Literary Figures: Novelists

Kyle Smith is book and music review editor at People Magazine. He's making his debut as a novelist with the new book Love Monkey. It's about a 32-year-old New Yorker who dares to be "average" and whose credo is to "think and act like a 13-year-old boy at all times." Smith is also a Yale graduate and a Gulf War veteran.

His new book Little Children is a satirical take on parenthood and suburbia. Perrotta is also the author of the novels Joe College and Election. Election was made into the 1999 movie of the same name.

His new book is Oracle Night. Auster is the author of 11 novels, three screenplays, five books of poetry and seven works of nonfiction. His recent works include the best selling novels The Book of Illusions and Timbuktu, and he also edited the NPR National Story Project anthology I Thought My Father Was God.

His first novel, recently published, is Old School. Wolff is best known for his memoir This Boy's Life and short stories, including The Barracks Thief.

His new novel is Screaming With the Cannibals. Maynard has been an assignment writer for Reader's Digest for over a decade. He's also written for many other magazines and newspapers. Screaming with the Cannibals is a sequel to his 1988 debut novel, Crum.

His novel, The Known World, is receiving critical acclaim and has been selected as a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction. It's about a black farmer and former slave who becomes a slave owner. Jones made his literary debut more than 10 years ago with Lost in the City, a collection of short stories about struggling black residents of Washington, D.C. It won the Lannan Literary Award. Until recently Jones made his living as a proofreader for the trade magazine Tax Notes.

His new book Brundibar is based on a Czech opera of the same name. It was set to music by Hans Krasa, who was imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camp Terezin and later killed in Auschwitz. The opera was performed 55 times by the children of Terezin. Sendak has also written and illustrated the classic children's books Where the Wild Things Are, In The Night Kitchen and Outside Over There. Time magazine has said, "For Sendak, visiting the land of the very young is not something that requires a visa.

His novel The Pleasure of My Company follows his best-selling novella Shopgirl. He wrote the play Picasso at The Lapin Agile and is the author of a collection of short stories, Cruel Shoes. Martin's screenwriting credits include L.A. Story and Roxanne. He has also starred in such films as The Jerk; Planes, Trains and Automobiles; The Lonely Guy; Parenthood; Father of the Bride; Housesitter; Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid; All of Me; The Man with Two Brains; Sgt. Bilko; Leap of Faith and Little Shop of Horrors. He won a Grammy Award for his album Let's Get Small.

His new semi-autobiographical novel, The Fortress of Solitude, tells the story of Dylan Ebdus, a white kid growing up in an African-American and Latino neighborhood in New York. His last novel, Motherless Brooklyn, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. His other books include Girl in Landscape and Amnesia Moon.

Lahiri's new novel is The Namesake. Lahiri won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter of Maladies, her collection of short stories. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. The Namesake is about being an Indian immigrant in America, when the Ganguli family leaves Calcutta and settles in Cambridge, Massachusetts.