The Book Of Other People
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The Book Of Other People
''The Book of Other People'' is a collection of short stories, published in 2008 by Penguin Books. Selected and edited by Zadie Smith, it contains 23 short stories by 23 different authors, among them Nick Hornby, David Mitchell, Colm Tóibín, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, as well as Smith herself. The collection, as evidenced by the title, focuses on character; the authors were simply asked to "make somebody up". Smith, Zadie. Preface. ''The Book of Other People''. By Zadie Smith, ed. New York City: Penguin Books, 2008. vii–ix. “''The Book of Other People'' is about character. The instruction was simple: ''make somebody up''.” It being a "charity anthology," the contributors to ''The Book of Other People'' were not compensated for their writing, and the book's proceeds were given to 826NYC, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students with their creative writing skills. Contents One of the central requirements for the authors was that each contribution ...
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Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith FRSL (born Sadie; 25 October 1975) is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, ''White Teeth'' (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She has been a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University since September 2010. Biography Sadie Smith was born on 25 October 1975 in Willesden to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne Bailey, and an English father, Harvey Smith, who was 30 years his wife's senior. At the age of 14, she changed her name from Sadie to Zadie. Smith's mother grew up in Jamaica and emigrated to England in 1969. Smith's parents divorced when she was a teenager. She has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers (one is the rapper and stand-up comedian Doc Brown, and the other is the rapper Luc Skyz). As a child, Smith was fond of tap dancing, and in her teenage years, she considered a career in musical theatre. While at university, Smith earned money as a jazz ...
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Daniel Clowes
Daniel Gillespie Clowes (; born April 14, 1961) is an American cartoonist, graphic novelist, illustrator, and screenwriter. Most of Clowes's work first appeared in '' Eightball'', a solo anthology comic book series. An ''Eightball'' issue typically contained several short pieces and a chapter of a longer narrative that was later collected and published as a graphic novel, such as ''Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron'' (1993), '' Ghost World'' (1997), ''David Boring'' (2000) and ''Patience'' (2016). Clowes's illustrations have appeared in ''The New Yorker'', ''Newsweek'', ''Vogue'', ''The Village Voice'', and elsewhere. With filmmaker Terry Zwigoff, Clowes adapted ''Ghost World'' into a 2001 film and another ''Eightball'' story into the 2006 film, '' Art School Confidential''. Clowes's comics, graphic novels, and films have received numerous awards, including a Pen Award for Outstanding Work in Graphic Literature, over a dozen Harvey and Eisner Awards, and an Academy Award nomination ...
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Miranda July
Miranda July (born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger; February 15, 1974) is an American film director, screenwriter, singer, actress and author. Her body of work includes film, fiction, monologue, digital presentations and live performance art. She wrote, directed and starred in the films ''Me and You and Everyone We Know'' (2005) and '' The Future'' (2011) and wrote and directed ''Kajillionaire'' (2020). She has authored a book of short stories, ''No One Belongs Here More Than You'' (2007); a collection of nonfiction short stories, ''It Chooses You'' (2011); and the novel ''The First Bad Man'' (2015). Early life July was born in Barre, Vermont, in 1974, the daughter of Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger. Her parents are both writers who taught at Goddard College at the time. They were also the founders of North Atlantic Books, a publisher of alternative health, martial arts, and spiritual titles. Her father was Jewish, and her mother was Protestant. July is the cousin of American ...
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Vendela Vida
Vendela Vida (born September 6, 1971) is an American novelist, journalist, editor, screenplay writer, and educator. She is the author of multiple books, has worked as a writing teacher, and is a founder and editor of '' The Believer'' magazine. Early life Vida was born on the 6 September 1971 in San Francisco, California. Both of her parents were European immigrants, her mother was from Sweden and her father is Hungarian. She inherited the name Vendela from her maternal grandmother. She left California to get her bachelor's degree in English in 1993 at Middlebury College in Vermont, and it was through a mutual friend from her undergraduate degree that she met her future spouse, Dave Eggers. She later continued her studies and received a Master of Fine Arts degree at Columbia University. After graduating, she interned at the ''Paris Review'', and she adapted her master's degree thesis into her first book, ''Girls on the Verge''. Career In 2003, Vida co-founded ''The Believer'' ...
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George Saunders
George Saunders (born December 2, 1958) is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in ''The New Yorker'', '' Harper's'', ''McSweeney's'', and '' GQ''. He also contributed a weekly column, ''American Psyche'', to the weekend magazine of ''The Guardian'' between 2006 and 2008. A professor at Syracuse University, Saunders won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004, and second prize in the O. Henry Awards in 1997. His first story collection, ''CivilWarLand in Bad Decline'', was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award. In 2006 Saunders received a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2006 he won the World Fantasy Award for his short story "CommComm". His story collection ''In Persuasion Nation'' was a finalist for the Story Prize in 2007. In 2013, he won the PEN/Malamud Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Saunders's '' Tenth of December: Stories'' won the 2013 Story Prize ...
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Heidi Julavits
Heidi Suzanne Julavits (born April 20, 1969) is an American author and was a founding editor of '' The Believer'' magazine. She has been published in ''The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2'', ''Esquire'', ''Culture+Travel'', ''Story'', '' Zoetrope All-Story'', and '' McSweeney’s Quarterly''. Her novels include ''The Mineral Palace'' (2000), ''The Effect of Living Backwards'' (2003), ''The Uses of Enchantment'' (2006), and ''The Vanishers'' (2012). She is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University. She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award. Early life Heidi Julavits was born and grew up in Portland, Maine, before attending Dartmouth College. She later went on to earn an MFA from Columbia University. Career ''The Believer'' and others Julavits wrote the article "Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!" (subtitled: "A Call For A New Era Of Experimentation, and a Book Culture That Will Support It") in the debut issue of ''The Believer'', a publication that a ...
