Good Fiction Guide

Covering everyone from Leo Tolstoy and Mark Twain to Don De Lillo and Lorrie Moore, Good Fiction Guide offers an informative reference work on novelists and their works, with an emphasis of twentieth-century fiction and popular classics, but with ample coverage of major novelists of the past.

The guide takes us on a stimulating tour of the literary landscape. Here are more than one thousand alphabetically arranged biographies of important novelists, ranging from Chinua Achebe to Emile Zola. There are profiles of leading contemporary writers, such as Ann Beattie, Thomas Pynchon, Jane Smiley, Martin Amis, Amy Tan, Peter Carey, V.S. Naipaul, and Harold Brodkey. The entries provide a flavor of each writer's work, recommend which of their books to read, and include suggestions for related reading, leading you to other writers whose work may be either comparable or an interesting contrast. Equally important, the guide includes 34 essays that illuminate genres such as Crime, Adventure, Romance, and Magic Realism, or offer intriguing looks at the national literatures of such places as Australia, India, and the Caribbean. Each entry is a personal essay by an expert in the field and includes their top twelve recommended titles. Good Fiction Guide is a perfect road map for everyone exploring the highways and byways of fiction.