Is Percival Everett the black male Joyce Carol Oates? Is Joyce Carol Oates the white female Percival Everett?

Perhaps there’s nothing to that comparison except that both are literary artist as prodigiously talented as they are stunningly prolific—delivering quantity and quality.

Just a year after his 22nd novel, The Trees, was named a Booker Prize finalist, Everett has given us his 23rd novel (which share shelf space with his six collections of poetry and four books of stories)—a smart and funny riff on high-level mathematics, identity, race and James Bond films called Dr. No.

Lydia Millet is that rare bird – a passionate environmentalist who spends her days trying to save the planet at the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson and an acclaimed novelist who spends her nights and weekends crafting open-ended works of fiction that do not fall into the trap of activism or dogma.

Top Ten contributor Kate Atkinson is receiving strong reviews for her latest novel, Shrines of Gaiety.

We are sad to hear that Top Ten contributor Melissa Bank died of lung cancer on Aug. 2 at the age of 61.

Melissa is best known for her bestselling book of linked short stories, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing (1999), which featured a common main character, Jane Rosenthal, who was very similar to Bank. As Simon Hattenstone observed in a profile of Bank for the Guardian, “Jane and Bank were both born in Philadelphia and live in New York, they share a neurologist father who died of leukemia in his late 50s, a background in publishing, an older lover with a history of drunkenness and diabetes.”

In an Author’s Note appended to her sixth novel, Booth, Karen Joy Fowler explains: “I did not want to write a book about John Wilkes. This is a man who craved attention and has gotten too much of it; I didn’t think he deserved mine. And yet there is no way around the fact that I wouldn’t be writing about his family if he weren’t who he was, if he hadn’t done what he did.”

Sheila Heti never shies away from the big questions. The title of her 2010 novel, for example, asked How Should a Person Be?

Where that bold work of autobiographical fiction merged memoir, philosophy and art to portray the search for meaning big and small—Does life have meaning? Why do I care about petty things?—it was an inward-looking work that focused on grounded struggles.

Nobody actually talks the way Craig Nova’s characters do in his 15th novel – and first mystery – Double Solitaire. And more’s the pity. As this hardboiled yarn drags us down into Hollywood perversion and corruption it lifts us up into a glittering realm of rat-a-tat dialogue where most everybody sounds like a cross between Philip Marlowe and Noel Coward.

Congratulations to Top Ten contributor Percival Everett whose recent novel, The Trees, has been named one of five finalists for the uber-prestigious Pen/Jean Stein Book Award.

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