The Book of Other People

Contributors

DANIEL CLOWES was born in Chicago in 1961 and now lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, Erika, their son, Charles, and their beagle, Ella. His books include Ghost World, David Boring, Caricature and Ice Haven.

EDWIDGE DANTICAT was born in Haiti and moved to the United States of America when she was twelve years old. She is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, Krik? Krak!, The Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker and, most recently, Brother, I’m Dying, a memoir.

DAVE EGGERS is the editor of McSweeney’s and the author of four books, including What Is the What. He is the co-founder of 826 Valencia.

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER was born in 1977. He is the author of Everything Is Illuminated, which won the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. He is also the editor of A Convergence of Birds, a tribute to the work of the American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

ANDREW SEAN GREER is the author of three works of fiction, most recently The Confessions of Max Tivoli, a national bestseller. He is the recipient of the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, the NY Public Library Young Lions Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in San Francisco.

ALEKSANDAR HEMON was born in Sarajevo, and moved to Chicago in 1992. Upon his arrival in the US of A, he had all kinds of lousy jobs, including, but not limited to, canvassing for Greenpeace and teaching English as a Second Language to the people who suddenly found their First Language nearly perfectly useless. He acquired an MA degree in English from Northwestern and dropped the pursuit of a PhD the moment he sold his book The Question of Bruno. Then he wrote Nowhere Man. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Esquire, The Paris Review and in the Best American Short Stories, among others. He writes a column in Bosnian, under the unfortunate title Hemonwood, for the Sarajevo magazine Dani. He is a Guggenheim, MacArthur and decent fellow. When he lives, he lives in Chicago.

A. M. HOMES is the author of the acclaimed memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter and the novels, This Book Will Save Your Life, Music For Torching, The End of Alice, In A Country of Mothers, and Jack, as well as the short-story collections, Things You Should Know and The Safety of Objects, the travel book, Los Angeles: People, Places and The Castle on the Hill, and the artist’s book Appendix A:.

NICK HORNBY was born in 1957. He is the author of four novels: High Fidelity, About A Boy, How To Be Good and A Long Way Down, and two other woks of non-fiction: Fever Pitch and The Complete Polysyllabic Spree. In 1999 he was awarded the E. M. Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives and works in Highbury, north London.

HEIDI JULAVITS is the author of three novels, most recently The Uses of Enchantment. She is a founding editor of The Believer magazine and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in New York and Maine.

MIRANDA JULY is a filmmaker, performing artist and writer. Her collection of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, was published earlier this year. She lives in Los Angeles.

A. L. KENNEDY has written four collections of short fiction and four novels, along with two books of non-fiction – many of these have won awards. Her latest novel is Day. She produces a variety of journalism and also writes for the stage, radio, film and TV and performs stand-up comedy. In 1993 and 2003 she was listed among Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

HARI KUNZRU is the author of The Impressionist, Transmission and the short story collection Noise, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. He is a contributing editor of Mute magazine and sits on the executive council of English PEN. He lives in East London.

JONATHAN LETHEM is the author of six novels including The Fortress of Solitude, as well as two collections of short stories. He lives in Brooklyn and Maine.

TOBY LITT was born in 1968. He is the author of Adventures in Capitalism, Beatniks, Corpsing, deadkidsongs, Exhibitionism, Finding Myself, Ghost Story and Hospital. In 2003, he was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. His website can be found at www.tobylitt.com.

DAVID MITCHELL was born in England in 1969. He is the author of four novels. He lives in Ireland with his wife and their two children.

ANDREW O’HAGAN lives in London and his latest novel is Be Near Me.

ZZ PACKER is the author of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and a New York Times Notable Book. A graduate of Yale, she has been a Wallace Stegner-Truman Capote fellow at Stanford University, where she is currently a Jones lecturer. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

GEORGE SAUNDERS, a 2006 MacArthur Fellow, is the author of five books of fiction including the short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. He teaches at Syracuse University.

POSY SIMMONDS was born in 1945 in Berkshire. She studied at the Sorbonne University, Paris before returning to England to attend the Central School of Art and Design in London. She has contributed to the Guardian since 1972 and has also drawn for the Sun, The Times and Cosmopolitan. Her bestselling children’s books include Fred, Lulu and the Flying Babies and The Chocolate Wedding, and her books for adults include Gemma Bovery and Literary Life. She lives in London.

ZADIE SMITH was born in north-west London in 1975. She is the author of White Teeth, The Autograph Man and On Beauty.

ADAM THIRLWELL was born in 1978. His first novel, Politics, was published in 2003. A book about novels, Miss Herbert, is out this year. ‘Nigora’ is from a novel in progress.

COLM TÓIBÍN is the author of the five novels, including The Black-water Lightship and The Master, and a volume of stories Mothers and Sons. He lives in Dublin.

VENDELA VIDA is the author of two novels, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and And Now You Can Go. Her first book, Girls on the Verge, was a journalistic study of female initiation rituals in America. She is the co-editor of The Believer magazine, the editor of The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, and a founding board member and teacher at 826 Valencia. She lives in Northern California.

CHRIS WARE lives outside of Chicago, Illinois, and is the author of Jimmy Corrigan – the Smartest Kid on Earth. He is currently serializing two new graphic novels in his ongoing periodical The ACME Novelty Library, the 18th and 18½ issues of which will be released in late 2007.