Contemporary literature

Authors and most important pieces (top ten)

1. Isabel Allende
Chilean-American author Isabel Allende wrote her debut novel, House of Spirits to great acclaim in 1982. The novel began as a letter to her dying grandfather and is a work of magical realism charting the history of Chile. Allende began writing House of Spirits on January 8th, and subsequently has begun all her books on that day.
2. Margaret Atwood
Canadian author Margaret Atwood has numerous critically-acclaimed novels to her credit, most recently Oryx and Crake and The Penelopiad (2005). She is known for her feminist themes, but her prolific output of work spans both form and genre.
3. Jonathan Franzen
Winner of the National Book Award for …ver más…

Murakami's most popular work among Westerners is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, though 2005's Kafka on the Shore met with success in this country, as well. The English version of Murakami's most recent novel, After Dark, is slated for release in 2007.
8. Philip Roth
Philip Roth seems to have won more book awards than any other American writer alive. Most recently he won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for The Plot Against America (2005) and a PEN/Nabokov Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2006. In Everyman (2006), Roth's 27th novel, he sticks to one of his familiar themes: what it's like growing old Jewish in America.
9. Zadie Smith
Literary Critic James Wood coined the term "hysterical realism" in 2000 to describe Zadie Smith's hugely successful debut novel, White Teeth, which Smith agreed was a "painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my owWhite Teeth." Her third novel, On Beauty, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction.
10. John Updike
Terrorist (2006) is the most recent in the twenty-some novels John Updike has to his credit. His four Rabbit Angstrom novels were named in 2006 among the best novels of the past 25 years in a New York Times Book Review