20 Contemporary Authors and their works

1. Isabel Allende
Chilean-American author Isabel Allende wrote her debut novel, "House of
Spirits," to great acclaim in 1982. The novel began as a letter to her dying grandfather
and is a work of magical realism charting the history of Chile. Allende began writing
"House of Spirits" on Jan. 8, and subsequently has begun writing all of her books on
that day. Most of her works usually contain elements of magical realism and vivid
female characters. "City of Beasts" (2002) has been another large commercial success.

2. Margaret Atwood
Canadian author Margaret Atwood has numerous critically acclaimed novels to
her credit. Some of her best-selling titles are "Oryx and Crake" (2003), "The Handmaid's
Tale" (1986), and "The Blind Assassin" (2000). She is best known for her feminist and
dystopian political themes, and her prolific output of work spans multiple genres,
including poetry, short stories, and essays. She distinguishes her "speculative fiction"
from science fiction because "science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative
fiction could really happen."

3. Jonathan Franzen
Winner of the National Book Award for his 2001 novel, "The Corrections," and a
frequent contributor of essays to The New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen's works include a
2002 book of essays titled "How to Be Alone," a 2006 memoir, "The Discomfort Zone,"
and the acclaimed "Freedom" (2010). His work often touches on social criticism and
family troubles

4. Ian McEwan
British writer Ian McEwan started winning literary awards with his first book, a
collection of short stories, "First Love, Last Rites" (1976) and never stopped.
"Atonement" (2001), a family drama focused on repentance, won several awards and
was made into a movie directed by Joe Wright (2007). "Saturday" (2005) won the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His work often focuses on closely observed personal
lives in a politically fraught world. He wields a paintbrush.
5. David Mitchell
English novelist David Mitchell is known for his frequent use of intricate and
complex experimental structure in his work. In his first novel, "Ghostwritten" (1999), he
uses nine narrators to tell the story, and 2004's "Cloud Atlas" is a novel comprising six
interconnected stories. Mitchell won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for "Ghostwritten,"
was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for "number9dream" (2001), and was on the Booker
longlist for "The Bone Clocks" (2014).

6. Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison's "Beloved" (1987) was named best novel of the past 25 years in a
2006 New York Times Book Review survey. The searingly painful novel offers a very
personal window into the horrors of the enslavement of people and its aftermath. The
novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and Toni Morrison, a luminary of African American
literature, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

7. Haruki Murakami
Son of a Buddhist priest, Japanese author Haruki Murakami first struck a chord
with "A Wild Sheep Chase" in 1982, a novel steeped in the genre of magical realism,
which he would make his own over the coming decades. Murakami's works are
melancholic, sometimes fantastic, and often in the first person. He has said that "his
early books...originated in an individual darkness, while his later works tap into the
darkness found in society and history." His most popular book among Westerners is
"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," and 2005's English translation of "Kafka on the Shore"
has also met with great success in the West. The English version of Murakami's well-
received novel, "1Q84," was released in 2011.

8. Philip Roth
Philip Roth (1933–2018) seems to have won more book awards than any other
late-20th-century American writer. He won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for
The Plot against America (2005) and a PEN/Nabokov Award for Lifetime Achievement
in 2006. His mostly Jewish-themed work usually explores a fraught and conflicted
relationship with Jewish tradition. In Everyman (2006), Roth's 27th novel, he stuck to
one of his familiar later themes: what it's like growing old Jewish in America.
9. Zadie Smith
Literary critic James Wood coined the term "hysterical realism" in 2000 to
describe Zadie Smith's hugely successful debut novel, "White Teeth," which Smith
agreed was a "painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found
in novels like my own 'White Teeth.'" The British novelist and essayist's third novel, "On
Beauty," was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the 2006 Orange Prize for
Fiction. Her 2012 novel "NW" was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and the Women's
Prize for Fiction. Her works often deal with race and the immigrant's postcolonial
experience.

10. John Updike

During his long career that spanned decades and reached into the 21st century,
John Updike (1932–2009) was one of only three writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction more than once. Some of Updike's most renowned novels included his Rabbit
Angstrom novels, "Of the Farm" (1965), and "Olinger Stories: A Selection" (1964). His
four Rabbit Angstrom novels were named in 2006 among the best novels of the past 25
years in a New York Times Book Review survey. He famously described his subject as
"the American small town, Protestant middle class."

