Lyceum Agency - Issues & Ideas - Bestselling Authors

Bestselling Authors

John Berendt
Bestselling Author │ Journalist │ Essayist

Armed with the verve and stylistic brevity of a columnist and the seasoned perspective of an editor, John Berendt wrote the modern classic Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story over the course of seven years, without a publisher’s advance. “People thought I was crazy, but I didn’t want to meet a deadline or owe money,” he says.

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Dr. Brian Fagan
Author │ Archaeologist │ Climate Change Historian

Dr. Brian Fagan is a leading authority on the complex relationship between the environment, climate change and human society. Fagan is the author or editor of 46 books, including eight college textbooks familiar to two generations of archaeology students. For audiences ranging from business executives to high school students, Fagan places today’s highly publicized climate crisis in a crucial historical context and describes how humans have adapted to environmental changes over the eons.

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Richard Ford
Novelist │ Short Story Writer │ Pulitzer Prize Winner

Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Richard Ford’s “sinewy and distinctively American voice contains the echoing tones of many ancestors” (The New York Times). Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway are the literary ancestors critics often cite when discussing Ford's fiction.

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Connie May Fowler
Bestselling Author │ Novelist │ Memoirist

"When I was a small girl, my parents fought every night. My sister and I would huddle together in our bedroom and I would beg her to read to me so that the sound of their voices might be drowned out. And so she would begin, reading to me from my children's books, night after night. Even then, before I had learned to read, I knew intimately the soul-saving power of literature."

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Elizabeth Gilbert
Bestselling Author │ Short Story Writer │ Memoirist

Oprah Winfrey calls her a “rock star author.” Annie Proulx calls her “a writer of incandescent talent.” A New York magazine editor calls her the “Queen of Quirk,” and goes on to say, “She has an awful lot of humor and charm, and she’s one of those few writers who writes the way she talks.” And talks the way she writes, we might add—with intelligence, wit and not just a shade of the performer behind her expressive and insightful presentations.

Selected Books: The Last American Man, Eat Pray Love, Committed

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Robert Greene
Bestselling Author │ Cultural Theorist │ Strategist

Law 3—CONCEAL YOUR INTENTIONS

Law 14—POSE AS A FRIEND, WORK AS A SPY

Law 15—CRUSH YOUR ENEMY TOTALLY

Robert Greene is not a man who preaches random acts of kindness. In fact, the release of his book The 48 Laws of Power prompted New York Magazine to declare, “Machiavelli has a new rival. And Sun Tzu better watch his back.” Spending eleven weeks on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, The 48 Laws of Power sent shockwaves through the business world, Hollywood, Washington, and even the hip-hop music industry. Not only has Greene been called in to Robert Greenepersonally advise industry leaders such as famed film and TV producer Brian Grazer and American Apparel CEO Dov Charney, but he was also asked to collaborate on a business book with the multi-platinum rapper 50 Cent. Rap producer and filmmaker Quincy “QD3” Jones III has even begun working on a full-length documentary about The 48 Laws of Power and its influence on the music industry.

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John Hodgman
Author │ Humorist │ Minor TV Personality

Before he went on television, JOHN HODGMAN was a humble writer, expert, and Former Professional Literary Agent living in New York City. In this capacity, he has served as the Humor Editor for the New York Times Magazine, Occasional Flight vs. Invisibility Consultant on “This American Life,” Advice Columnist for McSweeney’s, Comic Book Reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, and a Freelance Journalist specializing in Food, Non-Wine Alcohol, “Battlestar Galactica,” and most other subjects.

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Alice Hoffman
Bestselling Author │ Novelist │ Short Story Writer

Alice Hoffman has been called “America’s literary heir to the Brothers Grimm” and her luminous and remarkable “fables of the everyday” have enchanted readers since the publication of her first novel, Property Of, in 1977. More than 30 years later, with numerous acclaimed and bestselling novels (as well as two short story collections and many books for young adults), Hoffman continues to seduce readers into her vividly imagined world.

