Time magazine recently released its annual list of the "100 Most Influential People." Among the authors showcased:
Tayari Jones
Imani Perry wrote: "A daughter of Atlanta and a writer of the world, Tayari Jones has blazed her own path through American fiction. Her sensitive coming-of-age stories bloom into rich landscapes of Black women's interior lives. In them, key social issues and important historical moments come alive by way of her characters' wounds, yearnings, and dreams. Her fifth and most recent novel, Kin, is an exquisite journey through a lifelong friendship between two girls born in Louisiana who enter adulthood at the dawn of the freedom movement.
"In this novel, as in her preceding books, Tayari revels in language that is both literary and vernacular, and she uses her abundant gifts to deeply contemplate love in all its complexity. Standing in the tradition of civil rights organizers and writers of the late 20th century Black women's literary renaissance, she wears these inheritances like a crown. Tayari is building a legacy while nurturing her fellow writers and dazzling her readers with grace, charm, poise, and a brilliant smile."
Freida McFadden
E.L. James wrote: In person, the author Freida McFadden (her nom de plume) has a sweet, shy demeanor--but don't be fooled. Hers is a dark, dark mind that weaves deceptively simple tales into terrifying psychological page turners like The Housemaid. Fast-paced and addictive, her writing grabs you from the get-go, taking you on a wild roller-coaster ride that delivers one whiplash plot twist after another.
"Her backdrops may be familiar to the reader: a suburban home, a cozy marriage, a housekeeping routine--but with McFadden, nothing is as it seems. Steadily she ratchets up the tension, with hot-button themes of gaslighting, abusive relationships, manipulation, and revenge. She brings the terror home, subverting the familiar, until you can't trust anyone.
"Perhaps it's her background as a physician specializing in brain injuries that gives her this rare insight into the shadows of the human mind. Or maybe she's just as twisted as we think. Whatever sorcery is at work, McFadden is a writer at the top of her game--and the undisputed mistress of the psychological thriller."
Yiyun Li
Salman Rushdie wrote: "More than 20 years ago, Yiyun Li's first story collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, announced the arrival of a writer of exceptional gifts. American literature has been greatly enriched of late by new voices from everywhere--Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from Nigeria, Viet Thanh Nguyen from Vietnam, and from China, Yiyun Li, who now stands at the heart of this brilliant group. Li's life has been marked by dreadful tragedy, the loss of both her sons to suicide, which would destroy many mothers. She has somehow managed, through an act of 'radical acceptance,' to make a masterly literary response to the unbearable in a memoir from the 'abyss': the National Book Award finalist Things in Nature Merely Grow. The memoir joins high intelligence with remarkable emotional restraint, honoring the dead while also insisting on life. I don't know how she did it, but I'm in awe."