Lyceum Agency - Issues & Ideas

Literature

Diana Abu-Jaber
Author │ Journalist │ Essayist

"I grew up inside the shape of my father’s stories. A Jordanian immigrant, Dad regaled us with tales about himself, his country, and his family that both entertained us and instructed us about the place he’d come from and the way he saw the world. These stories exerted a powerful influence on my imagination, in terms of what I chose to write about, the style of my language, and the form my own stories took.

Selected Books: Origin, The Language of Baklava, Crescent

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Marc Acito
Novelist │ Humorist │ Columnist

Embezzlement...blackmail…fraud…high school.

Marc Acito’s first novel, How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater (Broadway Books, 2004), was selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times and was called “a dazzling…thumbs-up winner” by Publishers Weekly. How I Paid For College is a farcical coming of age tale about a talented but irresponsible teenager who schemes to steal his college tuition money when his wealthy father refuses to pay for acting school. Its message resonates with anyone who’s ever had a dream…or a scheme.

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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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Ana Castillo

Author │ Essayist │ Poet

“An always skilled storyteller, [Castillo] grounds her writing in . . . humor, love, suspense and heartache–that draw the reader in.”

–Chicago Sunday Sun-Times

In novels, short stories, poems, and essays, Castillo explores what Ibis Gomez-Vega has called “those segments of the American population often separated by class, economics, gender, and sexual orientation.” Castillo’s works nevertheless transcend boundaries of politics, class, and gender, making her “one of a few Mexican American writers who have attracted the attention of the mainstream reading public” (Ibis Gomez-Vega). Castillo’s prose blends elements of oral history and established literary tradition with innovation and experimentation: she has been called “the most daring and experimental of Latino novelists” (Ilan Stavans).

Selected Books: The Guardians, So Far From God

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Stephen Elliott
Novelist │ McSweeney's Contributor │ Youth Advocate

To have authored what The New York Times Book Review has called “the most intelligent and beautiful book ever written about juvenile detention centers, sadomasochism and drugs” is certainly an uncommon distinction. But for a writer who spent the better part of his adolescence as a ward of the State of Illinois and has worked variously as a cabdriver, stripper, bartender and marketing executive as well as teaching creative writing at Stanford University, the uncommon is to be expected.

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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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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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James Howard Kunstler
Novelist │Urban Planning Advocate │Journalist │Social Critic

James Howard Kunstler had written eight novels and countless articles and essays when the scene outside his window, on his street—on most of the cities and streets in America—caught his attention: "the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work."

Selected Books: Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency

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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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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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William T. Vollmann
Novelist │ Short Story Writer │ Journalist

William T. Vollmann is a monster, a monster of talent, ambition and accomplishment."

—Los Angeles Times

Distinctive for his boundless ambition and extraordinary output—23 books to date, counting the seven-volume, 3,352-page, Rising Up and Rising Down series—Vollmann fully inhabits two often polarized literary worlds. “One of the most unnerving aspects [of Vollmann's work]….is his combination of journalistic immediacy with profound moral inquiry” (Chicago Tribune). That duality has earned him comparisons to Thomas Pynchon.

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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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Edmund White
Novelist │ Memoirist │ Biographer │Social Critic

Edmund White is America’s preeminent gay writer. In biography, social history, travel writing, journalism, the short story, and the novel, this prolific and versatile author has chronicled the gay experience in the United States from the closeted 1950’s through the AIDS crisis. But as William Goldstein wrote in Publishers Weekly, “To call Edmund White merely a gay writer is to oversimplify his work and his intentions.” The acuity, insight, and compassion with which White explores the human condition transcends such a label.

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