-
A Bootlegger's Story: Dennis Lehane Takes on Prohibition-Era Boston
The epic new novel from Boston crime master Dennis Lehane spans from Prohibition-era Boston to Batista's Cuba.
-
From South-Central to Noir Cool: Gary Phillips
Gary Phillips, 57, is the epitome of the noir cool he writes about in his mysteries, looking like a linebacker with an attitude—until something makes him laugh, and the big grin on his face reveals the genial guy inside.
-
Religion Update Fall 2012: In Profile
Conversations with four religious authors.
-
'We the People' and Beyond: Akhil Reed Amar
“I think scholars often end up just writing for other specialists,” says Akhil Reed Amar, “and I think that’s particularly unfortunate when we’re talking about scholars of the American Constitution.” He produces a well-thumbed, pocket-sized copy from his jacket.
-
Sleuthing in Feudal Japan: Laura Joh Rowland
A criminal investigator of unswerving integrity, tackling crimes that often have implications for the stability of his government, set in feudal Japan—this is the premise, and unusual time and setting, that Laura Joh Rowland has chosen for her long-running Sano Ichiro series, which began with 1994’s Shinju (Random House). In September, Minotaur will publish the 16th entry, The Incense Game, probing the poisoning of three women in the aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake.
-
Taking Care of Business: Jonathan Evison
Jonathan Evison’s new novel, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (Algonquin, Aug. 28), is as much a cathartic exercise in healing as it is an intimate story of the unusual bond between Ben, a charmingly pathetic character who’s lost his wife, children, and home, and Trev, a “tyrannical” teenager with the debilitating disease of Duchenne muscular dystrophy, for whom Ben works as a caretaker.
-
Guns and Roses: Junot Diaz
“I like human endings,” says Junot Díaz. “For me, human endings are ones that represent the full complexity of what I consider human experience. For me, the consequences of surviving sometimes give you great pause.”
-
First Fiction 2012: Lisa Lang: Unusual Utopian
Lisa Lang’s debut novel, Utopian Man (Allen & Unwin, dist. by Trafalgar Sq.), is a fictionalized biography of the real-life Edward William Cole, who in Melbourne, Australia, in the 1880s established Cole’s Book Arcade, a wacky institution with more than one million books, a Chinese tea room, wall-to-wall mirrors, monkeys, and more.
-
First Fiction 2012: Richard Kramer: A Talent for Writing Teens
“Except for a stint scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins while in high school and a job right after college as a singles director on a cruise ship, my day job for nearly 40 years has been the same as my night job,” says Richard Kramer, “which is writing in one form or another.”
-
First Fiction 2012: Scott Hutchins: A Literary Turing Test
The Turing test of artificial intelligence, invented by Alan Turing and introduced in 1950, is meant to determine whether machines can “think.” Neill Bassett, the briefly married and recently divorced hero of Scott Hutchins’s debut novel, A Working Theory of Love (Penguin Press) is battling the Turing test and trying to create the world’s first sentient computer.
-
First Fiction 2012: Eduardo Halfon: A Grandfather's Inspiration
Eduardo Halfon’s English-language debut, The Polish Boxer (Bellevue Literary Press, Oct.), about a grandson investigating his grandfather’s past, was translated from the Spanish by a team of five literary translators who split the book’s 10 chapters among themselves. Halfon also had input—although he was born in Guatemala, he left the country when he was 10 years old and now, at 40, divides his time between Nebraska and Guatemala. “English is my second and perhaps stronger language,” he says, “but I write only in Spanish.”
-
First Fiction 2012: David Abrams: War as a Laughing Matter
Debut war novel Fobbit (slang for a U.S. Army employee stationed at a Forward Operating Base) has won accolades from Matterhorn (Atlantic Monthly, 2010) author Karl Marlantes and Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone (Putnam/Amy Einhorn, 2011) and a starred review in PW. The book will be published by Black Cat. Assistant editor Peter Blackstock, who acquired the title from Nat Sobel at Sobel Weber Associates, says, “Fobbit exposes the banalities of daily life during the war in Iraq and the aggressive bureaucracy at the heart of the American war machine.”
-
First Fiction 2012: Kevin Powers: Bonds of War
Two young soldiers tightly bonded since their days in basic training hang on through a battle in Iraq in Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds (Little, Brown)
-
First Fiction 2012: Amanda Coplin: Sitting Under The Apple Tree
Amanda Coplin didn’t live through the experiences of the two sisters in her debut novel, The Orchardist (Harper). After all, Coplin is only 31 years old, and the events take place at the turn of the 20th century. But the setting is autobiographical. Coplin explains, “The novel is set in and around Wenatchee, Washington, where I was born. I spent a lot of time in my grandparents’ apple, cherry, and pear orchards growing up, and this landscape affected my imagination in a major way. The novel is sort of a love letter to that place, and an homage to my grandfather, who was my best friend when I was a child.”
-
First Fiction 2012: Peter Heller: After Extinction
“I was hooked on The Dog Stars from page one,” recalls Jenny Jackson, the Knopf senior editor who acquired the debut novel from David Halpern at the Robbins Office. “I guiltily closed my office door, ignored my e-mails, and prayed the phone wouldn’t ring. From the eerie opening pages to the jaw-dropping ending, I was utterly transported by this novel.” The title concerns a pilot who believes he is the only survivor of a flu, but then receives a radio transmission and realizes he is not alone. Knopf will print 60,000 copies in August.
-
First Fiction 2012: David R. Gillham: Wrong Side of History
Amy Einhorn, v-p and publisher of Amy Einhorn Books, which will publish David R. Gillham’s City of Women, says the manuscript immediately caught her attention because “I love stories I’ve never heard before. City of Women tells the story of an ordinary German woman [in Berlin during WWII]—a perspective I hadn’t seen yet. What was it like to be on the wrong side of history?” She acquired the book from Rebecca Gradinger at Fletcher & Co.
-
First Fiction 2012: Franck Thilliez: Thriller from Across The Atlantic
Thirty-eight-year-old Franck Thilliez, who lives in a small town in the north of France with a population of about 10,000 people, was a computer engineer for a decade before he began writing, but it was his love of cinema that inspired the novel Syndrome E, a scientifically minded thriller about two detectives investigating the sudden onset of blindness after a viewing of an obscure film from the 1950s. The book, already a bestseller in France, was acquired by Viking and translated by Mark Polizzotti.
-
Fiction Firsts for Fall: First Fiction 2012
PW looks at 10 particularly intriguing and promising debut novels. A strikingly varied assortment, these fictional works discuss artificial intelligence, the extinction of human life, and the Iraq War from two distinctly different viewpoints.
-
Jo Nesbo is Not the Next...
And this October, Nesbø’s earnest but seriously flawed homicide detective, Harry Hole (pronounced HEU-leh in Norwegian) is back for a ninth mystery, Phantom, coming from Knopf in October.
-
Life After the Caldecott: Erin and Philip Stead
When your first book wins the Caldecott Medal, life tilts. Doors open. Everyone is your friend. It’s hard to know what to do next. So Erin Stead put the medal in a drawer and got back to work.
Browse archive by date:
