John Cowper Powys Thomas Hardy, and these novels are set in Somerset and Dorset, part of Hardy's mythical Wessex. American scholar Richard Maxwell describes these four novels "as remarkably successful with the reading public of his time". "Maiden Castle", the last of the Wessex novels, is set in Dorchester, Thomas Hardy's Casterbridge, and which he intended to be a "rival" to Hardy's "Mayor of Casterbridge". All the same, despite his indebtedness to the Victorian novel and his enthusiasm for Hardy and Walter Scott, as well as for lesser figures such as Ainsworth, Powys was clearly a modernist, and has affinities also with Fyodor
William Alexander (author) of Vermont, located in Burlington, Vermont. His first published speculative fiction was a seven-page short story, "The Birthday Rooms" ("Zahir", Summer 2005), which earned a 2006 Calvino Prize nomination. Alexander acknowledges that his writing style is influenced by well-known fantasy and mystery authors, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Susan Cooper. "Goblin Secrets" has received praise from Alexander's literary heroine Le Guin, author of the Earthsea series, and from Peter S. Beagle, author of "The Last Unicorn", and a starred review from "Kirkus Reviews". Alexander plans a series of novels set in Zombay. After the release