald Koertge and Jerene Hewitt. He then attended one year of univer -
Gary Indiana
Gary Hoisington, known as Gary Indiana, was an American writer, actor, artist, and cultural critic. He served as the art critic for the Village Voice weekly newspaper from 1985 to 1988. Indiana is best known for his classic American true-crime trilogy, Resentment, Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, and Depraved Indifference, chronicling the less permanent state of "depraved indifference" that characterized American life at the millennium's end. In the introduction to the recently re-published edition of Three Month Fever, critic Christopher Glazek has coined the phrase 'deflationary realism' to describe Indiana's writing, in contrast to the magical realism or hysterical realism of other contemporary writing.
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Chantal Akerman
Chantal Anne Akerman (French: [ʃɑ̃tal akɛʁman]; 6 June 1950 – 5 October 2015) was a Belgian film director, screenwriter, artist, and film professor at the City College of New York. She is best known for Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975); Akerman's influence on feminist and avant-garde cinema is substantial.
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Thomas Ligotti
Thomas Ligotti is a contemporary American horror author and reclusive literary cult figure. His writings, while unique in style, have been noted as major continuations of several literary genres—most prominently Lovecraftian horror—and have overall been described as works of "philosophical horror", often written as philosophical novels with a "darker" undertone which is similar to gothic fiction. The Washington Post called him "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction"; another critic declared "It's a skilled writer indeed who can suggest a horror so shocking that one is grateful it was kept offstage."
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Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their "intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination", including PAX, HERESIES for the Royal Shakespeare Company, CLAM, CALL BLUE JANE, SHINY NYLON, HONEY BABY MIDDLE ENGLAND, PUSHING THE PRINCE INTO DENMARK and MACBETH-FALSE MEMORIES, some of which are published in LEVY: PLAYS 1 (Methuen)
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Deborah wrote and published her first novel BEAUTIFUL MUTANTS (Vintage), when she was 27 years old. The experience of not having to give her words to a director, actors and designer to interpret, was so exhilarating, she wrote a few more. These include, SWALLOWING GEOGRAPHY, THE UNLOVED (Vintage) and BILLY and GIRL (Bloomsbury). -
Emmanuel Carrère
Emmanuel Carrère is a French author, screenwriter, and director. He is the son of Louis Carrère d'Encausse and French historian Hélène Carrère d'Encausse.
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Carrère studied at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (better known as Sciences Po). Much of his writing, both fiction and nonfiction, centers around the primary themes of the interrogation of identity, the development of illusion, and the direction of reality. Several of his books have been made into films; in 2005, he personally directed the film adaptation of his novel La Moustache. He was the president of the jury of the book Inter 2003.
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Molly Keane
Molly Keane (20 July 1904 – 22 April 1996) was an Irish novelist and playwright (born Mary Nesta Skrine in Ryston Cottage, Newbridge, County Kildare). She grew up at Ballyrankin in County Wexford and was educated at a boarding school in Bray, County Wicklow. She married Bobby Keane, one of a Waterford squirearchical family in 1938 and had two daughters. She used her married name for her later novels, several of which (Good Behaviour, Time After Time) have been adapted for television. Between 1928 and 1956, she wrote 11 novels, and some of her earlier plays, under the pseudonym M.J. Farrell . Molly was a member of Aosdána. Her husband died suddenly in 1946, and following the failure of a play she published nothing for twenty years. In 198
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Truman Capote
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Truman Capote was an American writer whose non-fiction, stories, novels and plays are recognised literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and In Cold Blood (1965), which he labeled a "non-fiction novel." At least 20 films and TV dramas have been produced from Capote novels, stories and screenplays.
He was born as Truman Streckfus Persons to a salesman Archulus Persons and young Lillie Mae. His parents divorced when he was four and he went to live with his mother's relatives in Monroeville, Alabama. He was a lonely child who learned to read and write by himself before entering school. In 1933, he moved to New York City to live wi -
Hélène Bessette
Hélène Bessette est née « obscurément » à Levallois, faubourg de Paris, le 31 août 1918. Lorsqu’un journaliste lui demande pourquoi « obscurément », elle répond : « Parce que ce terme me plaît, et que les détails ne regardent personne ». Elle peut être considérée comme l’une des pionnières du Nouveau roman.
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C’est après un voyage en Nouvelle-Calédonie où elle est partie trois ans avec son mari pasteur qu’elle se met à écrire. Elle n’a que trente-cinq ans quand Raymond Queneau la rencontre le jeudi 4 décembre 1952 dans les bureaux du 5, rue Sébastien Bottin, et lui fait signer un contrat qui l’engage chez Gallimard pour dix livres à venir. « Enfin du nouveau ! », s’exclame-t-il, soucieux de faire connaître celle qu’il considère comme un écriva -
John Darnielle
John Darnielle (/dɑrˈniːl/, born March 16, 1967) is an American musician, best known as the primary (and often solitary) member of the American band the Mountain Goats, for which he is the writer, composer, guitarist, pianist and vocalist.
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Source: Wikipedia. -
David Szalay
David Szalay (born 1974 in Montreal, Quebec) is an English writer.
