Wordcandy Authors

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Apr 2 2006

Iain M. Banks

Iain M. Banks is a serious writer. You can tell, because he has a serious website, serious book covers, and a serious, deliberate style that moves along at a snail’s pace. However, if you’re wil...

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Dec 7 2004

Nick Bantock

A mystery/romance told entirely through letters (which have to be taken out of the book and read) and lushly illustrated postcards, Canadian author Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine stories are th...

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Jul 20 2009

Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Jennifer Lynn Barnes wrote her first novel as a teenager, and she’s written five others since, including the Wordcandy Featured Book pick Fate, Tattoo, and the 'Killer Squad' series. Her far-fetc...

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Jan 24 2005

J. M. Barrie

Like A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh series, Scottish author Sir J. M. Barrie's most famous work walks a fine line between preciousness and genuine fun--and manages, most of the time, to keep its ba...

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Jul 11 2005

Stephanie Barron

Stephanie Barron is the author of a series of novels featuring Jane Austen as an amateur detective. Ms. Barron's books are structured as Austen's long-lost diaries, recently discovered in an atti...

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Aug 9 2008

Dale E. Basye

Dale E. Basye has been a film critic and journalist, and published an Arts and Entertainment newsletter, and now lives in Oregon. Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go is his first novel.Note: Heck feature...

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Sep 7 2006

K. P. Bath

We held off on reviewing author K.P. Bath until we were sure that there was going to be a sequel to his first book, The Secret of Castle Cant. It’s not that we didn’t love The Secret of Castle Ca...

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Oct 23 2011

Kate Beaton

Kate Beaton is the author of Hark! A Vagrant, one of our favorite web comics (also one of our Featured Books). Hark! A Vagrant is a testament to the kind of comic strips that can only be found on...

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Feb 27 2009

Tom Becker

Tom Becker is a British fantasy author. Darkside, his debut novel, is both the first installment in a projected series and one of our Featured Book titles.Note: We feel a strong sense of kinship ...

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Jan 18 2011

Josh Berk

Josh Berk is a Pennsylvania-based librarian with a professed (and, in our opinion, inexplicable) love of the Hardy Boys mysteries. His debut novel, The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin, is one of ou...

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Mar 20 2005

Alfred Bester

Although he had worked as a writer for comic books and radio and his novel The Demolished Man won the first Hugo Award in 1953, Alfred Bester was never really what you'd call a household name. Be...

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Apr 11 2008

Jeanne Birdsall

Jeanne Birdsall is the author of the National Book Award-winning novel The Penderwicks and its sequel: Featured Book pick The Penderwicks on Gardam Street. We have our doubts about the plausibili...

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Mar 6 2008

Scott Bittle

Journalist Scott Bittle is the executive editor of Public Agenda Online, and (along with Jean Johnson) the co-author of Where Does the Money Go? Your Guide to the Federal Budget Crisis, one of our...

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Dec 26 2005

Holly Black

Holly Black is the author of a series of excellent YA horror/fantasy novels: Valiant, Tithe, and Ironside, one of our Featured Book picks. Ms. Black is also one of the authors (along with Tony Di...

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Apr 10 2007

Benjamin Black

Benjamin Black is the pen name of prize-winning Irish novelist and journalist John Banville. Banville’s books are short on charm, but long on intelligence, elegant prose, and dark humor. His mys...

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Jul 6 2006

Sexton Blake

Sexton Blake is actually a character, not an author, and first appeared in 1893 in the boys’ magazine The Halfpenny Marvel. He was the creation of a man named Harry Blythe, who eventually sold th...

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Nov 14 2004

Berkeley Breathed

With cartoonist Berkeley Breathed, all roads seem to lead back to Bloom County. As the writer and illustrator of Bloom County, Outland, and now Opus, as well as a handful of children's books, alm...

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Jan 24 2005

Herbie Brennan

As with pretty much all fantasy stories published in the past decade, Herbie Brennan’s Faerie Wars series is routinely compared to Harry Potter, although the two series have almost nothing in comm...

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Jan 26 2010

Patricia Briggs

Patrica Briggs is an urban fantasy author based in Washington State. She's best known for her Mercy Thompson series about a shape-shifting VW mechanic living in the Tri-Cities area. (The first t...

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Aug 20 2007

Sybil G. Brinton

Little is known about Sybil G. Brinton, but she does hold the title of "Earliest Known Jane Austen Fanfic Writer", which is nothing to sneeze at. Her 1913 book Old Friends and New Fancies: An Ima...

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Aug 11 2004

Charlotte Bronte

Although Jane Eyre is commonly described as a Gothic love story, only about half of the book is devoted to Jane's romance with Mr. Rochester. The first quarter of the novel focuses on Jane's mise...

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Aug 19 2004

Anne Bronte

Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is my favorite of the Bronte sisters' books. Unlike Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, it focuses on the consequences of Byronic behavior, rather than wadin...

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Apr 2 2006

Steven Brust

Fantasy/sci-fi writer Steven Brust is best known for his Vlad Taltos novels, a series of books about a human assassin living in a world controlled by elf-like creatures known as Dragaerans. While...

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Feb 18 2006

Michael Buckley

Michael Buckley is the author of the Sisters Grimm books, a highly enjoyable series that has some striking similarities to Bill Willingham’s Fables series. So if you’re not old enough for Willing...

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Nov 3 2004

Frances Hodgson Burnett

The English-American writer Frances Hodgson Burnett actually has two claims to Wordcandy fame. Not only did she write two classic YA novels, but one of the aforementioned classic novels (1909's A...

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Aug 11 2004

Fanny Burney

Fanny Burney's first and best-known novel, 1778's Evelina, is usually described as the first novel of manners. Burney had originally intended the book to serve as an instruction manual for young ...

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Feb 12 2008

Charles Burns

Charles Burns isn't the only author to set a horror story in quiet, drizzly Washington State (Kat Richardson and Stephenie Meyer seem to find us pretty horror-worthy, too), but he's definitely the...

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Apr 17 2006

Jim Butcher

Jim Butcher is the author of The Dresden Files novels, a series about Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, a wizard-slash-P.I. who’s doing his best to save the people of Chicago from various supe...

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Aug 11 2004

A.S. Byatt

A. S. Byatt is smarter than you are. She knows it, and when you read one of her novels, you'll know it, too. When she's in a rub-this-in-your-face mood, this can make wading through one of her n...

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