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…
Mary Gaitskill is an American author of essays, short stories and novels. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993 and 2006), and The …
Laurence van Cott Niven's best known work is Ringworld(Ringworld, #1) (1970), which received the Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. His work is primarily hard science fiction, using big science …
Shirley Jackson was an influential American author. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. She has influenced such writers as S…
Leonora Carrington was an English-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City, and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surreali…
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), also known as Charlotte Perkins Stetson, was a prominent American sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for socia…
Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua (part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda). She lives in No…
Williams is the author of four novels. Her first, State of Grace (1973), was nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Quick and the Dead (2000), was a finalist for t…
The fate befalling the young woman who wanted "to be a poet" has been well documented. Desperately unhappy because of family tragedies and finding herself trapped in the wrong vocation (as a schooltea…
Born in 1911 in Rășinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, raised under the rule of a father who was a Romanian Orthodox priest and a mother who was prone to depression, Emil Ci…
László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter who is known for critically difficult and demanding novels, often labelled as postmodern, with dystopian and bleak melancholic themes. He …
Born in Milan, Italy, Adler grew up in Danbury, Connecticut after her parents had fled Nazi Germany in 1933. After attending Bryn Mawr, The Sorbonne, and Harvard, she became a staff writer-reporter fo…
Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, she w…
Barbara Comyns was educated mainly by governesses until she went to art schools in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. Her father was a semi-retired managing director of a Midland chemical firm. She was o…
Monika Maron is a German author, formerly of the German Democratic Republic. She moved in 1951 from West to East Berlin with her stepfather, Karl Maron, the GDR Minister of the Interior.
Murnane's first two books, Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), seem to be semi-autobiographical accounts of his childhood and adolescence. Both are composed largely of very long but g…
Markus Werner (December 27, 1944 in Eschlikon, canton of Thurgau) was a German-speaking Swiss writer, the author of Zündels Abgang (Zündel’s Departure).
Adolfo Vicente Perfecto Bioy Casares (1914-1999) was born in Buenos Aires, the child of wealthy parents. He began to write in the early Thirties, and his stories appeared in the influential magazine S…
Sándor Márai (originally Sándor Károly Henrik Grosschmied de Mára) was a Hungarian writer and journalist. He was born in the city of Kassa in Austria-Hungary (now Košice in Slovakia) to an old family o…
Susan Taubes (1928 – 6 November 1969), born Judit Zsuzanna Feldmann, was a Hungarian-American writer and intellectual. Taubes was born in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family. In 1939, Susan Feldma…