Wordcandy Authors
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James Branch Cabell
James Branch Cabell had an impressively poisonous pen. His eighth and most famous novel, 1919’s satirical fantasy Jurgen, earned him a brief period in the literary spotlight when the New York Soc...
James M. Cain
Most people don’t realize that James M. Cain, the taciturn, womanizing author of such hardboiled pulp classics as The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, originally trained to become ...
Eleanor Cameron
Born in 1912, writer and critic Eleanor Cameron is best remembered as the author of the charmingly bizarre Mushroom Planet books. The first book in this imaginative, entertaining series, 1954’s T...
Truman Capote
Truman Capote was a high school dropout-turned-journalist-turned-novelist-turned-socialite who achieved tremendous success at a remarkably young age, produced one of the most iconic novellas of th...
Mike Carey
Mike Carey is the author of a four-issue comic book miniseries from Vertigo entitled My Faith in Frankie. While this book won’t be the title that converts the English-speaking world into comic b...
Isobelle Carmody
Isobelle Carmody is the Australian author of both the Obernewtyn Chronicles (the first book of which is one of our Featured Titles) and Alyzon Whitestarr, an excellent standalone young adult fanta...
Lewis Carroll
Like Edgar Allen Poe, Lewis Carroll's books are too-often critiqued in the context of his private life. Highly intelligent, talented, and socially ambitious, Carroll's romantic inclinations were ...
Sarah Caudwell
I have no idea who makes this kind of decision, but whoever decided that the late, great Edward Gorey should provide the cover art for Sarah Caudwell's books was an absolute genius. Their styles ...
Michael Chabon
While all of Chabon's books are excellent, two in particular are Wordcandy. His young adult book Summerland is a gorgeously written novel that does for American mythology what Susan Cooper and Ll...
Raymond Chandler
Compared with fellow Black Mask writers Cornell Woolrich and Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler was a man with a successful career, a working set of social skills, and a downright chatty (one migh...
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is one of the most famous pieces of writing in the English language. It is an unfinished novel in verse—Chaucer got down about 17,000 lines before his death in...
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie is the world's most famous mystery writer. She's right up there with the Bible and Shakespeare in terms of sales, you can find her books in 45 different languages, and her most fa...
John Christopher
John Christopher (real name: Samuel Youd) is an English science fiction writer. Mr. Christopher has written more than 70 novels under a variety of pen names, but he is best known as the author of...
Catherine Clark
I know very little about this woman. She lives in Minneapolis, and she has a very pretty website. Her books Truth or Dairy and Wurst Case Scenario are fun stuff--the rambling journals of a self-...
Susanna Clarke
Englishwoman Susanna Clarke is the author of the almost universally praised novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (the subject of one of our Book of the Week reviews) as well as a handful of shor...
Beverly Cleary
I love Beverly Cleary's books. Mostly because they're awesome, of course, but also because Ramona, Beezus, Ellen, Henry Huggins, and all their friends live in the same neighborhood that my late, ...
Rosemary Clement-Moore
Rosemary Clement-Moore is the author of the excellent YA novel The Splendor Falls (which we loved, and chose as one of our Featured Book titles), and the Maggie Quinn: Girl vs. Evil series (which ...
Andrew Clements
Andrew Clements has written a series of pleasantly earnest, thoughtful children’s books, including the excellent YA sci-fi/fantasy Things Not Seen. Clements spent several years as a teacher, and ...
Eoin Colfer
Eoin Colfer is one of the many, many fine authors to have been relegated to the "If you loved the Harry Potter books, try ___" list, which always irritates me because it seems like so many o...
Wilkie Collins
Wilkie Collins was a close friend of Charles Dickens, and his books, while less famous, share many of Dickens’s strengths. (Collins was also less of a tool on the personality front, apparently.) ...
Suzanne Collins
Suzanne Collins is the author of the critically acclaimed Underland Chronicles. Collins’s series is an Alice-in-Wonderland-on-crack story about an eleven year old boy named Gregor who tumbles thr...
Jennifer Colt
Jennifer Colt is the author of The Butcher of Beverly Hills, an action-packed story about two redheaded twin sisters (one an uptight university grad, the other a lesbian ex-con with a wickedly ben...
Susan Cooper
My little brother is incapable of reading Susan Cooper’s two-time Newbury Award-winning The Dark Is Rising series without giving this whiny speech about how none of the books’ suspense actually wo...
Michelle Cooper
Australian author Michelle Cooper is a speech and language pathologist who specializes in learning disabilities and reluctant readers. Her novel A Brief History of Montmaray is one of our Feature...
Tom Corwin
Tom Corwin—along with illustrator Craig Fraizer—is the creator of Mr. Fooster Traveling on a Whim, one of our Wordcandy Featured Books. Mr. Corwin is also a musician, and the author of Mostly Bob...
Robert Crais
California-based suspense novelist Robert Crais is best known as the author of the Elvis Cole detective series, featuring the wisecracking title character and his enigmatic, heavily armed partner,...
Jennifer Crusie
Jennifer Crusie ties with Lisa Kleypas for the number one spot on my “Best Romance Novelists Currently Writing” list. While the two authors may seem to have little in common (Crusie writes sharp,...
Chris Crutcher
If Chris Crutcher wrote for adults rather than kids and was about fifty times less entertaining, I bet the people from Oprah's Book Club would be knocking his door down. Crutcher's books feature ...
Melissa de la Cruz
Melissa de la Cruz is the author of several YA series about the lives of rich, snotty, self-indulgent teens. Normally, this style of book leaves us cold... but then she went ahead wrote a series ...