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Karen Joy Fowler

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

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.

Craig Nova

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.

Paul Auster on Stephen Crane

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.

Lionel Shriver

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.

Edwidge Danticat on "Masters of the Dew"

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).