One of The Top Ten’s aims is to let esteemed writers be fans – to acknowledge and celebrate their own literary heroes.

The novelist, poet, memoirist, essayist and screenwriter Paul Auster does that in spades with his splendid new biography, Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane. Although he lived just 28 years (1871-1900), Crane remains one of America’s best known writers, thanks, in no small part, to his realist novel, The Red Badge of Courage, which was a staple of high school reading lists. But his star – like those of his contemporaries such as Jack London and Frank Norris – has faded in recent years.

Through complex novels such as The Gold Bug Variations (1991), Operation Wandering Soul (1993, National Book Award Finalist); Gain (1999, James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction); The Echo Maker (2006, National Book Award), Orfeo (2014) and The Overstory (2018, Pulitzer Prize), Richard Powers has established himself as one of the world’s most ambitious and accompl

Long acclaimed as one of America’s greatest novelists during his prize-winning career, it’s hard to see how Jonathan Franzen could top himself. But his new novel, Crossroads, may be his best.

Lionel Shriver believes in tough love. Instead of embracing her readers she prods, pinches, pokes and provokes them by exploring incendiary social issues through novels that use unlikable characters to reveal harsh truths.

The title of Michael Griffith’s wonderful new nonfiction book – “The Speaking Stone: Stories Cemeteries Tell” – is misleading.

Cemeteries are silent. It takes a curious mind to find the glimmering pulse in the dusky dead past and a gifted writer to make it breathe and sing.

Griffith accomplishes all that and more as he explores the richness, the wonders and mysteries of life at his local graveyard.

Haitian writer and activist Jacques Roumain (1907-44) straddled, and fused, the worlds of politics and art during his relatively short life.

The grandson of a former president, he was raised in comfort and educated abroad, including in Switzerland, Spain (where he developed an interest in bullfighting), Germany and France.

But his youth was also shaped by Haiti’s subjugation during its long occupation by the United States (1915-34).

Can Jim Shepard tell the future?

How else to account for the fact he had nearly completed his novel about a global pandemic, Phase Six, before COVID-19 descended on the planet?

Although Shepard’s seventh novel is triggered by an epidemic that is killing millions around the world, it focuses on three people: the young boy from Greenland, Aleq, who became patient zero and the two female scientists, Jeannine and Danice, who try to identify the pathogen that kills about a 33% of those who contract it (COVID’s morality rate is less than 1%).

Many people have written books. Only a precious few delivered their signature subject matter with such pronounced and memorable style that their name became a word:

Rabelaisian, adjective

1: of, relating to, or characteristic of François Rabelais or his works

2: marked by gross robust humor, extravagance of caricature, or bold naturalism

Nowadays, many writers follow a straight line—an elite education, MFA degree and publication.

The German author Karl Phillip Moritz (1756-93) had plenty of schooling before literary success, but his life was a jagged line. Born poor, he received just a smidgen of formal education before he was apprenticed to a hatmaker at age 12. But he clearly had a sharp mind – and also a troubled one that would haunt his days - and so patrons financed his study of theology.

Stephen King is a lot like another Top Ten contributor, Joyce Carol Oates. Both are widely admired masters of the craft. Both are superhumanly productive. Unlike other authors who crank out work, their readers have high expectations – they demand quality in their quantity.