Megan Mayhew Bergman

Unforgettable characters pop to life in Megan Mayhew Bergman’s first collection of short stories, Birds of a Lesser Paradise. The book earned a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and raves from many quarters. No experience seems to have escaped the author’s eagle eye as she twists even the most mundane into something special.

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Eleanor Brown

The sisters in Eleanor Brown’s entertaining and engaging new novel, The Weird Sisters, had an unusual upbringing, listening to their professor father speak primarily in Shakespearean verse. Brown’s novel focuses on what happens when the adult sisters gather to care for their sick mother. Their “weirdness” is explored with humor, compassion, and poignancy. In true Shakespearean fashion, all’s well that ends well.

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Michelle Huneven

Michelle Huneven is the award-winning author of three novels. Her latest, Blame, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and deals with the issues of guilt, redemption, and the painful soul-searching that results from the aftermath of a deadly alcohol-fueled accident that caused a double homicide. She also wrote Jamesland and Roundrock.

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Julie Otsuka

Julie Otsuka’s second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, is about a group of young Japanese “picture brides” who sailed to America in the early 1900s. Winner of the PEN/Faulkner and National Book Awards, it was described by Booklist as “entrancing, appalling, and heartbreakingly beautiful.” A California native, Otsuka lives in New York City, and writes every afternoon in her neighborhood café.

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Charlotte Rogan

After graduating from Princeton in 1975, Charlotte Rogan worked mostly in the fields of architecture and engineering. While staying home to bring up triplets, she taught herself to write. The result, her critically praised debut novel, The Lifeboat, is a psychological thriller of behavior when life is at stake.

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Dana Spiotta

Dana Spiotta is the author of Stone Arabia, a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her previous novels are Eat the Document, which was a National Book Award Finalist, and Lightning Field, which was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the West. Spiotta has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.

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Amy Waldman

In The Submission, a finalist in the Hemingway Foundation/PEN First Fiction Award, Amy Waldman creates a fascinating look at the jury’s selection in an anonymous competition for the 911 memorial. A Muslim-American wins and the jury goes into a tailspin. Waldman eloquently considers the multiple issues that spring from this event.

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