McSweeney's enchanted chamber of astonishing stories

Jonathan Lethem is the author of Wastelands--Stories of the Apocalypse, a collection that explores the end of the world. He's known for his imaginative fiction that often blends genres.

Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian novelist, poet, essayist and literary critic. Born in Ottawa, Ontario, on 18 November 1939, she has written more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, criticism and graphic work, published in more than forty-five countries. Her novels include The Handmaid's Tale (1985), which won the Governor General's Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and its sequel The Testaments (2019), a joint winner of the Booker Prize. She h...

Michael Chabon is an American author. Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was 25. He followed it with a second novel, Wonder Boys (1995), and two short-story collections. In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel that John Leonard, in a 2007 review of a later novel, called Chabon's magnum opus. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history...

Peter Straub (1943-2022) was an American novelist and poet who wrote horror and supernatural fiction with a literary bent. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he studied at the University of Wisconsin and Columbia University and broke through with Julia (1975) and Ghost Story (1979). His Blue Rose novels, Koko, Mystery and The Throat, follow a group of Vietnam veterans and a series of murders. He co-wrote The Talisman (1984) and its sequel Black House (2001) with Stephen King. He also edited the Libra...

Photo: By Christoph Rieger [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Stephen King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author whose work has defined popular horror fiction for more than half a century. Born in Portland, Maine, he grew up in poverty after his father abandoned the family, and credits his mother's resilience and a voracious reading habit as the foundations of his imagination. He began selling short stories to men's magazines while working as a high school English teacher, and published his first novel, Carrie, in 1974—his wife Tabitha retrieved...