Jerry Stahl

Jerry Stahl (born September 28, 1953) is an American novelist and screenwriter, He is best known for the darkly comedic tale of addiction, Permanent Midnight, which was revered by critics and an ever-growing cult of devoted readers, as one of the most compelling, contemporary memoirs. A film adaptation soon followed with Ben Stiller in the lead role, which is widely considered to be Mr. Stiller’s breakthrough performance. Since their initial paring, the two have become lifelong friends and collaborators.

One of Stahl’s mentors and greatest influences, the late American Novelist, Hubert Selby, Jr. had this to say about Permanent Midnight, “Absolutely compelling... Permanent Midnight is an extraordinary accomplishment... A remarkable book that

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Gerardo Sámano Córdova

Gerardo Sámano Córdova is a writer and artist from Mexico City. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. He has studied at Bread Loaf as a work/study scholar and at Tin House. His work has appeared in The Common, Ninth Letter, Passages North, and Chicago Quarterly Review. He’s also been known to draw little creatures.
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Sean Howe

Sean Howe is a former editor at Entertainment Weekly and The Criterion Collection. His writing has appeared in New York, the Los Angeles Times, Spin, and the Village Voice. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Katherine Arden

A note to everyone who trips and falls upon my Goodreads page. First, welcome. Let us read and discuss all the books together. I review books I've read, everything gets five stars, if I didn't like it I don't put it up.

Second, Goodreads is wondrous, but contacting me through my Goodreads DMs is a good way to ensure a long wait for a reply. Your best bet is Twitter or Instagram (arden_katherine) on both.

Happy reading.

Born in Texas, Katherine studied French and Russian at Middlebury College. She has lived abroad in France and in Moscow, among other places. She has also lived in Hawaii, where she wrote much of The Bear and the Nightingale. She currently lives in Vermont.
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Peter Swanson

Peter Swanson is the author of six novels including The Kind Worth Killing, winner of the New England Society Book Award, and finalist for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, Her Every Fear, an NPR book of the year, and his most recent thriller, Eight Perfect Murders. His books have been translated into 30 languages, and his stories, poetry, and features have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Atlantic Monthly, Measure, The Guardian, The Strand Magazine, and Yankee Magazine.

A graduate of Trinity College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Emerson College, he lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with his wife and cat.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Kurt Vonnegut, Junior was an American novelist, satirist, and most recently, graphic artist. He was recognized as New York State Author for 2001-2003.

He was born in Indianapolis, later the setting for many of his novels. He attended Cornell University from 1941 to 1943, where he wrote a column for the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. Vonnegut trained as a chemist and worked as a journalist before joining the U.S. Army and serving in World War II.

After the war, he attended University of Chicago as a graduate student in anthropology and also worked as a police reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York in public relations for General Electric. He attributed his unadorned writing st
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Mick Herron

Mick Herron was born in Newcastle and has a degree in English from Balliol College, Oxford. He is the author of six books in the Slough House series as well as a mystery series set in Oxford featuring Sarah Tucker and/or P.I. Zoë Boehm. He now lives in Oxford and works in London.
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Judith Rossner

Judith Perelman Rossner was an American novelist, best known for her 1975 novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which was inspired by the murder of Roseann Quinn and examined the underside of the seventies sexual liberation movement. Though Looking for Mr. Goodbar remained Rossner's best known and best selling work, she continued to write. Her most successful post-Goodbar novel was 1983's August, about the relationship between a troubled young woman and her psychoanalyst who has emotional troubles of her own.
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Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author thirty-five or so books. He really likes werewolves and slashers. Favorite novels change daily, but Valis and Love Medicine and Lonesome Dove and It and The Things They Carried are all usually up there somewhere. Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado. It's a big change from the West Texas he grew up in.
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Jeff VanderMeer

NYT bestselling writer Jeff VanderMeer has been called “the weird Thoreau” by the New Yorker for his engagement with ecological issues. His most recent novel, the national bestseller Borne, received wide-spread critical acclaim and his prior novels include the Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance). Annihilation won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, has been translated into 35 languages, and was made into a film from Paramount Pictures directed by Alex Garland. His nonfiction has appeared in New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and the Washington Post. He has coedited several iconic anthologies with his wife, the Hugo Award winning editor. Other titles include Wonderbook, the worl
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Hubert Selby Jr.

Hubert Selby, Jr. was born in Brooklyn and went to sea as a merchant marine while still in his teens. Laid low by lung disease, he was, after a decade of hospitalizations, written off as a goner and sent home to die. Deciding instead to live, but having no way to make a living, he came to a realization that would change the course of literature: "I knew the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer." Drawing from the soul of his Brooklyn neighborhood, he began writing something called "The Queen Is Dead," which evolved, after six years, into his first novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), a book that Allen Ginsberg predicted would "explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years."

