Novels inspired by great works of art are hardly novel but in the past several years their number seems to be growing Tracy Chevalier can claim some credit for the increase since her Girl With a Pearl Earring proved to be both a best-seller and the inspiration for a successful film and her secon

Tobias Wolff is best known as a memoirist both for This Boy rsquo s Life and In Pharaoh rsquo s Army as well as a fine short-story writer Old School his first novel though clearly labeled a novel takes the form of a first-person memoir about a schoolboy rsquo s encounters with books and their a

Margaret Atwood rsquo s last novel The Blind Assassin won the millennial Booker Prize for most writers a once-in-a-lifetime award Salman Rushdie notwithstanding Three years later she is back with a rather different kind of book more reminiscent of The Handmaid rsquo s Tale an earlier dystopia

John L rsquo Heureux began his career as a novelist writing about leaving the priesthood in the 70 rsquo s in Tight White Collar and The Clang Birds I was then America rsquo s literary editor and the magazine published reviews of both of them The second book was reviewed by Doris Grumbach as I r

Sebastian Barry first made his mark as a writer with The Steward of Christendom a play about his grandfather who rose from the ranks to become a superintendent of the Irish police force in Dublin under British rule but quickly fell into disrepute and dejection with its passing It made the rounds

I first began reading Ian McEwan when Black Dogs came out a decade ago subsequently I started collecting and reading all his novels Combining a shrewd narrative sense with acute psychology he often manages to pick subjects that push him and his reader into the borderlands of ordinary life where t

Umberto Eco is that relatively rare phenomenon a public intellectual who plies his specific academic trade as a semiotician but also ventures beyond the ivy cover to pronounce on public issues and to play the critic He is also of course a successful novelist who in The Name of the Rose may have

By any estimate the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz must be reckoned among the most important writers of the 20th century Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980 professor of Slavic languages at the University of California at Berkeley for four decades freedom fighter for Poland in World War

David Lodge holds a special place among British novelists In certain ways he is heir to Evelyn Waugh as a Catholic writer with a mordant wit and concern for religion He is also an accomplished academic with half a dozen works of criticism to his credit No surprise then that the academy is a fr

Ron Hansen has established himself as a significant contemporary American writer with five novels and a collection of stories that have earned him numerous awards and fellowships as well as an endowed chair at Santa Clara University in California He has now collected 14 essays variously published