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North of the Border: Richard Ford
Richard Ford leaves Frank Bascombe -- and his longtime publishers -- behind for his highly anticipated new novel, "Canada."
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Materfamilias: Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel—creator of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and author of the lauded 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home and now the new biocomic Are You My Mother?—doesn’t know what to call herself. “I know I’m a cartoonist. The drawing is completely inextricable from my writing,”she says from her home in Vermont. “I do feel, since Fun Home came out, I’ve had to sort of reimagine myself a little bit.”
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Lucky Ticket: Alyson Hagy
“This was not the planned book,” Alyson Hagy says of her third novel and seventh book, Boleto (Graywolf, May). “I was working on another novel and sitting in a lecture and this book just came to me,” she says, about remembering an encounter she once had with a ranch hand.
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Poetry Profiled 2012
Some of this year’s best poets are the newest. PW talked to three poets publishing their debut volumes this year, and one whose highly anticipated second collection will appear.
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Inside Out: Anouk Markovits
Anouk Markovits never intended to write about the Satmar Hasidic community in which she grew up, but then came 9/11, and Markovits thought, “I’ve had personal experience with fundamentalist environments.” Still, writing about that world didn’t come easily. Whether fiction or memoir, most books set in these environments are written by and about those who, like Markovits, have left, and that wasn’t the story she wanted to tell. Which raised the question: “Could I possibly write a book about the people who stayed?”
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Emily St. John Mandel: Once a Dancer, Now a Noir Phenom
While The Lola Quartet, Emily St. John Mandel's third novel, has plenty of criminals, guns and double-crossings, there’s also love among characters who once bonded through jazz and now hover one step away from disaster.
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Of Reversals and Reunions: Deborah Copaken Kogan
The first piece of writing Deborah Copaken Kogan remembers being proud of appeared in the 1998 Red Book on the occasion of her 10th Harvard College reunion.
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Can Jon Klassen Top 'Hat'?
A lot of things astonished Jon Klassen about the reception given his first picture book, I Want My Hat Back: hearing Daniel Pinkwater read it aloud on NPR, being invited to talk about it with Martha Stewart on TV, learning it had become an Internet meme.
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Sacre Bleu!: Christopher Moore
Walking through San Francisco’s Legion of Honor Museum’s impressionist art collection and a special exhibit on Camille Pissarro with Christopher Moore, who’s as irrepressible in person as he is in his novels, the conversation ricochets from thoughtful comments about the paintings on the walls to laugh-out-loud anecdotes about the artists—including Pissarro—who populate Moore’s 13th novel, Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d’Art (Morrow).
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Firsts in Fiction
Debut novelists can be counted on to bring fresh voices, diverse story lines, and singular characters.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Vaddey Ratner: Holding onto Hope
Vaddey Ratner’s journey to writing In the Shadow of the Banyan (Simon & Schuster) begins with silence. When she was five years old, the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia. An estimated two million people died between 1975 and 1979 in the genocide—including all the members of Ratner’s family except her and her mother. They managed to get to a refugee camp over the Thai border when Ratner was nine. She was practicing a self-imposed silence when an immigration official forced her to tell her story or risk being sent back to Cambodia.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Shehan Karunatilaka: The Universal Language of Sports
Shehan Karunatilaka was born in Sri Lanka in 1975 and describes growing up in Colombo “amidst bombs and curfews,” the kind of language the colorful characters in his debut, The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (Graywolf, May), might use. The novel—which recently won the $50,000 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature—tells the story of an aging sportswriter with a bad liver who heads out with a friend to search Sri Lanka for the title’s legendary cricket bowler, uncovering secrets about the country and encountering a six-fingered coach and a Tamil Tiger warlord.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Brandon Jones: Exploring the Axis of Evil
The characters of All Woman and Springtime by Brandon Jones (Algonquin, May) are far from his direct experience. Young girls Gi and Il-sun become friends growing up in a North Korean forced-labor camp. Eventually they escape and make it to the U.S., but human traffickers intercede on their journey. Over the course of the novel, which Algonquin compares to Memoirs of a Geisha, the author gets in close not just to the North Korean girls but to those who sell them.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Regina O'Melveny: A Poetic Renaissance
At first, poet Regina O’Melveny didn’t realize she’d started a novel. She began to write a series of prose poems chronicling strange maladies and gradually puzzled out that they were from a single character’s voice.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Chris Pavone: Luxembourg Redux
It wasn’t Chris Pavone’s two decades as an editor at various houses that ultimately inspired his hotly anticipated debut thriller, The Expats (Crown). Instead, it was becoming a stay-at-home dad for the first time, after his wife, Madeline McIntosh, took a job launching the Kindle overseas that required a family move to Luxembourg.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Karen Thompson Walker: A Shift in Gravity
The Indonesian earthquake and tsunami happened when 31-year-old Karen Thompson Walker was pursuing her M.F.A. at Columbia. She was struck by the revelation that the force had been powerful enough to shorten the length of the day by microseconds.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Carole DeSanti: Secret Passions Go Public
Carole DeSanti, v-p and editor-at-large for the Penguin Group, is well-known as a champion for women’s voices in literature, having worked with Terry McMillan, Tracy Chevalier, Marisha Pessl, and many others over the years.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Howard Anderson: Adventure Down Under
Howard Anderson’s biography on the jacket of Albert of Adelaide (Hachette/Twelve) reads like a novel of its own—he’s flown helicopters in Vietnam; worked on fishing boats in Alaska and in steel mills in Pittsburgh, Pa.; done a stint in Hollywood (his biggest success as a scriptwriter was writing the sequel to Annie); and is currently a defense attorney in New Mexico. And at 66, he’s also a first-time novelist. Asked about the publisher’s bio, he quips, “They have no idea. It’s much abridged.”
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Cristina Alger: Gotham Gossip
Cristina Alger’s The Darlings is set in the high stakes world of financial sector New York—the world she grew up in and almost found herself building a career in. Though she planned to work in academia or publishing while an English major at Harvard, after her father’s death on 9/11 she moved back to New York to be close to her mother and got a job at Goldman Sachs that then segued into corporate law.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: G. Willow Wilson: A Fantasy Revolution Gets Real
G. Willow Wilson’s memoir, Butterfly Mosque: A Young Woman’s Journey to Love and Islam (2010), chronicled her conversion to Islam and her move from America to Cairo. What she wasn’t able to include was what she saw as a growing movement online, “emerging digital history” taking place on social media. Many people were still questioning whether the Internet would have a true political impact on the Middle East.
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