Club Book

Gish Jen is a second generation Chinese American, and a thoughtful chronicler of emigration, assimilation, and multiculturalism as they relate to the modern American experience. The Los Angeles Times said of her 1991 debut, Typical American : “Jen has done much more than tell an immigrant story… She has done it in some ways better than it has ever been done before.” Jen’s shrewd insights and sensi...

Lara Prescott belongs to the small, exclusive club of authors who have had their work optioned for film. While this is an impressive accomplishment on the face of it, still fewer writers can claim to have reached this milestone before their first book even hit shelves! Prescott’s highly anticipated literary debut, The Secrets We Kept , premieres September 3. It tells the true story behind the writ...

National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson is the author of four novels, including the critically acclaimed Where the Dead Sit Talking . Hobson’s layered coming-of-age story focuses around a Cherokee boy named Sequoyah. After a tumultuous childhood marked by abuse and neglect, sensitive Sequoyah is thrown into the foster system. While living with the eccentric Troutt family in Oklahoma, he meets...

Columbian-born Ingrid Rojas Contreras is author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree , one of 2018’s breakout fiction debuts. Based in part on the author’s own experiences growing up in factious Bogotá, Contreras’s story is set against the backdrop of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s shadow reign over Columbia. This turmoil is explored through the eyes of Chula, a seven-year-old from a well-to-do family livin...

Nicola Yoon is one of the best known – and bestselling – authors writing today in the realm of YA fiction. Her debut, Everything, Everything , catapulted her to the top of the charts in 2015. Told through diary entries, text messages, and even illustrations, the story focuses around a teenage protagonist who suffers from a rare immune disease often called “bubble boy syndrome” – but refuses to let...

Dacre Stoker is the great grand-nephew of renowned Irish novelist Bram Stoker, the mind behind the genre-defining classic Dracula . He is also manager of his famous ancestor’s estate, and an internationally recognized expert on all things Dracula. In 2009, Dacre turned his eye to fiction, and a sequel more than 110 years in the making. Aptly titled Dracula: The Undead , this continuation of the or...

Mystery phenom J.A. Jance is the mind behind not one, but four blockbuster series. Her corpus, stretching back to 1985, includes nearly 70 novels to date. Jance’s popular and compelling protagonists include news anchor-turned-sleuth Ali Reynolds, trailblazing sheriff Joanna Brady, and Arizona’s colorful Walker Family. Each has a devoted following, but none has been solving crimes for as long – or...

Over the past decade, Thrity Umrigar has emerged as a leading, cherished voice in Indian American literature. Her fiction, usually set in urban India, showcases the wealth of diversity found within the world’s second largest country. Umrigar first gained a wide audience with her sophomore work The Space Between Us (2006), which hinges on “the intimacy, and the irreconcilable class divide, between...

In the span of six short weeks in 2014, Nora McInerny had a miscarriage, buried her father, and lost her husband Aaron to an aggressive brain tumor. Devastated but undeterred, she spoke openly about her tragedies and parlayed that year into a platform to help others through grief. That platform now straddles many media. Her blog, originally called “My Husband’s Tumor,” rapidly hit and passed the 2...

New York Times bestselling historian Charles C. Mann is perhaps best known for his ground-breaking 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus . As the name suggests, 1491 challenges and corrects long-held assumptions about the indigenous peoples who populated the New World before European colonization. It won the prestigious National Academies Best Book Award. Mann’s meticulously resear...

Minnesota’s own Lorna Landvik is a comedienne, actress, playwright, and prolific novelist. Her 1995 fiction debut, Patty Jane’s House of Curl – a zany but heartwarming story about two Minnesota sisters who open a beauty parlor, “complete with live harp music and Norwegian baked goods” – introduced readers to Landvik’s unique brand of humor. She has since published nearly a dozen other books, inclu...

Cooking sensation Kwame Onwuachi is one of America’s best known chefs of color, and a vocal ambassador for Afro-Caribbean fusion cuisine. He first gained a national following as a Final Four contestant on the 2016 season of reality television juggernaut Top Chef. He wowed the judges, time again, by ingeniously melding elements of his parents’ Nigerian, Jamaican and Creole cultures into never-befor...

