1. Fiction I Spring 2011 SWOSU

2. Paul Bowles' major novel is The Sheltering Sky. He is the author of five novels and more than sixty short stories. An American expatriate, he spent his adult life in North Africa, the setting for most of his work. (Story One)

3. A Japanese writer that has been described by the Virginia Quarterly Review as "easily accessible, yet profoundly complex". His works of fiction and non- fiction have garnered him critical acclaim, and he is the sixth recipient of the Franz Kafka Prize for his novel Kafka on the Shore. He is considered by critics as an important figure in postmodern literature. (Story Two)

4. American film director, screenwriter, actor, writer, comedian and musician. (Story Three)

5. Uruguayan author and writer. He wrote stories which, in their jungle settings, use the supernatural and the bizarre to show the influence of modernismo, Edgar Allan Poe, and Rudyard Kipling, among others. Quiroga's influence can be seen in the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez and the postmodern surrealism of Julio Cortázar. (Story Four)

6. Self- published web author. (Story Five)

7. Self- published web author. (Story Six)

8. Robert Stone was born in Brooklyn in 1937. The child of a schizophrenic mother, he spent several years in a Catholic orphanage, finally dropping out of high school to become a navy journalist. Later he studied with Wallace Stegner at Stanford University and traveled with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. Stone’s first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, won the Faulkner Foundation Award, and his second, Dog Soldiers, won the National Book Award. He is the author of five brilliant novels and a two collections of short stories. Stone and his wife live in New York City.