Wordcandy Authors
Select an author by last name
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Pilot, poet, and novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had one of those adventurous, emotionally messy lives that produce remarkable art but always seem to end badly. (And early.) Sure, he wrote and...
Dorothy L. Sayers
English mystery novelist and playwright Dorothy L. Sayers understood that what this world really needed was a crime-solving hero that was equal parts Sherlock Holmes and Bertie Wooster. She set o...
Lisa Shanahan
Lisa Shanahan is an Australian children’s author. Ms. Shanahan trained as an actor, and she’s heavily into drama—and (for once) we mean that in a straightforward, non-Oprah-esque way. Her book T...
Marjorie Weinman Sharmat
Marjorie Weinman Sharmat's Nate the Great is an amateur detective with a loyal dog, an assortment of weird friends, and a profound (perhaps existential?) hunger for pancakes. He is also the hero ...
Margery Sharp
If the children's books of George MacDonald have "fallen out of fashion", then the books of Margery Sharp are the literary equivalent of the bustle... and I really have no idea why. What happened...
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus when she was nineteen. (Yes, nineteen. Take THAT, Christopher Pa...
Shel Silverstein
It was a tremendous blow to readers everywhere when Shel Silverstein died of a heart attack in 1999. Still, like Douglas Adams, Silverstein got an awful lot done during the limited time he spent ...
Dan Simmons
While Dan Simmons is probably best known for his Hugo-Award-winning sci-fi novel Hyperion, we here at Wordcandy prefer his sprawling, Greek-mythology-influenced novel Illium, the subject of one of...
Obert Skye
Obert Skye is the author of the very entertaining Harry Potter-esque YA fantasy Leven Thumps and the Gateway to Foo. I wouldn't recommend going to great lengths to hunt this book down, but if you...
Dodie Smith
While Dodie Smith is best known as the author of 101 Dalmatians, she also wrote the strange and wonderful mid-20th century coming-of-age novel I Capture the Castle. I Capture the Castle was a cul...
L.J. Smith
Being a fan of L.J. Smith is somewhat trying, as we’ve been waiting for the final book in her Night World series for the better part of a decade. So while I cannot in good conscience describe tha...
Jeff Smith
Jeff Smith, author of the completely awesome Bone series, is the comic book world’s answer to J.K. Rowling: the kind of writer who is so staggeringly entertaining that almost anybody, regardless o...
Cynthia Leitich Smith
Cynthia Leitich Smith, author of the YA dark fantasy novel Tantalize, the subject of one of our Book of the Week reviews, is an Austin, Texas-based author noted for her stories’ cultural diversity...
Fuyumi Soryo
Fuyumi Soryo is the author of Mars, one of the best-selling shōjo comics ever released in Japan. Mars is compulsively readable--the literary equivalent of a bag of potato chips--but it’s als...
Neal Stephenson
Neal Stephenson, like fellow Wordcandy authors Neil Gaiman and A.S. Byatt, occasionally seems like he's written entire novels for the sole purpose of flaunting his intelligence and bone-deep hipne...
Caroline Stevermer
Caroline Stevermer is a woman who clearly isn't afraid of a little experimentation. Her alternative history/fantasy stories feature truly unusual settings, characters, and resolutions, and even i...
Mary Stewart
Mary Stewart is best known for her Merlin trilogy. They are beautifully written, and anyone who likes Arthurian legend should enjoy them. (Although I can't say that I do. But then, the only ver...
Maggie Stiefvater
We approve of Maggie Stiefvater: her characters are relatively sane, her mythologies creative, and her sentiments on fanfiction just what the civic-minded public likes to see. Her novel Shiver is...
Bram Stoker
Bram Stoker was a mediocre Irish playwright and theatrical manager who produced exactly one memorable book: 1897's Dracula. It has been suggested that Stoker's horror story was inspired by a comb...
Aneva Stout
Aneva Stout is the author of the highly original book The List: A Love Story in 781 Chapters, the subject of one of our Book of the Week reviews. Subject-wise, Ms. Stout’s story is B-grade Bridge...
Gene Stratton-Porter
Books like Gene Stratton-Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost and Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs are America's answer to the books of Lucy Maud Montgomery. If Stratton-Porter's heroine is a little ...
Noel Streatfeild
Ballet Shoes is the first and best novel in Noel Streatfeild’s 10-book-long series about the lives of British child actors in the first half of the twentieth century. (Only a few of these books h...
Jonathan Stroud
Jonathan Stroud is the author of the excellent "Bartimaeus Trilogy", a fantasy/alternate history series starring a terrorist, a fairly unpleasant boy, and a very sympathetic demon. In Stroud’s un...
Michael A. Stusser
Michael A. Stusser is a Seattle-based journalist, writer, and game inventor. His (semi) non-fiction book The Dead Guy Interviews is one of our Featured Book titles.
Leonie Swann
Leonie Swann is the German author of the internationally best-selling detective novel Three Bags Full, one of our "Featured Book" picks. According to her publishers, Ms. Swann has degrees in phil...