Jeff ONeal - Start Here: Read Your Way Into 25 Amazing Authors

Start Here was launched through Kickstarter.com. We are grateful to all 947 people who backed the project, including the following people who loved the project enough to go above and beyond.

Dori Solomon, Ali Colluccio, Kurt Adam, Cameo Wood, Francisco Areas Guimaraes, Joe Wallace, Brad Meltzer, Shelly Nuessle, Barbara Nordin, Maggie Rotter, Madelyne Anweiler, Priscilla Warner, Sarah McCoy, Angelica Quinonez, Julie Wilson (, Scott Reichel and Tammy Rollins, Natalie Hamilton, Claire Alcock, Joanne M. Kelly, Kelly Leonard, Therese Anne Fowler, Anonymous, Margaret Atwood, and JR Hughson.

Ben Dolnick lives with his wife in Brooklyn. He is the author of the novels Zoology and You Know Who You Are, and Shelf-Love, a Kindle Single about Alice Munro.

Linda Fairstein was chief of the Sex Crimes Unit of the district attorneys office in Manhattan for more than two decades and is Americas foremost legal expert on sexual assault and domestic violence. Her Alexandra Cooper novels are international bestsellers and have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Brenna Clarke Gray holds a PhD in Canadian Literature and teaches in the Vancouver area. She posts about graphic narratives at Graphixia , and occasionally on her own blog, Not That Kind of Doctor .

Joe Hill is the author of two novels, Heart-Shaped Box and Horns, a collection of short stories, 20th Century Ghosts, and a comic book series, Locke & Key.

Cassandra Neace is a contributing editor at Book Riot.

Rachel Manwill is working toward a Master's in Publishing and writes for Book Riot and at her own blog, A Home Between Pages .

Erin Morgenstern is the author of The Night Circus and plans on writing more novels eventually so she can have other things to list in her bio. In the meantime she writes tiny short stories that can be found on her website (the creatively named erinmorgenstern.com ), reads a lot of books, drinks a lot of tea and tries to keep her kittens from chewing electrical cords.

Amanda Nelson is a contributing editor at Book Riot and a freelance writer living in Richmond, VA. She blogs about (mostly) classic literature at Dead White Guys .

Jeff ONeal is the editor of Book Riot. He teaches at The New School University in New York City.

Nicole Perrin is an editor, reader, tea drinker, and lit blogger (not necessarily in that order). She blogs at Bibliographing .

Steve Randolph's first job, which lasted eight years, was in a college bookstore, but it wasn't until he moved to Richmond, VA, and smooth-talked his way onto the Fountain staff that he learned what it meant to work in a real bookstore. Four years later, they still haven't figured out how to get rid of him. He lives with a lady, a kid, two cats, and a lot of bookshelves.

Susan Rodarme lives in Columbus, Ohio, loves to cook when she's not reading, tweets excessively from . She won 2012 Independent Book Blogger Award for adult fiction.

Kevin Smokler is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books you Haven't Touched since High School (Prometheus, Feb. 2013). His writing on the arts and technology has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Fast Company and on NPR.

Kit Steinkellner is a playwright, screenwriter, and creative writing teacher. She also is a contributing editor at Book Riot ands writes about books and reading at Books Are My Boyfriends .

Victor Wishna's work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun, the New York Post, NPR, KCMetropolis.org, and others. His writing and editing services firm, The Vital Word helps find the right words for nonprofit, corporate, and individual clients.

Greg Zimmerman is a contributing editor for Book Riot. He blogs about contemporary literary fiction at The New Dork Review of Books and holds down a full-time gig as a trade magazine editor.

by Kevin Smokler

If you care about something enough, its going to make you cry. But you have to use it. Use your tears. Use your pain. Use your fear. Get mad.

Sherman Alexie

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Sherman Alexie (b. 1966) is a novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter. Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington and lives in Seattle. War Dances, a collection of fiction and poetry, won the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

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You might not be interested in the work of Sherman Alexie if you arent interested in American Indians. We can argue whether subject choice is a good reason for leaving any author off your will-read-someday list (long road trips and I are not friends. Bill Brysons long road trips and I are in love), but its unlikely to change anything. I could star in a 4-act ballet about Alexies confident plotting, graceful genius with image and setting, and welcome political incorrectness, but hey, the guy writes about his own. Even when hes cracking wise about Indians who suddenly become Medicine Men to pick up white chicks and the pointless machismo described as Super Indian Men: able to leap tall HUD houses in a single bound, thats his deal. Looking for something else is asking for the Eugene ONeill play where nobody has a drink.

So yes, Indians, at the Wellpinit Reservation in Washington State where Alexie himself grew up in the 1970s. He returns to the setting, a few of its inhabitants (most frequently the earnest nerd Thomas Builds the Fire and his YA incarnation Arnold Spirit Jr.) and themes of memory, historical burden and the complicated bonds of community over and again. And while his bibliography is most heavily weighed with short stories (four collections) and poetry, his novels have been his most awarded (an American Book Award for Reservation Blues and National Book Award for his YA novel The Absolutely True Story of a Part Time Indian.) Alexie also wrote the screenplay to the 1998 film Smoke Signals based on his own short story.

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1. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993)

This bundle of twenty-two interconnected stories serves as a guide both to Alexies passions and to the chords he will strike in his later work. Also, we first meet best friends Victor Joseph (loyal, destructive, proud to a fault) and Thomas Builds the Fire (well-meaning and nave, has seen Dances With Wolves a few too many times) who will re-appear in Reservation Blues two years later. The seventh story, This Is What It Means To Say Phoenix, Arizona about a road trip to pick up the remains of Victors deceased father, was the basis of Smoke Signals.

2. Reservation Blues (1995)

This is Alexies second book of fiction, his first novel, and his masterpiece. The story of the short life of Coyote Springs, an Indian rock n roll band, Reservation Blues is a musical coming-of-age, story, on its face like an Indian version of The Commitments. But The Commitments is an on-the-ground report, composed almost entirely of dialogue from the same working-class Dublin neighborhood where author Roddy Doyle lived. Alexie looks at the story of Coyote Springs from the dark sky above a largely silent American West. He dips in and out of dreams and shifts point of view, from band members to supporting characters, both real and imagined. The iconography of film Westerns slides into the story only to vanish as quickly as an echo.