Literary Figures: Novelists

Movie-theater owner Ben Tanaka is having relationship issues; his girlfriend, Miko, suspects he's secretly attracted to white women. (She's right, but he won't admit it.) In Shortcomings, Asian-American graphic novelist Adrian Tomine (Scrapbook, Summer Blonde) has finally done what many fans and critics have suggested he should: addressed race in his work.

Novelist Junot Diaz's first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao explores the complexities of living in two cultures at once. Set in both the United States and in the Dominican Republic, the novel follows the story of Oscar Wao in prose that frequently mixes Spanish and English in the same sentence.

Author Alice Sebold has produced difficult books before: Her novel The Lovely Bones, soon to be filmed by director Peter Jackson, centers on a 14-year-old looking down from heaven after her own rape and murder.

Now comes Sebold's latest fiction, The Almost Moon: Its narrative involves a middle-aged woman who murders her ailing elderly mother.

Philip Roth's newest novel, Exit Ghost, is his ninth and final Nathan Zuckerman book.

The series began in 1979 with The Ghost Writer; a compendium, Zuckerman Bound, is now available.

Roth won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for American Pastoral; his 28 novels have won him numerous other awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal for Fiction.

Novelist Bill Flanagan wrote the comedy A&R about the smooth operators and the scatty artists who make the music business so entertaining. Now he's lampooning the cable-TV industry in his novel New Bedlam. The source for his send-ups? His day job as an MTV networks exec.

Michael Harvey created the A&E cable show Cold Case Files, a documentary series that follows forensic experts and detectives as they investigate long-unsolved murder cases. Harvey has also written a novel, The Chicago Way.

Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, has written a new novel that Publishers Weekly describes as a "murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller."

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a private-eye novel that takes place in a fictional community of Jewish exiles — "the frozen chosen" — displaced to a temporary settlement in Alaska by World War II.

Novelist Joshua Ferris makes his debut with Then We Came to the End, a satire about life in a Chicago advertising agency just as the dot-com boom went bust.

In a single monologue, the protagonist of Mohsin Hamid's sophomore novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, tells his life story to an American stranger over dinner in a Pakistani cafe. Hamid's first novel, Moth Smoke, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Author Jonathan Lethem. His new novel is “You Don’t Love Me Yet” (Doubleday). He is also the author of the semi-autobiographical novel, "The Fortress of Solitude" (Doubleday 2003) about a white kid growing up in an African-American and Latino neighborhood in New York. His novel, "Motherless Brooklyn" (Doubleday 1999) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. His other books include "Girl in Landscape" (Doubleday 1998) and "Amnesia Moon" (Harcourt 1995).