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Adam Thirlwell
Adam Thirlwell (born 22 August 1978) is a British novelist. His work has been translated into thirty languages. He has twice been named as one of ''Granta''s Best of Young British Novelists. In 2015 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the London editor of ''The Paris Review''. Life Thirlwell was educated at the independent Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, Elstree. He read English at New College, Oxford, where he got the top first. He was a Prize Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford between 2000 and 2007, and worked as assistant editor at the literary magazine Areté. He now lives in London. In 2011 he was the S Fischer Guest Professor of Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin. In 2015 he was announced as an Honorary Fellow of the Metaphysical Club at the Domus Academy in Milan. Work Thirlwell is the author of three novels: ''Politics'' (2003), ''The Escape'' (2009) described by Milan Kundera as "a novel wh ...
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Toby Litt
Toby Litt is an English writer and academic in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. Life Litt was born in Ampthill in 1968. He was educated at Bedford Modern School, read English at Worcester College, Oxford and studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia where he was taught by Malcolm Bradbury. A short story by Toby Litt was included in the anthology ''All Hail the New Puritans'' (2000), edited by Matt Thorne and Nicholas Blincoe, and he has edited ''The Outcry'' (2001), Henry James's last completed novel, for Penguin in the UK. In 2003 he was nominated by Granta magazine as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Novelists', although his work since then has met with mixed reviews, one reviewer in the Guardian writing that his novel ''I Play the Drums in a Band Called Okay'' "goes on ... and on, and on. There is plenty of story here, but little plot, and no tension." He edited the 13th edition of ''New Writing'' (the British Cou ...
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Hari Kunzru
Hari Mohan Nath Kunzru (born 1969) is a British novelist and journalist. He is the author of the novels '' The Impressionist'', '' Transmission'', ''My Revolutions'', ''Gods Without Men'', ''White Tears''David Robinson"Interview: Hari Kunzru, author" scotsman.com, 29 July 2011 and ''Red Pill''. His work has been translated into twenty languages. Personal life Kunzru was born in London to an Indian Kashmiri Pandit father and a British mother. He grew up in Essex and educated at Bancroft's School. He studied English at Wadham College, Oxford, then gained an MA in Philosophy and Literature from University of Warwick. In his teens, Kunzru decided that he did not believe in formal religion or God, and is "opposed to how religion is used to police people." Kunzru is married to novelist Katie Kitamura, and the couple have two children. Kunzru is fascinated by UFOs and as a youngster often imagined a close-encounter type experience with them. Career From 1995 to 1997 he worked on ...
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Chris Ware
Franklin Christenson "Chris" Ware (born December 28, 1967) is an American cartoonist known for his ''Acme Novelty Library'' series (begun 1994) and the graphic novels ''Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth'' (2000), ''Building Stories'' (2012) and ''Rusty Brown'' (2019). His works explore themes of social isolation, emotional torment and depression. He tends to use a vivid color palette and realistic, meticulous detail. His lettering and images are often elaborate and sometimes evoke the ragtime era or another early 20th-century American design style. Ware often refers to himself in the publicity for his work in self-effacing, even withering tones. He is considered by some critics and fellow notable illustrators and writers, such as Dave Eggers, to be among the best currently working in the medium; Canadian graphic-novelist Seth (cartoonist), Seth has said, "Chris really changed the playing field. After him, a lot of [cartoonists] really started to scramble and go, 'Holy [expl ...
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Aleksandar Hemon
Aleksandar Hemon ( sr-Cyrl, Александар Xeмoн; born September 9, 1964) is a Bosnian-American author, essayist, critic, television writer, and screenwriter. He is best known for the novels '' Nowhere Man'' (2002) and '' The Lazarus Project'' (2008), and his scriptwriting as a co-writer of ''The Matrix Resurrections'' (2021). He frequently publishes in ''The New Yorker'' and has also written for ''Esquire'', ''The Paris Review'', the Op-Ed page of ''The New York Times'', and the Sarajevo magazine '' BH Dani''. Early life Hemon was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, then Yugoslavia, to a father of partial Ukrainian descent and a Bosnian Serb mother. Hemon's great-grandfather, Teodor Hemon, came to Bosnia from Western Ukraine prior to World War I, when both countries were a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Biography Hemon graduated from the University of Sarajevo and was a published writer in former Yugoslavia by the time he was 26. Since 1992 he has lived ...
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Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat (; born January 19, 1969) is a Haitian-American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, ''Breath, Eyes, Memory'', was published in 1994 and went on to become an Oprah's Book Club selection. Danticat has since written or edited several books and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. Early life Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. When she was twelve years old, her father André immigrated to New York, to be followed two years later by her mother Rose. This left Danticat and her younger brother, also named André, to be raised by her aunt and uncle. When asked in an interview about her traditions as a child, she included storytelling, church, and constantly studying school material as all part of growing up. Although her formal education in Haiti was in French, she spoke Haitian Creole at home. While still in Haiti, Danticat began writing at nine years of age. She later wrote another story about her immigration experience for ''New Yout ...
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