Lyceum Agency - Issues & Ideas

Nonfiction

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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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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Gary Braasch

Mia Birk
Author │Urban Planner │Bicycling and Pedestrian Transportation Advocate

Mia Birk is Chief Executive Officer and Principal at the international firm Alta Planning and Design. She has 20 years experience in sustainable transportation focused on pedestrian, bicycle, trail, and greenway planning, design and implementation. Mia is also an Adjunct Professor at Portland State University, where she co-founded the Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation in the College of Urban Studies.

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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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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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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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Jeff Goodell
Author │ Investigative Journalist │ Energy & Environment Expert

“The greatest danger we face is not technological hubris, but human apathy.”

—Jeff Goodell

Through years of research, acclaimed author and investigative journalist Jeff Goodell has established himself as an expert on the coal industry and now geoengineering--which offers the most ambitious solutions to our planet’s environmental crises. As the price of oil soars and energy independence and global warming become ever more urgent political and ecological priorities, Goodell offers a vital perspective on what the stakes are and how to stem the tide of environmental disaster.

Selected Books: Big Coal, How to Cool the Planet

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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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Richard Heinberg

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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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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Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon
Author │ Energy & Security Expert │ Political Scientist

Thomas Homer-Dixon helps his audiences understand how our world is changing. In clear, simple language, he shows how challenges such as global warming, energy scarcity, economic instability, and infoglut affect people, companies, and societies. And he explains what we can all do to adapt and prosper in a world of ever-greater complexity, speed, and surprise.

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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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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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Alex Kotlowitz
Bestselling Author │ Journalist │ Race & Poverty Commentator

Alex Kotlowitz is an award-winning journalist whose bestselling book, There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America (Doubleday, 1991), garnered national recognition for its compassionate and unflinching portrait of Pharoah and Lafeyette Rivers and their lives growing up in a public housing project in inner city Chicago.

No other book, no movie, no TV show so powerfully portrays the children and families who are outside the American dream."

—New Leader

Selected Books: There are No Children Here, Never a City So Real

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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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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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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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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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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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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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Krista Tippett
Author │ Radio Show Host │ Journalist

“It’s always been very important to me to enlarge imaginations about how this part of life we call religious and spiritual actually works in real, far-flung, 21st-century lives.”

—Krista Tippett

Peabody Award winning broadcaster Krista Tippett grew up in Oklahoma, attended Brown University, and spent most of the 1980’s in divided Germany. She was The New York Times stringer in Berlin and also reported for Newsweek, The International Herald Tribune, the BBC, and Die Zeit. Later she served as a special political assistant and chief Berlin aide to the U.S. Ambassador to West Germany.

Selected Books: Speaking of Faith, Einstein's God

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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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