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

Two published novels and several short stories into his career, Joshua Ferris has staked a unique place in American literature as a writer whose works re-explore and dismantle otherwise familiar terrain – workplace politics, disease, family dynamics – through experimentation of form. &

There is something to Phillip Lopate that may make his followers feel particularly close to him, as if his work were known solely by them and a select few others; that this is not true, that he is in fact an immensely respected writer and scholar, would seem of little importance to these readers.