Wordcandy Authors

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Feb 28 2005

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Pilot, poet, and novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had one of those adventurous, emotionally messy lives that produce remarkable art but always seem to end badly. (And early.) Sure, he wrote and...

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Jun 24 2005

Dorothy L. Sayers

English mystery novelist and playwright Dorothy L. Sayers understood that what this world really needed was a crime-solving hero that was equal parts Sherlock Holmes and Bertie Wooster. She set o...

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Oct 2 2007

Lisa Shanahan

Lisa Shanahan is an Australian children’s author. Ms. Shanahan trained as an actor, and she’s heavily into drama—and (for once) we mean that in a straightforward, non-Oprah-esque way. Her book T...

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Jul 11 2005

Marjorie Weinman Sharmat

Marjorie Weinman Sharmat's Nate the Great is an amateur detective with a loyal dog, an assortment of weird friends, and a profound (perhaps existential?) hunger for pancakes. He is also the hero ...

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Jun 24 2005

Margery Sharp

If the children's books of George MacDonald have "fallen out of fashion", then the books of Margery Sharp are the literary equivalent of the bustle... and I really have no idea why. What happened...

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Dec 26 2005

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus when she was nineteen. (Yes, nineteen. Take THAT, Christopher Pa...

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Apr 24 2005

Shel Silverstein

It was a tremendous blow to readers everywhere when Shel Silverstein died of a heart attack in 1999. Still, like Douglas Adams, Silverstein got an awful lot done during the limited time he spent ...

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Feb 25 2007

Dan Simmons

While Dan Simmons is probably best known for his Hugo-Award-winning sci-fi novel Hyperion, we here at Wordcandy prefer his sprawling, Greek-mythology-influenced novel Illium, the subject of one of...

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Jan 28 2006

Obert Skye

Obert Skye is the author of the very entertaining Harry Potter-esque YA fantasy Leven Thumps and the Gateway to Foo. I wouldn't recommend going to great lengths to hunt this book down, but if you...

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Aug 11 2004

Dodie Smith

While Dodie Smith is best known as the author of 101 Dalmatians, she also wrote the strange and wonderful mid-20th century coming-of-age novel I Capture the Castle. I Capture the Castle was a cul...

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Aug 11 2004

L.J. Smith

Being a fan of L.J. Smith is somewhat trying, as we’ve been waiting for the final book in her Night World series for the better part of a decade. So while I cannot in good conscience describe tha...

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Jan 24 2004

Jeff Smith

Jeff Smith, author of the completely awesome Bone series, is the comic book world’s answer to J.K. Rowling: the kind of writer who is so staggeringly entertaining that almost anybody, regardless o...

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Feb 12 2007

Cynthia Leitich Smith

Cynthia Leitich Smith, author of the YA dark fantasy novel Tantalize, the subject of one of our Book of the Week reviews, is an Austin, Texas-based author noted for her stories’ cultural diversity...

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Oct 25 2005

Fuyumi Soryo

Fuyumi Soryo is the author of Mars, one of the best-selling shōjo comics ever released in Japan. Mars is compulsively readable--the literary equivalent of a bag of potato chips--but it’s als...

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Feb 12 2005

Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson, like fellow Wordcandy authors Neil Gaiman and A.S. Byatt, occasionally seems like he's written entire novels for the sole purpose of flaunting his intelligence and bone-deep hipne...

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Aug 11 2004

Caroline Stevermer

Caroline Stevermer is a woman who clearly isn't afraid of a little experimentation. Her alternative history/fantasy stories feature truly unusual settings, characters, and resolutions, and even i...

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Aug 14 2004

Mary Stewart

Mary Stewart is best known for her Merlin trilogy. They are beautifully written, and anyone who likes Arthurian legend should enjoy them. (Although I can't say that I do. But then, the only ver...

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Feb 9 2010

Maggie Stiefvater

We approve of Maggie Stiefvater: her characters are relatively sane, her mythologies creative, and her sentiments on fanfiction just what the civic-minded public likes to see. Her novel Shiver is...

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Apr 24 2005

Bram Stoker

Bram Stoker was a mediocre Irish playwright and theatrical manager who produced exactly one memorable book: 1897's Dracula. It has been suggested that Stoker's horror story was inspired by a comb...

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Apr 2 2006

Rex Stout

Rex Stout wrote several standalone detective stories, dozens of short stories, and, of course, the Nero Wolfe novels. Stout’s greatest creation, Nero Wolfe is the ultimate armchair detective—a fa...

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Jul 10 2006

Aneva Stout

Aneva Stout is the author of the highly original book The List: A Love Story in 781 Chapters, the subject of one of our Book of the Week reviews. Subject-wise, Ms. Stout’s story is B-grade Bridge...

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Aug 14 2004

Gene Stratton-Porter

Books like Gene Stratton-Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost and Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs are America's answer to the books of Lucy Maud Montgomery. If Stratton-Porter's heroine is a little ...

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Feb 28 2005

Noel Streatfeild

Ballet Shoes is the first and best novel in Noel Streatfeild’s 10-book-long series about the lives of British child actors in the first half of the twentieth century. (Only a few of these books h...

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Sep 7 2006

Jonathan Stroud

Jonathan Stroud is the author of the excellent "Bartimaeus Trilogy", a fantasy/alternate history series starring a terrorist, a fairly unpleasant boy, and a very sympathetic demon. In Stroud’s un...

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Sep 27 2007

Michael A. Stusser

Michael A. Stusser is a Seattle-based journalist, writer, and game inventor. His (semi) non-fiction book The Dead Guy Interviews is one of our Featured Book titles.

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Jul 26 2007

Leonie Swann

Leonie Swann is the German author of the internationally best-selling detective novel Three Bags Full, one of our "Featured Book" picks. According to her publishers, Ms. Swann has degrees in phil...

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