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Follow the MacGuffin: PW Talks with Mary Higgins Clark
Clark credits her longtime editor, Michael Korda, with the idea for The Lost Years, though he is quick to emphasize he is not her Svengali. He tells Show Daily, “All Mary’s novels start with a premise that is believable, intriguing, and chilling. It’s her trademark. It’s a privilege and a pleasure to have occasionally suggested the right one and to see where she takes it, often to places that I wouldn’t ever have dreamed of.”
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Sympathy for the Devil: PW Talks with J.R. Moehringer
Mix a lifelong fascination with bank robber Willie Sutton (1901–1980) together with turbulent economic times, and the chances you’ll come up with Sutton (Hyperion), a historical novel based on the man’s life, are pretty slim. For J.R. Moehringer, however, the result was almost inevitable.
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A Chat with Kirstie Alley
Popular actress and product spokesperson Kirstie Alley is master of ceremonies at this morning’s Adult Book and Author Breakfast. Immediately afterward, she will be signing book cover art postcards at the Atria Books booth (3657), 10–10:30 a.m. Alley recently penned The Art of Men (I Prefer Mine Al Dente), pubbing this November, a tell-all account featuring the men in her life.
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Here Comes the Judge: PW Talks to Judge Lynn Toler
Judge Lynn Toler, who presides over the Fox syndicated reality television show Divorce Court, is making an appearance at BEA today. No, she’s not here to scout booksellers to appear on her show; Judge Toler is going to preside over signing ARCs of her August release, Making Marriage Work: New Rules for an Old Institution (Agate). After all, who would know better the rules for a successful marriage than Judge Toler, who has heard sad stories of marital failure from thousands of estranged couples over the years? Even though Judge Toler deals more with warring individuals than blissful lovers, she insists that “people in marriages are looking not to get divorced.” They just need a little advice so they don’t wind up in divorce court or even worse, on Divorce Court.
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The Power of Writing: PW Talks with Damien Echols
As one of three teenagers wrongly convicted of murder, Damien Echols was sentenced in 1994 to the death penalty, spending 18 years in prison, most of them on Arkansas’s death row, before his release last August in a plea deal that went just short of exoneration. Echols’s prison diaries, first collected and self-published in 2005, form the foundation for his forthcoming memoir, Life After Death, out from Blue Rider Press. Along with his day-to-day, year-to-year experience in a supermaximum prison, Echols’s memoir details the botched investigation that put him behind bars and the forces that gathered around his cause and ultimately freed him, as well as his two friends, who together became known as the West Memphis Three.
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Looking Forward to the Movie: PW Talks to Lee Child
Craving a copy of A Wanted Man, bestseller Lee Child’s next Jack Reacher adventure? Then show up at the Random House Booth at BEA and you could be one of the lucky recipients as the bestselling author signs a limited number of ARCs of number 17 in his bestselling series from Delacorte.
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Help from the Other Side: PW Talks to John Edward
It should come as no surprise that renowned psychic John Edward gets guidance for his fiction writing from unusual sources. “I always joke around and say I want to put on a book, ‘Written by John Edward and his band of merry invisible men.’ I don’t think I write like a writer—it’s kind of strange, I write like a psychic—I’m capturing the movies that somebody allows me to see,” he explains to Show Daily.
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A Mutual Admiration Society: PW Talks to Allegra Kent and Emily Arnold McCully
Author-illustrator Emily Arnold McCully has been a fan of Allegra Kent since, as a college student sitting in nosebleed seats, she first saw the famed ballerina perform with the New York City Ballet in 1959. But the creator of Mirette on the High Wire, which received the 1993 Caldecott Medal, never dreamed that her life would become intertwined with that of Kent more than 50 years later. “When my editor sent me the manuscript for Ballerina Swan (Holiday House), and I saw her name on it, I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ It was incredible,” says McCully.
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Master of the Cold Case: PW Talks to Jussi Adler-Olsen
There are worse things than being called “the new ‘it’ boy of Nordic noir,” which is how the Times of London hailed thriller writer Jussi Adler-Olsen, comparing him to Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, and Jo Nesbø. A wildly popular author in his native Denmark, Adler-Olsen was introduced to American audiences last year with the acclaimed Keeper of Lost Causes, the first in a series featuring the put-upon, world-weary police detective Carl Mørck and his sidekick, Hafez el-Assad, both employees in Department Q, the Copenhagen police division for the coldest of cold cases. The Absent One (Dutton) is the second book in the series, with many more no doubt to come.
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Time for Terror: PW Talks to Wendy Corsi Staub
After the tragic events of 9/11, bestselling author Wendy Corsi Staub was haunted by two things. First, that crime rates dropped drastically in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks. “The cops were all busy downtown, and obviously everybody was distracted. I always thought if you were diabolical and wanted to do something, that was a good time to do it because the city was in chaos,” Staub says.
