Uptown Literati

Many readers remember Anita Diamant for her unforgettable bestseller, The Red Tent, the story of Jacob’s daughter Dinah over whom the Book of Genesis glosses over. She writes with poetry and an innate understanding of women. Her latest novel, Day After Night, carries these same strengths and focuses on a group of young [...]

The dysfunctional family saga is one that has been touched upon many times, but every once in a while a novel comes along that revolutionizes the subgenre. Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You has been hailed as one of these novels, at once side-splitting and heart-rending and cockle-warming. In the interview [...]

Kind-eyed, loced Carleen Brice, the author of the highly-acclaimed novel Orange Mint and Honey, published her second novel, Children of the Waters, in June 2009. Children of the Waters tells the story of two sisters’ parallel struggles through prejudice, disease, and family through subtle but finely tuned writing. In the interview below with “One World [...]

It is somewhat astounding and certainly a blessing that we can count Bich Minh Nguyen (pronounced Bit Min New-win) among today’s authors when one considers her early life.

When she was 1-year-old, her Vietnamese family fled Saigon on April 29, 1975, the night before it fell. Nguyen now teaches literature and creative writing at Purdue University, [...]

Italian-American author Gay Talese has lived for the majority of the twentieth century and made an illustrious career for himself. With Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and others, he helped to define the genre of New Journalism in the 1960s, and since then has been covering topics from Frank Sinatra to boxing to mob violence to [...]

Geraldine Brooks is a true woman of the world. She was born and raised in Australia, but completed her Master’s in journalism at Columbia University and married her husband Tony Horwitz in France, during which period she converted to Judaism. As a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, she covered crises in the Middle [...]

Those who have grown up on digitally-enhanced movie monsters and other special effects of the Computer Age might chuckle at the mechanically or cosmetically created monsters of Old Hollywood. And yet in their heyday, these monsters made audiences gasp and screech, and theirs is a legacy to remember.

Carla Laemmle, who turns 100 in October, was [...]

Though One Thousand and One Nights was written hundreds of years ago, it’s still a goldmine of inspiration for readers and writers. Its most recent reincarnation is The Night Counter, a novel by Alia Yunis, in which a dying old woman spins nine final tales for the Scheherazade of legend and in doing so, unveils [...]

Achy Obejas, a Cuban lesbian living in Chicago, is a true “writer’s writer.” She has published six acclaimed books, reported on arts and culture for The Chicago Tribune and on Latin music for The Washington Post, and won the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Her novels tend to investigate questions of personal, national, and sexual identity, [...]

As an author, blogger, comedian, producer, and mother of three, one could get a little frazzled. But if Stefanie Wilder-Taylor ever does, she keeps her sense of humor about it. On July 7, she comes out with her latest collection of personal essays, cumbersomely and hilariously entitled It’s Not Me, It’s You: Subjective Recollections from [...]