Scott McClanahan
Scott McClanahan (born June 24, 1978) is an American writer, filmmaker, and martial artist. He lives in Beckley, West Virginia and is the author of eight books. His most recent book, The Sarah Book, was featured in Rolling Stone, Village Voice, and Playboy. NPR called the book "brave, triumphant and beautiful — it reads like a fever dream, and it feels like a miracle." McClanahan is also a co-founder of Holler Presents, a West Virginia-based production and small press company.
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John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck was an American writer. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception". He has been called "a giant of American letters."
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During his writing career, he authored 33 books, with one book coauthored alongside Edward F. Ricketts, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas The Red Pony (1933) and Of Mice and Men (1937). The Pulitzer Prize–winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American -
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.
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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 -
Denis Johnson
Poet, playwright and author Denis Johnson was born in Munich, West Germany, in 1949 and was raised in Tokyo, Manila and Washington. He earned a masters' degree from the University of Iowa and received many awards for his work, including a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction (1993), a Whiting Writer's Award (1986), the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from the Paris Review for Train Dreams, and most recently, the National Book Award for Fiction (2007).
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Junji Ito
Junji Itō (Japanese: 伊藤潤二, Ito Junji) is a Japanese cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his horror manga.
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Ito was born in Gifu Prefecture, Japan in 1963. He was inspired to make art from a young age by his older sister's drawing and Kazuo Umezu's horror comics. Until the early 1990s he worked as a dental technician, while making comics as a side job. By the time he turned into a full time mangaka, Ito was already an acclaimed horror artists.
His comics are celebrated for their finely depicted body horrors, while also retaining some elements of psychological horror and erotism.
Although he mostly produces short stories, Ito is best known for his longer comic series: Tomie (1987-2000), about a beautiful high school girl who inspires her -
Harry Crews
Harry Eugene Crews was born during the Great Depression to sharecroppers in Bacon County, Georgia. His father died when he was an infant and his mother quickly remarried. His mother later moved her sons to Jacksonville, Florida. Crews is twice divorced and is the father of two sons. His eldest son drowned in 1964.
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Crews served in the Korean War and, following the war, enrolled at the University of Florida under the G.I. Bill. After two years of school, Crews set out on an extended road trip. He returned to the University of Florida in 1958. Later, after graduating from the master's program, Crews was denied entrance to the graduate program for Creative Writing. He moved to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where he taught English at Broward Communit -
Breece D'J Pancake
Breece (Dexter John) Pancake was born in South Charleston, West Virginia, the youngest child of Clarence "Wicker" Pancake and Helen Frazier Pancake, and was raised in Milton, West Virginia. Pancake briefly attended West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon before transferring to Marshall University in Huntington where he completed a bachelor's degree in English education in 1974. After graduating from Marshall he spent time out West, visiting his sister in Santa Fe. As a graduate student he studied at the University of Virginia's creative writing program under John Casey and James Alan McPherson. Pancake also worked as an English teacher at two Virginia military academies, Fork Union and Staunton.
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While at the University of Virginia, Panc -
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Sam Pink
Sam Pink is the author of The No Hellos Diet, Hurt Others, I Am Going to Clone Myself Then Kill the Clone and Eat It, Frowns Need Friends Too, and the cult hit Person. His writing has been published widely in print and on the internet, and also in other languages. He lives in Chicago, where he plays in the band Depressed Woman.
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Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovene sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic.
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He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992).
Since 2005, Žižek has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Žižek is well known for his use of the works of 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, f -
Justin Torres
JUSTIN TORRES grew up in upstate New York. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Glimmer Train, and other publications. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is a recipient of the Rolón United States Artist Fellowship in Literature, and is now a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He has worked as a farmhand, a dog-walker, a creative writing teacher, and a bookseller.
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Bud Smith
Bud Smith is the author of Teenager (Tyrant Book), Double Bird (Maudlin House), WORK (CCM), Dust Bunny City (Disorder Press), among others. He works heavy construction, and lives in Jersey City, NJ.
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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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Chelsea Hodson
Chelsea Hodson is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Tonight I'm Someone Else (Henry Holt, 2018) and the chapbook Pity the Animal (Future Tense / Emily Books, 2014). She is a graduate of the MFA program at Bennington College, and was a PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Julia Shaw
Julia Shaw is an honorary research associate at the University College London. Born in Germany and raised in Canada, she has a MS in psychology and law and a PhD in psychology from the University of British Columbia. She is a regular contributor to Scientific American.
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Nico Walker
Nico Walker is originally from Cleveland. He served as a medic on more than 250 missions in Iraq. Currently he has two more years of an eleven-year sentence for bank robbery. Cherry is his debut novel.
