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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: John Donatich: 'Variations' on a Theme
John Donatich is no stranger to publishing. Over a storied career spanning 20+ years, the 51-year-old director of Yale University Press has shepherded the work of such prominent authors as Christopher Hitchens and Steven Pinker into print. But he never gave up on the dream of publishing a novel of his own. After writing the well-received 2005 memoir, Ambivalence: A Love Story, about his marriage with wife and fellow industry veteran Betsy Lerner, he became interested in the Catholic archdioceses that were closing down along the eastern seaboard.
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Speaking in Tongues: Elizabeth Little
Imagine, for a moment, that lutefisk had the zip of gumbo, and Norwegian folk songs had the verve of zydeco. Were that the case, Minot, N.D., might have had a marketing advantage over New Orleans, and the buzz phrase for partying would be la de gode tider rull instead of laissez les bons temps rouler.
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A Literary Spy: Olen Steinhauer
Olen Steinhauer can thank James Joyce and an exchange program as an undergraduate in Eastern Europe for his writing aspirations. “I was living in a garret in Zagreb in 1989, reading Joyce for the first time,” he says over lunch at a French cafe in Carmel, Calif. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man completely floored me.”
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Ron Carlson Delivers the Whimsy
Ron Carlson, author of six short story collections and five novels, including Five Skies (Viking, 2007) and The Signal (Viking, 2009), has gathered 30 years' worth of his poems in the forthcoming Room Service: Poems, Meditations, Outcries & Remarks (Red Hen Press), about which he says, "Poems are necessary. By that, I mean to say there is no way I could not have written these things. I love words, don't you?"
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Suvir Saran Has a Farm...
Saran’s first cookbook, Indian Home Cooking (Clarkson Potter, 2004), focused on home-style Indian recipes, and his second, American Masala (Clarkson Potter, 2007), livened up American favorites with Indian flavors. In his third and newest book, with Raquel Pelzel and Charlie Burd, Masala Farm: Stories and Recipes from an Uncommon Life in the Country (Chronicle)—named after the 67-acre farm Saran and his partner, Charlie Burd, now own, live on, and care for in upstate New York—Saran “bares his heart and soul.”
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Girl Gone Wild
Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild (Knopf, Mar.) proves she’s fearless: in life and in her writing. In Wild, Strayed chronicles her three-month solo 1995 hike along 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail.
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Elizabeth Hand: Two of a Kind
On the narrator of her newest novel of psychological suspense: “She’s essentially a sociopath, but she has a certain charisma that stops her from being totally unlikable.”
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Fall 2011 Flying Starts: Marie Lu
Neither first-timer nerves nor the Santa Ana winds that brought massive power outages across Southern California could keep Pasadena resident Marie Lu from her very first signing as a published author—at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in Redondo Beach on December 1. “A dream come true,” says the author—a dream that was a long time coming.
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Fall 2011 Flying Starts: Robison Wells
Robison Wells did not aspire to be an author. In fact, as a teen, he hated English class and hated books. “I never wanted anything to do with writing,” he says now with a laugh. “Unlike so many of my colleagues, I was not born with a pencil in my hand.”
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Fall 2011 Flying Starts: Rae Carson
Rae Carson grew up reading fantasy, but as time passed, the genre conventions that once resonated began to feel, well, conventional. When she sat down to write her own fantasy novel, she says, “I wanted to subvert those tropes and focus on what a princess is not versus the tropes of what she is. I wanted an epic quest like Lord of the Rings, but less Aragorn and more Ugly Betty.”
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Fall 2011 Flying Starts: Wendy Wunder
In 2008, the first of a series of serendipitous events led then struggling writer Wendy Wunder (no, not a pseudonym) to a new career in YA literature. “I had been trying to write this adult novel that was semiautobiographical,” she says. Wunder wrote while her daughter was in preschool and diligently applied for grant funding to finish. “But I was starting to think maybe I should do something else with my life.”
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Fall 2011 Flying Starts: Christopher Silas Neal
For a graphic artist who has done posters, covers, and spot illustrations, illustrating a book should be a piece of cake, right? Not necessarily. “When I do a cover or a poster, it’s often a big figure or object that’s centered on the page,” Christopher Silas Neal says.
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Playing It by Ear: Kambri Crews
Poised, intelligent, and with a quick wit, Kambri Crews comes across as a woman comfortable in her own skin. So comfortable, it’s easy to forget that her father, a man she loves, is serving a 20-year sentence in a Texas maximum-security prison for attempted murder, stabbing and nearly decapitating his girlfriend—and that Kambri helped put him there.
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True Grit: Jan-Philipp Sendker
How Jan-Philipp Sendker’s first novel came to be published in the U.S. 10 years after its initial publication in Germany is a story a lot like the one fluttering at the core of The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (Other Press). And that story of love and determination—grand, touching, and unabashedly romantic—is, it turns out, a lot like Sendker himself.
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A Long Time Coming: John Lescroart
John Lescroart’s 23rd book, The Hunter (Dutton), is his third thriller featuring San Francisco private investigator Wyatt Hunt.
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Anita Desai: Telling Stories
In the 1960s, Anita Desai was a young mother when she sent her work to a British publisher from her home in India: “I lived in a very ordinary, traditional Indian family. I had four children... I did my writing in secret. I used to pull out my notebooks as soon as I’d seen the children off to school and quickly put them all away before they came home. The children say now that it was always like some kind of magic. ‘We never saw you writing and then one day there was a book lying on the table.’”
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Val McDermid: Not Bringing Comfort and Joy
The waitress at the Renaissance St. Louis Grand Hotel bar brings a bowl of potato chips. “You’re bad,” Val McDermid, the Scotswoman across the table from me, in town as the International Guest of Honor for Bouchercon, the annual mystery conference, tells her, “very, very bad.”
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Nothing is Illuminated: Adam Johnson
A satellite photo of the Korean peninsula taken at night—North and South—shows the southern half covered in constellations of light. The northern half, by contrast, is entirely, eerily dark. From space, North Korea at night looks more like an uninhabited desert than a 21st-century country of 23 million people.
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