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He was born in Canada, moved to the UK the following year and has lived there ever since. He studied at Oxford University and has written a number of radio dramas for the BBC.
He won the Betty Trask Award for his first novel, London and the South-East, along with the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Since then he has written two other novels: Innocent (2009) and Spring (2011).
He has also recently been named one of The Telegraph's Top 20 British Writers Under 40 and has also made it onto Granta magazine's 2013 list of the Best of Young British Novelists.
A fourth novel All That Man Is was longlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2016. -
Éric Jourdan
Éric Jourdan was the pen name of Jean Roger Éric Gaytérou, later changed in Jean-Éric Green after his adoption by american writer Julien Green.
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His first book was the 1955's novel Les Mauvais Anges, (lit. "Evil Angels"), published at fifteen years old, which was banned for his homosexual, violent and controversial content. However it was later published in english in a special edition with the title Two, translated by Richard Howard.
Jourdan, proudly independent, always rejected to be included in the Parisian literary and intellectual world, as any political party. After his parents' death he was adopted by writer Julien Green. He changed his identity numerous times and wrote under many pseudonyms which he never revelead.
He was buried next -
Agustín Gómez Arcos
Agustín Gómez Arcos (Agustin Gomez-Arcos in France) was a Spanish writer, anarchist and dramatist born in Almería, Andalusia. He studied law but quit university for theater. However, some of his work was banned in Franco's Spain. Because of censorship Gómez Arcos emigrated to London in 1966, then to Paris in 1968, where he settled and wrote primarily in French, often with themes condemning the fascist Spanish state. He died in Paris of cancer.
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Gómez Arcos won the Hermès Prize for his 1975 novel The Carnivorous Lamb, the Livre Inter prize, the Roland Dorgelès Prize and the Thyde Monnier Prize for his 1977 novel Ana No, and he was twice a finalist for the Prix Goncourt. -
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II, (also known by his pen name William Lee) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer.
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A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century".
His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays.
Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearance -
Olivia Laing
Olivia Laing is a writer and critic. She’s the author of To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City, which has been translated into 17 languages and sold over 100,000 copies worldwide. Her collected essays, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, were published in 2020.
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Her first novel, Crudo, is a real-time account of the turbulent summer of 2017. It was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and a New York Times notable book of 2018 and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize. In 2019 it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Laing’s writing about art & culture appears in the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times and frieze, among many other publications. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and -
Garth Greenwell
Garth Greenwell is the author, most recently, of Small Rain, which won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His first novel, What Belongs to You, won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His second book of fiction, Cleanness, was a New York Times Notable Book. He is also the co-editor, with R.O. Kwon, of the bestselling anthology KINK: Stories. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, The Yale Review, and Harper’s, among others. His hono
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Seán Hewitt
Seán Hewitt's debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire (2020), won the Laurel Prize in 2021. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide (2022), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022. He lives in Dublin.
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Cristina Rivera Garza
Cristina Rivera Garza is the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction. Originally written in Spanish, these works have been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, and more. Born in Mexico in 1964, she has lived in the United States since 1989. She is Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Houston and was awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2020.
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Conner Habib
Conner Habib hosts the podcast Against Everyone with Conner Habib, which features in-depth conversations on topics as broad as punk rock, philosophy, fiction, and occultism. His writing has appeared in multiple online and print magazines. He lives in Ireland.
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Maria Reva
MARIA REVA was born in Ukraine and grew up in Canada. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney's, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere, and has won a National Magazine Award. She also works as an opera librettist.
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Conner Habib
Conner Habib hosts the podcast Against Everyone with Conner Habib, which features in-depth conversations on topics as broad as punk rock, philosophy, fiction, and occultism. His writing has appeared in multiple online and print magazines. He lives in Ireland.
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Kenneth Martin
Kenneth Martin was born in Belfast in 1939. He grew up in Bangor, Co. Down, where he was adopted into a poor family. He began work on his first novel, Aubade, at the age of sixteen, and when it was accepted for publication by Chapman and Hall with an advance of £100, he moved to London. Aubade, published the day after Martin turned eighteen in 1957, was a modest success, selling well enough to run into a second printing in 1958 and was also published in America. Martin followed his debut with two more novels, Waiting for the Sky to Fall (1959) and A Matter of Time (1960), but the reviews of these novels were largely disappointing, and Martin turned from fiction to journalism. He moved to the United States in 1970 and earned degrees from Col
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James Barr
James Fugaté published the novel Quatrefoil and other works under the pseudonym James Barr, an alias he also used in his work as an activist in the homophile movement of the 1950s.
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Fugaté was born on February 13, 1922 in an oilfield boomtown in either Texas or Oklahoma. His mother died of childbed fever; he never knew his father.
Fugaté's illegitimate birth haunted him as a child, but his adoptive parents, who had money from wheat and oil in Kansas, gave him a good education. His best-known work, the novel Quatrefoil (1950), is based on his experience in the U.S. Navy during World War II, but a central character is patterned after a fraternity brother with whom Fugaté had sex as a university student. (He appears to have been a student either -
