Sam Briger

"I don't use my life as inspiration," says the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Her new book, Manhattan Beach, imagines the lives of the women who worked on the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II.

"I wanted to make a completely honest, heart-on-sleeve, non-ironic melodrama," del Toro says. Set in 1962, his new film features a fairy tale romance between a creature and a mute woman.

Ward's National Book Award-winning novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, is set in a small town modeled after her own rural hometown. It centers on a biracial young boy confronting the South's racial legacy.