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A.M. Homes
Novelist │ Memoirist │ Essayist

A.M. Homes is that rare writer whose work successfully elides the distinction between high art and pop culture. In incendiary and brilliantly crafted fiction, Homes shocks and sometimes disgusts, but never fails to entertain as she tears down the façade of suburban normality to reveal the darkness within.

In her impressionistic art criticism, Homes has brought levity and creativity to a hidebound genre. And her inspiring lectures on creativity have spurred other writers and artists to abandon fear and mediocrity and take real risks in their work. Iconoclastic, daring, fiercely real—A.M. Homes is one of the most provocative literary voices today.

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Sue Monk Kidd
Bestselling Author │ Novelist │ Essayist

Sue Monk Kidd’s stunning bestselling debut novel, The Secret Life of Bees (2002), has enchanted critics and readers alike, bringing her literary renown and establishing her as one of the most popular writers working today. Taught widely in colleges and high schools, The Secret Life of Bees is Southern storytelling at its finest and is fast becoming a modern classic. The novel has spent more than two and a half years on the New York Times bestseller list, sold six million copies, and been translated into 23 languages. It was produced onstage in New York and was made into an award-winning movie released in the fall of 2008. Barnes and Noble listed The Secret Life of Bees as the sixth bestselling book of the decade.

Selected Books: The Secret Life of Bees, The Mermaid Chair

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Tracy Kidder
Bestselling Author │ Journalist │ Essayist

"A lot of the job of a person trying to write stories that are true is to make what’s true believable. It isn’t enough to say, well, it actually happened. You have to make it believable on the page; you have to bring people to life and scenes to life."

—Tracy Kidder

Over his long career, Kidder’s writing has been prolific and outstanding. The Soul of a New Machine—a book celebrated for its insight into the world of high-tech corporate America—earned him a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 1982. Other bestselling works include House (1985), Among Schoolchildren (1989), Old Friends (1993) and Home Town (1999).

Selected Books: Mountains Beyond Mountains, The Strength in What Remains, The Soul of a New Machine

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Dr. Peter Kramer, MD
Bestselling Author │ Psychiatrist │ Novelist

"What if Van Gogh had taken antidepressants? Would we still have Starry Night?"

—Dr. Peter Kramer

More than a decade ago, Dr. Peter Kramer revolutionized the way we think about antidepressants with his enormously popular and influential bestseller Listening to Prozac (Viking, 1993). Thoughtful and provocative, Kramer’s work explored what it means to have medicines that alter the essence of personality and how this impacts our understanding of self.

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Ursula K. Le Guin
Bestselling Author │ Novelist │ Poet │ Essayist

Ursula Kroeber was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California. Her parents were the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, author of Ishi. She graduated from Radcliffe College and studied at Columbia University. She married Charles A. Le Guin, a historian, in Paris in 1953. They have lived in Portland, Oregon, since 1958, and they have three children and four grandchildren.

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Jonathan Lethem
Bestselling Author │ Novelist │ Essayist

Lethem is one of our most perceptive cultural critics, conversant in both the high and low realms, his insights buffeted by his descriptive imagination."

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

Jonathan Lethem’s genre-bending fiction weaves the conventions of noir mysteries, westerns, science fiction, and comic books into coming-of-age tales that are evocative and wholly original. He is the author of eight novels—including the much lauded Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude—and is the winner of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant.

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Dr.

Christopher Phillips
Bestselling Author │ Founder, Constitution & Socrates Cafés │ Social Entrepreneur

“To date, Phillips has orchestrated discussions on … Solomonic topics at nursing homes, maximum-security prisons, churches, homeless shelters, bookstores and coffeehouses across the country, gently prodding students, urban professionals, unreconstructed slackers, street people and others to share their worldviews and scrutinize their most basic assumptions.”

–Los Angeles Times

Christopher Phillips has a passion for inquiry. A foremost specialist in the Socratic Method, he reminds us that we ought to ask questions – “not about any chance question,” as Socrates put it in Plato’s Republic, “but about the way one should live.”

Selected Books: Constitution Café, Six Questions of Socrates, Socrates Café.