Award-winning novelist and poet Linda LeGarde Grover is a poignant chronicler of the modern Native American experience. A member of the Bois Forte Band of the Chippewa Tribe – and long-time professor of American Indian studies at UMN Duluth – Grover first made waves in the literary world with her 2010 short story collection The Dance Boots . This debut garnered Grover the prestigious Flannery O’Co...

Chart-topping novelist Leif Enger burst onto the literary scene in 2001 with Peace Like a River – one of this century’s few fiction debuts to sell a million copies. Set in northern Minnesota in the 1960s, audiences fell in love with Peace Like a River’s arcadian small town setting and 12-year-old protagonist Reuben ‘Rube’ Land – a young narrator every bit as memorable as Huck Finn or ‘Scout’ Finch...

Internationally renowned thriller novelist Don Winslow is the mind behind “ The Godfather trilogy of our time” – this according to sources as varied as The New York Times , Esquire magazine, and writer Stephen King. Over the past three decades, Winslow has published more than twenty books total. Early highlights include The Death and Life of Bobby Z , basis for a 2007 film of the same name starrin...

Tennessee native Emily Bernard is intimately familiar with, and endlessly fascinated by, the “complexities and paradoxes” of growing up as a person of color in the American South. She captures her insights and takeaways in the much anticipated essay anthology Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine . In an advance review for the intertwining, twelve-essay...

Peabody Award- winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author Alex Kotlowitz is one of the nation’s foremost commentators on urban violence and community perseverance. He is best known for the seminal but haunting There Are No Children Here, the real-life story of 9- and 11-year old brothers in Chicago’s most crime-ridden public housing complex. (Oprah Winfrey produced and starred in a f...

Bestselling author Deborah Blum is one of America’s foremost science writers, and one of only a handful to find publishing success writing about the history of science. Blum’s debut, The Monkey Wars (1994), grew out of a Pulitzer Prize winning series she wrote for the Sacramento Bee about the ethical implications of primate research. Blum’s follow-ups demonstrate her research range: Sex on the Bra...

David Grann is a #1 New York Times bestselling author. His gripping debut, The Lost City of Z (2009), follows the life and mysterious disappearance of Amazon explorer Percy Fawcett. It is the basis for the 2016 movie of the same name, starring Charlie Hunnam and Robert Pattinson. Grann’s follow-up, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (2010) , is a twelve-essay anthology. Each entry focuses on someone wi...

African American historian Wil Haygood made waves in 2008 with the publication of a feature in The Washington Post titled “A Butler Well Served by This Election.” It profiled the life and service of Eugene Allen, a White House butler who worked under eight presidents over the course of 34 years. It is the inspiration behind the Lee Daniels movie of the same name, starring Oprah Winfrey and Forrest...

Outside of the United States, the city of Duluth is best known by many as the primary setting for the mysteries of prolific, internationally bestselling novelist Brian Freeman. He is the author behind the acclaimed Jonathan Stride detective series. Stride’s 2006 debut,  Immoral , won the Macavity Award and was a finalist for the Edgar, Dagger, Anthony and Barry awards for best first novel. Freeman...

National Book Award winner Julia Glass won one of fiction’s highest honors with her debut novel. That breakout, Three Junes (2002), follows the lives and loves of a Scottish family over the course of a full decade. Upon its release, The New York Times Book Review gushed: “ Three Junes brilliantly rescues, then refurbishes, the traditional plot-driven novel.” Subsequent bestsellers to Glass’s credi...

Eli Saslow is a Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist, and a leading voice in the discourse around resurgent white nationalism and how to combat it. His first book-length treatment of this subject, Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist , hits shelves in September. The book follows Saslow’s relationship with Derek Black, a white supremacist from one of the movement’s most h...

Eli Saslow is a Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist, and a leading voice in the discourse around resurgent white nationalism and how to combat it. His first book-length treatment of this subject, Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist , hits shelves in September. The book follows Saslow’s relationship with Derek Black, a white supremacist from one of the movement’s most h...

Award-winning journalist and feminist icon Peggy Orenstein is a leading voice in the national conversations around gender norms and expectations. Her influential exposés include Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (2011) and Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape (2016). Orenstein has also penned a bestselling and candid mem...