Selby's second nove
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Brian K. Vaughan

Brian K. Vaughan is the writer and co-creator of comic-book series including SAGA, PAPER GIRLS, Y THE LAST MAN, RUNAWAYS, and most recently, BARRIER, a digital comic with artist Marcos Martin about immigration, available from their pay-what-you-want site www.PanelSyndicate.com

BKV's work has been recognized at the Eisner, Harvey, Hugo, Shuster, Eagle, and British Fantasy Awards. He sometimes writes for film and television in Los Angeles, where he lives with his family and their dogs Hamburger and Milkshake.
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Elmore Leonard

Elmore John Leonard lived in Dallas, Oklahoma City and Memphis before settling in Detroit in 1935. After serving in the navy, he studied English literature at the University of Detroit where he entered a short story competition. His earliest published novels in the 1950s were westerns, but Leonard went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillers, many of which have been adapted into motion pictures.

Father of Peter Leonard.
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Charlie Huston

Charlie Huston is an American novelist, screenwriter, and comic book writer known for his genre-blending storytelling and character-driven narratives. His twelve novels span crime, horror, and science fiction, and have been published by Ballantine, Del Rey, Mulholland, and Orion, with translations in nine languages. He is the creator of the Henry Thompson trilogy, beginning with Caught Stealing, which was announced in 2024 as a forthcoming film adaptation directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Austin Butler. Huston’s stand-alone novels include The Shotgun Rule, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, Sleepless, and Skinner. He also authored the vampire noir series Joe Pitt Casebooks while living in Manhattan and later California
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John Sandford

John Sandford is the pen name of John Roswell Camp, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author known for his gripping thrillers and popular crime series. After earning degrees in history, literature, and journalism from the University of Iowa, Camp began his writing career as a reporter, first at The Miami Herald and later at The Saint Paul Pioneer Press, where he earned critical acclaim for in-depth series on Native American communities and American farm life. His work won him the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1986.
In 1989, Camp transitioned into fiction, publishing two novels: The Fool's Run under his real name and Rules of Prey under the pseudonym John Sandford. The latter launched the long-running “Prey” series,
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Joseph Heller

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Joseph Heller was an American author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays. His best-known work is the 1961 novel Catch-22, a satire on war and bureaucracy, whose title has become a synonym for an absurd or contradictory choice. He was nominated in 1972 for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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John Kennedy Toole

John Kennedy Toole was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, whose posthumously published novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981; he also wrote The Neon Bible. Although several people in the literary world felt his writing skills were praiseworthy, Toole's novels were rejected during his lifetime. Due in part to these failures, he suffered from paranoia and depression, dying by suicide at the age of 31.

Toole was born to a middle-class family in New Orleans. From a young age, his mother, Thelma, taught him an appreciation of culture. She was thoroughly involved in his affairs for most of his life, and at times they had a difficult relationship. With his mother's encouragement, Toole became a s
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David Sedaris

David Raymond Sedaris is an American humorist, comedian, author, and radio contributor. He was publicly recognized in 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay "Santaland Diaries". He published his first collection of essays and short stories, Barrel Fever, in 1994. His next book, Naked (1997), became his first of a series of New York Times Bestsellers, and his 2000 collection Me Talk Pretty One Day won the Thurber Prize for American Humor.
Much of Sedaris's humor is autobiographical and self-deprecating and often concerns his family life, his middle-class upbringing in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, his Greek heritage, homosexuality, jobs, education, drug use, and obsessive behaviors, as well as his life in France, London
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Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.

Of French-Canadian ancestry, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens." During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and num
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Ray Bradbury

Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction.

Bradbury is best known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and his short-story collections The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and The October Country (1955). Other notable works include the coming of age novel Dandelion Wine (1957), the dark fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992). He also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space. Many of his works were ada
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Joseph Mattson

OUT NOW:

THE SPEED CHRONICLES (Editor/contributor. Anthology of new fiction about the drug speed, feat. William T. Vollmann, Sherman Alexie, Jerry Stahl, Beth Lisick, Megan Abbott, James Greer, and more. Akashic Books).

EMPTY THE SUN (Novel with Soundtrack by Six Organs of Admittance)

EAT HELL

TWO LETTERS COLLECTION OF ART & WRITING VOL. 2

GIRLVERT: A PORNO MEMOIR by ORIANA SMALL aka ASHLEY BLUE (Edited by Joseph Mattson)

Forthcoming/In-Progress:

COURTING THE JAGUAR (novel)
HEXICO (novel)
WESTERN VIOLENCE AND BRIEF SENSUALITY (screenplay)
ALL THAT MATTERS IS THE WOLF (poems)
LAST SEEN IN BARSTOW/LAST SCENE IN BARSTOW (play)
JESUS DICE (novel)
HUNTED BY SAVAGES (nonfiction)

Also editing VIRGINS IN REVERSE and THE INTRUSION, two excellent novellas by Gabr
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Jon Vreeland

Jon Vreeland is a writer of prose, poetry, plays, and journalism. His memoir “The Taste of Cigarettes” published May 22, 2018, under Vine Leaves Press of Australia, and can now be purchased through all major bookstores and outlets.

Vreeland's writing focuses on addiction and its harsh consequence and reality. His stories mostly take place in Huntington Beach, where he lived for thirty years. Vreeland is 38 years old and has been clean from drugs and alcohol for 4 years. Since getting clean he’s published stories with Rebelle Society, Santa Barbara New Press, he currently writes a colum for the Santa Barbara Sentinel and Montecito Journal. His poetry’s been published in a number of journals and three different printed anthologies, two of the
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