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Kate Folk
Kate Folk is the author of the novel SKY DADDY (2025) and the story collection OUT THERE (2022). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, and The Baffler, among others. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she’s also received support for her writing from MacDowell, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and Willapa Bay AiR. Originally from Iowa, she lives in San Francisco.
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Sam Pink
Sam Pink is the author of The No Hellos Diet, Hurt Others, I Am Going to Clone Myself Then Kill the Clone and Eat It, Frowns Need Friends Too, and the cult hit Person. His writing has been published widely in print and on the internet, and also in other languages. He lives in Chicago, where he plays in the band Depressed Woman.
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Bill Cotter
Bill Cotter was born in Dallas in 1964, and has labored as an antiquarian book dealer and restorer since 2000. He presently lives in Austin with his girlfriend, the poet Annie La Ganga, and Travis, an inextinguishable roach who divides his time between the shower and the silverware drawer.
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Matthew Davis
Note: There are multiple authors in the GR system with this name. This profile is for Matthew^^^Davis, author of Let Me Try Again.
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Chelsea Hodson
Chelsea Hodson is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Tonight I'm Someone Else (Henry Holt, 2018) and the chapbook Pity the Animal (Future Tense / Emily Books, 2014). She is a graduate of the MFA program at Bennington College, and was a PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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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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Bud Smith
Bud Smith is the author of Teenager (Tyrant Book), Double Bird (Maudlin House), WORK (CCM), Dust Bunny City (Disorder Press), among others. He works heavy construction, and lives in Jersey City, NJ.
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Gore Vidal
Works of American writer Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, noted for his cynical humor and his numerous accounts of society in decline, include the play The Best Man (1960) and the novel Myra Breckinridge (1968) .
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People know his essays, screenplays, and Broadway.
They also knew his patrician manner, transatlantic accent, and witty aphorisms. Vidal came from a distinguished political lineage; his grandfather was the senator Thomas Gore, and he later became a relation (through marriage) to Jacqueline Kennedy.
Vidal, a longtime political critic, ran twice for political office. He was a lifelong isolationist Democrat. The Nation, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Review of Books, and Esquire published his essays.
Essays and media appear -
Breece D'J Pancake
Breece (Dexter John) Pancake was born in South Charleston, West Virginia, the youngest child of Clarence "Wicker" Pancake and Helen Frazier Pancake, and was raised in Milton, West Virginia. Pancake briefly attended West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon before transferring to Marshall University in Huntington where he completed a bachelor's degree in English education in 1974. After graduating from Marshall he spent time out West, visiting his sister in Santa Fe. As a graduate student he studied at the University of Virginia's creative writing program under John Casey and James Alan McPherson. Pancake also worked as an English teacher at two Virginia military academies, Fork Union and Staunton.
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While at the University of Virginia, Panc -
Diego Gerard Morrison
Diego Gerard Morrison is a writer, editor and translator, whose recent work explores themes of magical realism and appropriation set within the context of the Mexican drug war. He is the cofounder and fiction editor of diSONARE, an editorial project based in Mexico City. His fiction, non-fiction and other writings appear or are forthcoming in The Brooklyn Rail, The River Rail, Terremoto, Boiler House Press, The Poetry Project and Shifter, among others. He lives and works in Mexico City.
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Nami Mun
Nami Mun grew up in Seoul, South Korea and Bronx, New York. For her first book, Miles from Nowhere, she received a Whiting Award and a Pushcart Prize, and was shortlisted for the Orange Award and the Asian American Literary Award. Miles From Nowhere became a national bestseller within first weeks of publication and was selected as "Editors’ Choice" and "Top Ten First Novels" by Booklist, "Best Fiction of 2009 So Far by Amazon," and as an Indie Next Pick. Chicago Magazine named her "Best New Novelist of 2009."
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Previously, Nami has worked as an Avon Lady, a street vendor, a photojournalist, a waitress, an activities coordinator for a nursing home, and a criminal defense investigator. After earning a GED, she went on to get a BA in English from -
Kevin Maloney
Kevin Maloney is the author of The Red-Headed Pilgrim (Two Dollar Radio, Jan 2023), Horse Girl Fever (CLASH Books, 2025), and Cult of Loretta (Lazy Fascist, 2015).
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At times a TJ Maxx associate, grocery clerk, outdoor school instructor, organic farmer, electrician, high school English teacher, and teddy bear salesman, Kevin currently works as a web developer and writer. His stories have appeared in Hobart, Barrelhouse, Green Mountains Review, and a number of other journals and anthologies.