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Julie Powell
Bestselling Author │ Memoirist │ Blogger

On the eve of my thirtieth birthday, stuck in a dead-end secretarial job, living in a hideous apartment in Long Island City, Queens, and dreading what seemed like a life of terminal mediocrity, I came up with a panicked notion—to cook through all 524 recipes of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in a year, and blog about it. Julie and Julia describes my efforts to hold on to my job, marriage, and sanity while blazing a nonsensical trail toward fulfillment,with Julia leading the way."

Julie Powell

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David Oliver Relin
Bestselling Author │ Journalist │ Human Rights Advocate

"We Americans need to learn from our mistakes, from the flailing, ineffective way we, as a nation, conducted the 'war-on-terror' after the attacks of 9/11, and from the way we’ve failed to make our case to the moderate, peace-loving majority of people at the heart of the Muslim World. If we want to heal the wounded relationship between Islam and the West, we have to learn how to wage peace as aggressively as we wage war."

—David Oliver Relin

Selected Books: Three Cups of Tea, See How They Shine (Random House, forthcoming 2011)

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Rebecca Skloot
Bestselling Author │ Journalist │ Educator

Bestselling author Rebecca Skloot spent over ten years doggedly uncovering the truth about the life, death and ultimate "immortality" of a poor black tobacco farmer named Henrietta Lacks. On a tumultuous educational path until a community college biology instructor utter the words "Henrietta Lacks," Skloot—with remarkable focus and tenacity—set off on a trajectory that would shine the national spotlight on both and become the phenomenal book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

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Anthony Swofford
Bestselling Author │ Novelist │ Memoirist

“…Jarhead is more than just the latest, most eloquent writing to emerge from the Gulf War...In Swofford's conflicted psyche and lucid prose can be seen the evolution not only of the war memoir but of American attitudes toward war—and war's current place in the American consciousness.”

—Justin Ewers, U.S. News & World Report

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Paul Theroux
Novelist │ Travel Writer │ Short Story Writer │ Critic

Paul Theroux is described by his friend, writer Jonathan Raban, as “utterly American, possessing all of those democratic, Yankee, can do qualities.” Theroux is the quintessential explorer who has a talent for noticing the odd, compelling detail.

Readers depend on his uncompromising, sometimes brazen reportage; audiences remember him for his witty, acerbic asides and the tremendous breadth of literature with which he is intimately familiar. Theroux is an avid, impassioned reader and literary scholar. His relentless enthusiasm for the pursuit of new discoveries and an abiding respect and affection for his readers and audience are abundantly evident in person. "It’s like a friendship [with the reader],” Theroux says of being an author. “A bond develops if you write a lot of books.”

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Norah Vincent
Bestselling Author │ Cultural Critic │ Journalist

Norah Vincent is a freelance journalist by trade. In 2003, she took a leave from writing her nationally syndicated political opinion columns in order to write her New York Times bestselling book Self-Made Man, the story of a woman living, working, and dating--all while disguised as a man.

Shrewd, sympathetic, and courageous, Self-Made Man is one woman’s take on just how hard it is to be a man, even in a man’s world. With an ever-present five o’clock shadow, a crew cut, wire-rimmed glasses, and her own size 11½ shoes, Norah Vincent spent a year and a half as her male alter ego, Ned, and reported back what she observed incognito. Narrating her journey with exquisite insight, empathy, and humor, Norah ponders the many remarkable mysteries of gender identity as she explores firsthand who men really are when women aren’t around. As Ned, she joins a bowling team, takes a high-octane sales job, goes on dates with women (and men), visits strip clubs, and even manages to infiltrate a monastery and a men’s therapy group. Absolutely engrossing in its reporting and surprising in its analysis, Self-Made Man is a thrilling tour de force of immersion journalism.

Selected Books: Self-Made Man, Voluntary Madness

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Ayelet Waldman
Bestselling Author │ Mystery Writer │ Novelist

Maternal ambivalence is my subject,” says the provocative novelist and essayist Ayelet Waldman. In her bestselling collection of essays, Bad Mother, her popular Mommy Track Mystery series, in her critically acclaimed literary novels, and pieces that have appeared in The New York Times, Elle, The Guardian, Salon.com and others, Waldman brings refreshing candor to the socially-charged issues of wifehood, motherhood, sexuality and family.

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