Author Biographies

Guest Editor 2008

Salman Rushdie is the author of such novels as Midnight's Children (which won the Booker Prize for Fiction, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, an Arts Council Writers' Award and the English-Speaking Union Award, and in 1993 was judged to have been the 'Booker of Bookers,' the best novel to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the award's 25-year history; Shame (which won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction); The Satanic Verses (which won the Whitbread Novel Award); The Ground Beneath Her Feet; Fury; and Shalimar The Clown. He is also the author of a children's book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which he adapted for the stage (with Tim Supple and David Tushingham. It was first staged at the Royal National Theatre, London); a book of essays entitled Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991; Step Across the Line: Collected Non-fiction 1992-2002; and East, West, a book of short stories.

Contributing Authors

T. C. Boyle is the author of twenty-one books of fiction, including The Women, Talk Talk, Tooth and Claw, and the forthcoming collection Wild Child and Other Stories. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a member of the English Department at USC. His novels and story collections have received a number of awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award for World's End, the Prix Médicis Étranger for The Tortilla Curtain, and the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction. His website is tcboyle.com.

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia, the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer, and the children's novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery. His stories have appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, Georgia Review, McSweeney's, Zoetrope, and The Oxford American, as well as in The Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies. Recently he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and named one of Granta magazine's Best Young American Novelists. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised.

Karen Brown's first collection of short stories, Pins and Needles, was the recipient of AWP's Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and published in 2007 by the University of Massachusetts Press. Her work has appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories 2006, and in journals that include Georgia Review, Epoch, Tampa Review, and Crazyhorse. She studied creative writing at Cornell University, and the University of South Florida in Tampa, where she is currently working on a novel.

Katie Chase was born in 1980 and raised in a suburb of Detroit. She received her B.A. from the University of Michigan and her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow and a Provost's Postgraduate Writing Fellow. "Man and Wife" is her first published story.

Danielle Evans has published fiction in The Paris Review, Phoebe, Black Renaissance Noire, and The L Magazine. She received an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her first short story collection is forthcoming from Riverhead, and she is currently at work on a novel.

Born in New York and raised in Honolulu, Allegra Goodman is the author of the novels Intuition, Paradise Park, and Kaaterskill Falls, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has written two collections of shorts stories: The Family Markowitz and Total Immersion. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Commentary. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The American Scholar, The New York Times Book Review and The New Republic. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, the Salon Award for Fiction, and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her new novel, The Other Side of the Island, has just been published.

A. M. Homes is the author of the novels This Book Will Save Your Life, Music for Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, and Jack, along with the short story collections Things You Should Know and The Safety of Objects and the memoir The Mistress's Daughter. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages and appears frequently in Granta, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, and Zoetrope. She is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, Bomb, and Blind Spot. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, NYFA, and The Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library. Born in Washington, D.C., she now lives in New York City.

Nicole Krauss is the author of the novels Man Walks into a Room and The History of Love, which received many awards, including France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, and Esquire, and in 2007 she was selected as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. She was born in New York City in 1974 and now lives in Brooklyn. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.

Jonathan Lethem has written seven novels, including Girl in Landscape and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the 1999 National Book Critic's Circle Award and has been translated into twenty languages. His stories and essays have been collected in The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye, Men and Cartoons, and The Disappointment Artist. In 2005 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. He lives in Brooklyn and Maine.

Rebecca Makkai has published stories in Threepenny Review, Iowa Review, Shenandoah, and Sewanee Review. She is at work on a novel and on a collection of stories linked by the themes of music and war. She is twenty-nine and lives near Chicago with her husband and baby.

Steven Millhauser is the author of eleven works of fiction, including Edwin Mullhouse, Martin Dressler, and Dangerous Laughter (2008). He was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Connecticut, and now lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Daniyal Mueenuddin is a graduate of Dartmouth College, Yale Law School, and the M.F.A. program at the University of Arizona. For a number of years he practiced law in New York City. During 2007 he held a residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Currently he is based in Pakistan. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker and in Zoetrope. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, his debut collection of linked stories, will be published by Norton in spring 2009.

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published eleven new collections of stories—Dance of the Happy Shades; Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You; The Beggar Maid; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway; The View from Castle Rock, and a volume of Selected Stories—as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada's Governor General's Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England's W. H. Smith Book Award, the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Edward MacDowell Medal in literature. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro divides her time between Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, and Comox, British Columbia.

Miroslav Penkov was born and raised in Bulgaria. In 2001, at the age of eighteen, he arrived in America to study. He is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Arkansas, where he was a Walton Fellow in Fiction. His stories have appeared in Blackbird and twice in Southern Review. He is the recipient the 2007 Eudora Welty Prize in Fiction.

Karen Russell's first collection of short stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, was named a Best Book of 2006 by the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times; in 2007 she was featured in Granta's Best of the Young American Novelists. She lives in New York City where she is working on another story collection and a novel about a family of alligator wrestlers, Swamplandia!

George Saunders, a 2006 MacArthur Fellow, is the author of six books (including the short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation and, most recently, the essay collection The Braindead Megaphone. He teaches at Syracuse University.

Christine Sneed lives in Evanston, Illinois, and teaches writing classes at DePaul University and Loyola University in Chicago. Her stories and poems have appeared in New England Review, Massachusetts Review, Other Voices, South Dakota Review, Pleiades, Greensboro Review, and several other journals. She studied French language and literature at Georgetown University and creative writing and a little more French at Indiana University.

Bradford Tice received his master's in creative writing from the University of Colorado, and is now at work on his Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee. His poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in such periodicals as The Atlantic, North American Review, The American Scholar, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, Crab Orchard Review, and the anthology This New Breed: Gents, Bad Boys, and Barbarians 2 (Windstorm Creative, 2003).

Mark Wisniewski is the author of the novel Confessions of a Polish Used-Car Salesman, the collection of short fiction All Weekend with the Lights On, the book of narrative poems One of Us One Night, and the book Writing and Revising Your Fiction. Awarded two Regents' Fellowships in Creative Writing by the University of California at Davis, he won a 2006 Isherwood Foundation Fellowship in Fiction, the 2006 Tobias Wolff Award, the TIL Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story for 2006, and the 2007 Gival Press Short Story Award. More than one hundred of his short stories have appeared in magazines such as Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly, American Short Fiction, Georgia Review, The Sun, and Yale Review, and about as many poems of his are published or forthcoming in venues including Poetry, New York Quarterly, and Poetry International.

Tobias Wolff's books include the memoirs This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War; the short novel The Barracks Thief; three collections of short stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, and The Night in Question; and, most recently, the novel Old School. His fourth collection, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories, will appear in April 2008. He has also edited several anthologies, among them The Best American Short Stories 1994, A Doctor's Visit: The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov, and The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories. His work is translated widely and has received numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, both the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction and the Rea Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of English at Stanford.