11. Frederic Tuten

At once daringly inventive and acutely aware of the human heart, Tuten can
move seamlessly from magic realism to more traditional prose. Tuten’s novel The
Adventures of Mao on the Long March is a modern classic (The New York Times called
it “almost too good to be true,” when it was first published in the ’70s), and Walter
Mosley is among his most devoted fans. In 2019, Tuten published his memoir My
Young Life about growing up in New York and his early artistic endeavors which
received an Editor’s Choice award from BOMB magazine as well as a number of rave
reviews for its heart and sharpness. Start with: The Green Hour

12. Ocean Vuong

As the recent recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant (MacArthur Fellowship) in
2019, Ocean Vuong is on the rise after his debut poetic novel, On Earth We’re Briefly
Gorgeous, was an almost-instant New York Times Bestseller and shortlisted for the
Carnegie Medal and the National Book Award for Fiction. The first novel from the
Vietnamese-American poet is an epistolary non-linear narrative about adolescence,
family, and immigration. His earlier poetry collection and later foray into epistolary poetic
novel marks Vuong as one to watch with the Los Angeles Times calling Vuong’s work,
“of sustained beauty and lyricism, earnest and relentless, a series of high notes that
trembles exquisitely almost without break.”
13. Diane Williams
Williams’ stories, in collections such as Excitability, are as far out on the cutting
edge as you can get. The New York Times once called her, “a double-agent in the
house of fiction.” Her 2018 anthology, The Collected Stories of Diane Williams, houses
over three hundred previously published and new short stories and novellas with nearly
800 pages of rule-breaking fiction. The widely-anthologized author eschews chronology
and just about every other narrative convention, yet her stories resonate powerfully
because, on a deep, almost eerie level, they evoke the inner life.

14. Karen Tei Yamashita

hough Yamashita was a finalist for the National Book Award with I Hotel, which
was all about San Francisco’s Asian community in the ’60s and ’70s, she hasn’t gained
the broad recognition she richly deserves. In 2017, Yamashita published Letters to
Memory, which is composed of archival material, family artifacts, and letters. The novel
explores the period of Japanese internment with an epistolary and experimental style
that the New York Times calls, “fluid and poetic as well as terrifying.” I Hotel is her sixth
novel and one of her most ambitious works to date; this 640-page epic story is made up
of interconnected novellas, all centered at the hotel where people, politics, ideals, and
history come together.

15. Brian Evenson

Evenson’s thrillingly unnerving books have won awards for mystery, horror, and
literary fiction; this is work that’s scary on a deep level. Perhaps Peter Straub put it best:
“Whenever I try to describe the resonant and disturbing literature that horror, whether
acknowledged or not, lately has found itself capable of producing, I find myself alluding
to Brian Evenson…[He] places himself furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered
narrative precipice—narrative at the far edge of narrative possibility…” Evenson is only
picking up speed, receiving both the Guggenheim Fellowship and Shirley Jackson
Award for The Warren in 2017.

16Terese Svoboda
Svoboda does it all: novels, stories, memoir, biography, poetry that pops up in
the New Yorker from time to time, and even a libretto. Her work spans continents and
an astonishing breadth of subject matter, including mermaids, pirates, conquistadors,
and ghosts to American veterans (Black Glasses Like Clark Kent), cattle herders on the
Nile, and a young woman seeking self-discovery (Bohemian Girl). With Svoboda, you
can expect the unexpected—and a big heart beating under every surprising line. Start
with: Trailer Girl and Other Stories, a mix of novella and stories.
17. Joan Wickersham
Wickersham’s most recent book is The News from Spain, a refreshing, elegant
exploration of real, grownup love, with all its complications, consolations, and imperfect
beauty. Few people write about the emotion with this much honesty and intelligence.
Her memoir, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order, was a finalist for a
National Book Critics Circle Award. If Wickersham has got you feeling lovesick, find out
why we love who we love.

18. Kevin Canty

Montana-based Canty (Where the Money Went, Everything) has been rightfully
compared to Richard Ford and Russell Banks. There’s a strong sense of place in
Canty’s beautifully rendered novels and stories, but his work goes far beyond any notion
of regionalism. The Underworld: A Novel deals with a Idaho mining town fire disaster
and fictionalizes the aftermath for a number of real and imagined survivors inspired by
true stories of loss and perseverance. His talents involve taking dark subjects such as
divorce and mortality, suffusing them with wit and empathy, and arriving at unexpected,
believable redemption.

19. Steve Stern

Stern, who draws inspiration from Yiddish folklore, is a master of the rollicking
good tale. He’s been called the successor of Isaac Bashevis Singer, but his exhilarating
narratives—many of them set in the American South!—are entirely original. The Book of
Mischief and his latest, The Pinch, are both a treat for anyone who enjoys magic,
mayhem and an invigorating investigation of life’s mysteries. Speaking of folklore and
tradition, see which ways people used to use folklore to predict the weather.

20. Terry McMillan

McMillan, back in 1987 when she published her first book, Mama, was so
dissatisfied with her publisher’s handling that she took it upon herself to publicize and
sell her book (dealing with motherhood, pride, abuse, and despair) herself. Just the
characters in her books, McMillan demands your attention and respect. With multiple
film adaptions and the New York Times bestseller list picks, McMillan’s novels tell
crucial stories about identity, Blackness, relationships, and growth in acclaimed novels
such as Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back.