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Zen Writing: PW Talks with Dinty W. Moore
In a world where we are bombarded with texting, tweeting, Facebook updates, e-mail, and all sorts of other distractions, Ohio University creative writing professor Dinty W. Moore offers to writers a “still, small voice” amid the madness. “I think we need a mindful approach,” he explains, “the type of paying attention and slowing down a writer needs to practice, even before he or she starts putting word to the page.” Moore admits, “In many ways, the basic teachings of letting go that are part of Buddhism seem entirely incompatible with the highly meticulous and in many cases obsessive practice that’s necessary to be a successful writer. At the heart of it, I am trying to reconcile the two.”
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Never Say Never: PW Talks with Hanna Pylvainen
“The mantra of M.F.A. programs was you won’t sell your book,” remembers Hanna Pylväinen. “And I certainly never expected to live a writer’s life at this young age.” But at 27, Pylväinen, with an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan and a MacDowell Colony residency, has indeed defied the odds and will see her first novel, We Sinners, published by Henry Holt.
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On the Case: PW Talks with Hank Phillippi Ryan
“She’s tough, focused, and a little vulnerable.” That description of news reporter Jane Ryland, one of the key characters in Hank Phillippi Ryan’s new series, and fifth book, The Other Woman (Forge), could also describe the award-winning mystery/thriller author. A longtime investigative news reporter for 7News in Boston, Ryan has earned 27 Emmys for her reporting and was recently nominated for another three. She’s also the author of four Charlotte McNally mysteries—the first won an Agatha Award—and she’s incoming president of Sisters in Crime and sits on the board of Mystery Writers of America.
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Yiddish with a Twist: PW Talks with Steve Stern
“It’s a daunting thing to publish a retrospective book,” says novelist and short story writer Steve Stern, referring to his new collection, The Book of Mischief: New and Collected Stories (Graywolf Press), which draws from work throughout his 25-year career. Six of the stories have never been collected before; all have Jewish themes. “My writing friends say, don’t get excited, it’s just a book of stories. But I’ve never been so excited about the existence of a book. I would like to honor it with events that might promote it. I’ve always been good at discouraging people from reading my work. With this one I’d like to find lots of readers.”
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Mission: Improve Education: PW Talks to Harold Kwalwasser
Harold Kwalwasser is the first to say that he is “perversely proud” of having been general counsel for the Los Angeles Unified School District under Roy Romer, 2000–2003. He came to the position by way of a career in public service, having served on the staffs of three U. S. senators and as chief of staff for a California state senator. Now a writer and consultant on education, Kwalwasser says he wrote Renewal: Remaking America’s Schools for the Twenty-First Century (Rowman & Littlefield) more for parents and community leaders than for educators. But make no mistake, he thinks education reform is everyone’s business—and attainable.
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Book Long in the Making: PW Talks to David Ezra Stein
A girl’s contagious smile sets off a chain of good feelings that make their way around the world in Because Amelia Smiled (Candlewick), the latest picture book by David Ezra Stein, whose Interrupting Chicken was a Caldecott Honor book. The story, which he wrote in 1999 while a student at Parsons the New School for Design, came quite quickly to the author. The art did not.
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Loving Comics Pays Off: PW Talks to Lincoln Peirce
Yes, a kid’s obsession with comics really can lead to big things. Lincoln Peirce is a case in point. His Big Nate character, a high-energy sixth-grader who serves up big laughs and gets lots of detentions, is the star of a daily syndicated comic strip, an island on kids’ site Poptropica.com, a number of popular comic strip compilations, and a series of bestselling chapter books.
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Burger Queen: PW Talks to Rachael Ray
If you think a burger is simply ground meat between two halves of a bun, celebrity chef and television star Rachael Ray will set you straight in her latest cookbook, The Book of Burger, published this month by Atria Books. “I love playing with the idea of what people think of when they think of burgers,” she tells Show Daily. “You can make a burger out of anything—seafood, vegetables, all kinds of ground meats.”
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The Bank Robber's Son Makes Good: PW Talks with Deni Bechard
In 2007, Deni Béchard’s novel, Vandal Love, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book, but the Canadian-American author was missing from the U.S. scene until Milkweed Editions released Béchard’s novel (starred by PW) as well as a brand-new memoir called Cures for Hunger. In it, Béchard reveals his own novel-worthy tale: how the son of a French-Canadian bank robber grew up to be a globe-hopping journalist and award-winning author.
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A Tribute to His Mom and Books: PW Talks with Will Schwalbe
Mary Anne Schwalbe was an educator who worked at Harvard University and the Dalton School in New York City and spent 10 years building libraries in Afghanistan. She loved books, a passion shared by her son, Will, a former editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books and founder of Cookstr.com. When his mother was diagnosed with cancer, Schwalbe began accompanying her to chemotherapy treatments. During one of those trips, a casual conversation about what she was reading evolved into a book club with two enthusiastic members.
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