He lives in Portland, Oregon, five blocks from his very hot and talented fiancée Ryan-Ashley Anderson. -
Eugene Marten
Eugene Marten lives in New Mexico. He is also the author of the novels In The Blind (Turtle Point), Waste (Ellipsis), and Firework (Tyrant Books).
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Zac Smith
Zac Smith is the author of books. His stories and poems have mostly appeared online.
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Andrew J. Wilt
Andrew is the publisher and founder of 11:11 Press. To learn more, visit 1111press.com
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Nico Walker
Nico Walker is originally from Cleveland. He served as a medic on more than 250 missions in Iraq. Currently he has two more years of an eleven-year sentence for bank robbery. Cherry is his debut novel.
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Marie Calloway
Marie Calloway (born 1990) is an American author. Her first book, what purpose did i serve in your life? was published by Tyrant Books. Calloway grew up in Japan and Oregon. She currently lives in New York.
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Joanna Ruocco
Joanna Ruocco is a prize-winning American author and co-editor of the fiction journal Birkensnake. In 2013, she received the Pushcart Prize for her story "If the Man Took” and is also winner of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. Ruocco received her MFA at Brown, and a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Denver. Her most recent novel is Dan, published by Dorothy, A Publishing Project. She also serves as Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Wake Forest University.
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Ruocco has also published romance novels under the pseudonyms Toni Jones and Alessandra Shahbaz.
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Colin Winnette
Colin Winnette is an American novelist, short story writer, and poet. He is the author of several works of fiction: Revelation (Mutable Sound 2011), Animal Collection (Spork Press 2012), Fondly (Atticus Books 2013), Coyote (Les Figues Press 2015), and Haints Stay (Two Dollar Radio 2015). His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Playboy, Lucky Peach, The American Reader, The Believer, Gulf Coast Magazine, and 9th Letter. He was the winner of Les Figues Press's 2013 NOS Book Contest, for his novel Coyote.
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Gurney Norman
Gurney Norman was born in Grundy, Virginia in 1937. He grew up in the southern Appalachian Mountains and was raised alternately by his maternal grandparents in Southwest Virginia and his paternal grandparents in East Kentucky in several towns, but primarily in the small community of Allais, near Hazard, in Perry County. He attended Stuart Robinson School in Letcher County, Kentucky, from 1946-1955. Norman attended the University of Kentucky from 1955-1959 graduating with a degree in journalism and English. In 1960, he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University where he studied with literary critic Malcolm Cowley and the Irish short story writer Frank O'Connor.
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After Stanford, Norman spent two years in th -
Michael Dumanis
Michael Dumanis is the author of two books of poems, Creature (Four Way Books, 2023) and My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry; and the co-editor of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande). Born in the former Soviet Union, he emigrated to the United States at the age of five. His recent work appears in American Poetry Review, The Believer, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Colorado Review, The Common, Iowa Review, Poetry, and Waxwing. He lives in North Bennington, Vermont, and teaches at Bennington College, where he also serves as editor of Bennington Review.
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Gabby Bess
"Comparisons to the films of Miranda July are also apt. Like July, Gabby’s work in Airplane Food has emotional resonance in its flattened language and framing. As I was reading Airplane Food I was often reminded of Miranda July’s film Me and You and Everyone You Know. The attempt to bridge the gap between art and life. To make art like life and life like art. And also the flattened language and framing and bleak landscape but also the beauty and hope within those framings that is unflinching, rare, and brave.” - Marcus Slease, The New Poetics of Confession
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"What Gabby Bess captures with her words is the beauty of a fragile time and place. In this collection, she evokes what it means to be young, to be a woman, to have both feet firmly plant -
Ashleigh Bryant Phillips
Ashleigh Bryant Phillips is from rural Woodland, North Carolina. She's a graduate of Meredith College and earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review and The Oxford American. Her debut collection, Sleepovers, is the 2019 winner of the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, selected by Lauren Groff.
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David Nutt
David Nutt was born in 1977. He is a former newspaper reporter and copy editor, speechwriter, substitute teacher, executive assistant, administrative assistant, electrician’s assistant, office gopher, dishwasher, grocery stocker, part-time burger flipper, begrudging paperboy, and sometime musician. His fiction has appeared in Hobart, New York Tyrant, Washington Square Review, The American Reader, Juked, Open City, and other journals. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. He lives in Ithaca, New York, with his wife, the writer Gina Nutt, and two cats.
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His novel, The Great American Suction, was published by Tyrant Books in Feb 2019.
A short-story collection, Summertime in the Emergency Room, was published by Calamari Pr