Literary Figures

The best-selling author and humorist has kept journals for 36 years. Those diaries have been the jumping-diff point for the personal essays that appear in his collections, including Me Talk Pretty One Day and now Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls.

On Wednesday, it was announced that the 28-year-old fiction writer had won the Story Prize as well as the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her debut story collection explores the landscape, people and history of the American West.

In his first novel, J.R. Moehringer writes from the point of view of Willie Sutton, whom he calls the "greatest American robber." Moehringer says writing historical fiction helped him deal with the anger he felt toward banks after the global financial crisis in 2008.

The author's What Happened to Sophie Wilder features a convert to Catholicism and another character who struggles to understand her faith. Beta talks about his Catholic upbringing, iron's place in fiction and literature's therapeutic aspects.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times columnist's new memoir explores her past, present and future — her relationships with her parents and children, her faith, her career and her feelings about herself over the past five decades.

In What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Nathan Englander writes about his own faith — and what it means to be Jewish — in stories that explore religious tension, Israeli-American relations and the Holocaust.

Ayad Akhtar's debut novel, American Dervish, tells the story of a Pakistani-American boy in Milwaukee coming to terms with his religion and identity. Akbar drew on his own experiences exploring the Muslim faith as a teenager growing up in Wisconsin.

Two years after the death of her husband, Joan Didion suffered the untimely loss of her only daughter. She pieces together her memories of Quintana Roo in her new memoir, Blue Nights.

Illustrator Christoph Niemann's work ranges from whimsical children's books to poignant cover art for The New Yorker, but he's not interested in ending up in a museum. "I get a much bigger kick out of having my image seen like a million times for like 20 seconds," he says.

The veteran journalist's new novel takes place in an old-school print newsroom, not unlike the one where he worked. Hamill, a longtime columnist, reflects on changes in the news industry, and explains how columnists of his day differed from today's media bloggers.