Lyceum Agency - Issues & Ideas

Memoir

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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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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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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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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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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Jonathan Raban
Novelist │ Travel Writer │ Essayist

In an era of sometimes disorienting global change, a writer like Jonathan Raban offers avenues for understanding and exploration. A prolific and influential travel writer, Raban focuses on places that have been both idolized and demonized in global culture: London, the Middle East, the American West. At once lyrical and sardonic, Raban’s writing has been called “vivid and utterly idiosyncratic” (Publishers Weekly).

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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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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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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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