If only she weren't so prolific, the thinking goes, that Nobel would be hers.  And Joyce Carol Oates – with the aid of her pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelley – is nothing if not prolific, having written well over fifty books in her lifetime.  But this is not for lack

Jhumpa Lahiri's career should have been doomed as soon as she won the Pulitzer Prize for her first published book, the short story collection Interpreter of Maladies.  But her subsequent releases have found her unmoored by the attention and expectations that met her debut effort, and

The terrifically-named Wells Tower had been writing professionally – had been published, that is – for a little under two decades before releasing his first short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.  He'd established a reputation during this period fo

Nathanael West accomplished a few several things in his short life, among them: forging his way into both Tufts and Brown Universities, writing several largely ignored satiric novels, writing several equally ignored screenplays, and running a stop sign en route to the funeral of F. Scott Fitzgeral