Faces to watch

Robert Anderson

Novelist/short-story writer

Anderson takes a blurred-line approach in his first novel, “Little Fugue,” about the ramifications of Sylvia Plath’s suicide on her husband, Ted Hughes; his mistress, Assia Gutmann Wevill, who killed herself six years later; and a fictional Anderson’s infatuation with Plath.

The novel grew out of Anderson’s memory of a University of Minnesota poetry class in which the professor and a fellow student “fought back and forth and babbled on” about how to parse the meter of a Plath poem.

“I thought these other people were ridiculous and Sylvia had the last word -- that growing old and pursuing an academic life was ridiculous,” said Anderson, 40. “It hit me that someday I would write about Sylvia and fill in the blanks about what we don’t know about her.”

Lisa Glatt

Novelist/short-story writer

Glatt, who teaches writing at Cal State Long Beach, is publishing a collection of short stories called “The Apple’s Bruise” in June, following her well-received 2004 debut novel, “A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That.”

The pieces are linked by threads of fidelity and the exploration of memory and recollection.

“The stories are mostly set in Southern California, a few suburban and a few near the beach, but California does seem to be a common thread,” said Glatt, 41. “I’m mostly telling stories and hoping that by the time I’m finished they resonate in a way I didn’t expect and don’t even quite understand myself on a literal level.”

Yiyun Li

Short-story writer

Li, 32, who grew up in Beijing and immigrated to the U.S. in 1996, began to publish works in English two years ago, starting at the top: the New Yorker, the Gettysburg Review and the Paris Review, where her “Immortality” won the 2004 Plimpton Prize for New Writers.

Most of Li’s stories in her first collection, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” to be published in the fall, are set in China but explore universal themes.

“A lot of the stories are about people in certain political [situations], who are forced to make a decision and then the outcome of their fate is determined by their own decisions,” Li said. “The political background is very vague. The choices are in the foreground.”