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From Stephen Elliott
More often than not, the best surprises arrive in unmarked brown boxes. In this case the mysterious contents appeared to be harmless enough, despite the intimidating immensity of the thing: it was the new novel by the great Hungarian writer Péter Nádas, a 1,000-plus-page behemoth called Parallel Stories.
For a writer, Sloane Crosley’s a pretty fancy young lady. For starters, she’s been in the New York Times—for her fashion sense; she’s gone head to head with comedic Scottish bulldog Craig Ferguson
The list of reputable writers who have worked in the medical field is long and distinguished—Chekhov, Bulgakov, William Carlos Williams, among many others—and yet the promethean doctor-divinity-student-novelist-daredevil Chris Adrian,
John Sayles is a force of nature, a do-it-yourself renaissance man—director, actor, screenwriter, script doctor, novelist.
The brainy British novelist David Mitchell is a member of that elite club of living writers—Pynchon, Coetzee—who have spawned an obscene amount of critical adoration.
When he’s not documenting his irreversible addiction to food porn or commiserating with the literary illuminati, Gary Shteyngart writes books. OK, he writes some of the funniest books I have read, penned by a Soviet or otherwise.
Jennifer Egan is widely regarded, not pejoratively, as an “unclassifiable” novelist. Indeed, each of her books—Emerald City, The Invisible Circus, Look at Me, The Keep, and now A Visit From the Goon Squad—could have been written by different writers, so distinct are they in setting and style.