Hot Author Number Ten
Author of two best-selling memoirs, Barack Obama is better known as the Leader of the Free World. He published his third book, OF THEE I SING, last fall, which currently has 129 five star Amazon ratings out of 141 total ratings. Amazing. The man can do it all, and he is, without a doubt, extremely handsome.

Hot Author Number Nine
Karen is the author of highly acclaimed short story collection ST LUCY’S HOME FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES and SWAMPLANDIA!, which features one of the greatest Wolf / Alligator fight scenes ever written. Karen is also the tallest member of this list, clocking in at a staggering six foot six.

Hot Author Number Eight
Flannery is (unfortunately) dead, but nevertheless attractive in memoriam. She’s also the author of the legendary short story collection A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND.

Hot Author Number Seven
Marisha Pessl: almost too authorial.

Hot Author Number Six
Jhumpa Lahiri: who says looks don’t count?

Hot Author Number Five
Harriet Beecher Stowe: it seems people must have been getting it on in the nineteenth century, but it’s hard to imagine with pictures like this. Still, definitely Author Hot.

Hot Author Number Four
Zadie Smith: very much the Literary World’s “author hot” item for the past decade.

Hot Author Number Three
Clarice Lispector: wrote a novel in which an unnamed woman eats a cockroach. How’s that for symbolism!?

Hot Author Number Two
Paul Auster: probably only published because of his total Author Hotness, not Just Plain Hot, mind you, but completely and undeniably tortured and artistic looking.

Hot Author Number One
Sylvia Plath: the hottest author of our time. After years of battling depression, Plath took her own life in 1963, not before securing her place in the history of American letters with her Collected Poems, which posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize. Here’s to you, Sylvia Plath.