-
Mad Cats and an Englishwoman: Ruth Rendell
Rendell was in New York for BEA in June to promote her latest novel, The St. Zita Society, on one of her increasingly rare trips to the U.S. “I come over once a year,” she says. “I’ve done the big 12-city tours, and I’m never going to do that again—never. I was younger then. It wears you out, you know.”
-
Home on the Range: Ivan Doig
Like Faulkner and his beloved Yoknapatawpha County, Ivan Doig, who’s written 10 novels—the 11th, The Bartender’s Tale, comes out from Riverhead—and three works of non-fiction, most notably his memoir, This House of Sky (Harcourt, 1978) spends most of his time on the page in his home state of Montana. “I’ve hung on to the country and community,” he says, though his characters do venture far afield, from Harlem to Vietnam. Doig himself now lives in Seattle.
-
Collisions with Strangeness: James Meek
British author and journalist James Meek talks process -- it involves spoiling paper -- and how experience informs his fiction.
-
Spring 2012 Flying Starts: Marissa Meyer
When Marissa Meyer decided to remake the popular fairy tale Cinderella, little did she know that she would soon be living out her own fairy tale. Cinder (Feiwel and Friends), a dystopian, sci-fi young adult novel about an outcast cyborg who unwisely falls for a handsome prince and winds up at the center of an interplanetary war, was released in early January and soon found a place on bestseller lists.
-
Spring 2012 Flying Starts: emily m. danforth
No, that’s not a typo: emily m. danforth does not capitalize her name. “But not for interesting theoretical or political reasons,” she says. “I just like the way that it looks, and I’ve done it ever since high school.” She’s happy to see her name any way people want to style it, though, most especially on the cover of her debut novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post (HarperCollins/Balzer & Bray).
-
Spring 2012 Flying Starts: Christopher Healy
Like so many little girls, Christopher Healy’s daughter went through a “heavy princess phase” a few years back. Healy, then a freelance magazine writer, discussed what he termed parental “princess fatigue” in an essay for Salon.com. And while he would often commiserate with other parents who were troubled by archetypical images of passive princesses, he was also perturbed by the vacuous nature of Prince Charming in fairy tales like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, and Cinderella. “He’s so inconsequential,” Healy says. “He’s presented as the ideal man, but he has no personality.” If princesses are going to fall in love with princes, he continues, then “shouldn’t we care about who these men are?”
-
Spring 2012 Flying Starts: Leigh Bardugo
Leigh Bardugo’s path to publication took a few twists and turns before her first book, Shadow and Bone (Holt), finally hit the shelves. Born in Jerusalem and raised in Los Angeles, Bardugo graduated from Yale with a degree in English. From there, she worked in journalism and copywriting, including some time spent crafting movie trailers. However, writing was her dream. “I’d always wanted to be a writer. Come hell or high water, I’d finish a book.”
-
Spring 2012 Flying Starts: Caroline Starr Rose
In 2009, with nearly a dozen unpublished manuscripts, stacks of rejections, and no leads, Caroline Starr Rose seized what she terms a “you only live once” conviction and quit her job teaching middle-school social studies to write full-time. Her husband, a Presbyterian minister, and two sons, now nine and 11, cheered her along, and four months later Rose completed the manuscript for May B. (Random/Schwartz & Wade, Jan.), a historical novel in verse set in the 19th-century, about a 12-year-old girl left to fend for herself during a brutal Kansas winter. She quickly secured an agent, Michelle Humphrey at the Martha Kaplan Agency, and in another four months she had a book deal.
-
Hollywood Confidential: Bruce Wagner and 'Porn Culture'
Bruce Wagner's new novel stars Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, an 11-year-old breast cancer survivor, and an American Idol reject. It's called Dead Stars, and writing it helped save his life.
-
Mother & Daughter Coauthors: Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer Talk to PW
Can an author who has sold millions of books learn from her daughter about writing? For the mother-daughter author team of Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer, writing Between the Lines was enlightening for each in different ways.
-
Crime Pays: Linda Fairstein
Linda Fairstein chose Vassar because of its excellent English department (she graduated in 1969, in the last all women’s class), but aware that supporting herself as a writer wouldn’t be easy, she went on to get a law degree at the University of Virginia.
-
Paradise Found: Steve Hamilton
“There is a bullet in my chest, less than a centimeter from my heart. I don’t think about it much anymore. It’s just a part of me now. But every once in a while, on a certain kind of night, I remember the bullet. I can feel the weight of it inside me. I can feel its metallic hardness. And even though that bullet has been warming inside my body for fourteen years, on a night like this when it is dark enough and the wind is blowing, that bullet feels as cold as the night itself.”
-
Girls on Top: Megan Abbott
Megan Abbott first made a name for herself in the world of noir fiction, where hard-drinking girls call one another “buttercup,” don silk stockings, and someone is always wearing a trench coat. Within the genre there are few female writers, and Abbott’s fresh perspective, delicious language, and rich, historical details garnered immediate attention.
-
JLove Calderon: Author, Activist, White Girl
Jennifer Calderon’s panelist bio at the recent National Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, N.Y., said she was “a white woman, an author, activist, and social entrepreneur”—not your usual conference introduction. But Calderon, better known to the hip-hop community as JLove, uses her race as well as her books to challenge white supremacy and racism and to mobilize a multicultural audience around issues of social justice.
-
Occupying Democracy: Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco
Individually, journalists Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco have reported from some of the world's most chaotic war zones, including Bosnia, Gaza, and Iraq. In their first book-length collaboration, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (Nation Books, June), Hedges's words and Sacco's pictures form a mosaic portrait of the United States at a low point of economic dysfunction.
-
Alias Benjamin Black: John Banville
The Dublin office of John Banville—novelist, screenwriter, critic—is where he writes the literary fiction he’s famed for, Booker Prize–winning The Sea and The Infinities, and more recently, under the pen name of Benjamin Black, the Dr. Quirk mysteries, which are becoming as popular in America as they are in Banville’s native Ireland.
-
Religion Update Spring 2012: In Profile
Tracie Peterson: Inspired and Inspiring and more
-
A Diamond in the Rough: Peter Lovesey
In 1969, Peter Lovesey’s mystery fan wife, Jax, pointed out a notice to her husband that read: “Macmillan and Panther Books announce a First Crime Novel Competition open to all nationals of the United Kingdom, Commonwealth and the Republics of Eire and South Africa.” Lovesey, a teacher at a technical college, was reluctant to respond although he did have some background in the genre.
-
Book Criticizing 'Globe and Mail' Self-Published
When no Canadian publisher was willing to take on journalist Jan Wong’s book criticizing her former newspaper, she had to self-publish.
-
Unfettered Imagination: Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones has taught creative writing at the University of Colorado in Boulder for four years, and while he can find his office, he’s not sure of the address. An apt metaphor for a writer who has created a narrator in his latest novel, Growing Up Dead in Texas (MP Publishing), who is ready to take you to a wrapped-up conclusion, but not quite sure how to get you there.
Browse archive by date:
