Best of Boston

Best Author

Cover design by Will Staehle. / Courtesy Zando Projects

Doris Kearns Goodwin

For the past 30-plus years, Kearns Goodwin has given us the inside scoop on every 20th-century POTUS worth knowing, from FDR to LBJ to JFK. [...] read more»
2023 Best Author

Margot Douaihy

For character invention alone, Douaihy wins this one. With her 2023 debut novel Scorched Grace, the soon-to-be assistant professor at Emerson College has blessed the [...] read more»
2022 Best Author

Kaitlyn Greenidge

The Arlington native’s 2021 release Libertie is ambitious in scope, encompassing the story of one of the country’s first Black female doctors during Reconstruction. But [...] read more»
2021 Best Author

Jerald Walker

In a year when books explicitly addressing racism in America were the hottest topic in nonfiction, longtime Emerson creative writing professor Jerald Walker’s How to [...] read more»
2020 Best Author

Ocean Vuong

“A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved,” writes Ocean Vuong in his earthquake [...] read more»
2019 Best Author

Jill Lepore

Hamilton taught us there’s a fierce appetite—not to mention need—for well-told stories of American history, and few writers bring our country’s saga to life like [...] read more»
2017 Best Author

Kelly Link

Link's fiction may be teeming with the inexplicable—polite zombies, world-swallowing purses—but it's no mystery why the work of this Pulitzer-nominated Northampton author was chosen for [...] read more»
2013 Best Author

Matthew Pearl

Cambridge's Matthew Pearl has combined literary mystery with historical fiction in such best-selling novels as The Dante Club and Poe's Shadow. He recently released his [...] read more»
2012 Best Author

Jack Gantos

This year, Boston's literary world hit the jackpot with national success stories in local writers Erin Morgenstern and Jack Gantos. Morgenstern's fantastical debut novel about [...] read more»
2011 Best Author

Andre Dubus III

Released this winter, Dubus's Townie was a rarity: a Bay State memoir entirely lacking in Oirish flavah and Whitey Bulger references. Instead, Dubus chronicled his [...] read more»