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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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Bradford Morrow: Not Afraid of the Dark
Otto Penzler needs a golf mystery for a series of books about sports. Bradford Morrow writes one about miniature golf, with its “crazy little world of windmills and castles,” and a lonely boy who, as a teenager, goes to work at a miniature golf course.
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Christopher Goffard: Death in Kenya
Christopher Goffard’s dive into a true story of murder, madness, and Kenyan politics began four years ago when he stumbled across a wire service brief buried in the Los Angeles Times, where he is a staff writer.
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Grace Burrowes: The Gravity That Keeps Families Together
Romance authors might be expected to exude sensuality, while lawyers are no-nonsense and tough. Grace Burrowes is both, but even amid the bustle and noise of the annual Romance Writers of America conference, she’s a model of mellowness and... well, grace.
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Maria Duenas: Politics, Espionage, Fashion... and Love
María Dueñas, 47, never intended to write a bestselling novel. She never even dreamed of becoming a fiction writer. A professor for almost 20 years, with a Ph.D. in English philology, Dueñas says she was perfectly happy teaching at the University of Murcia in Spain. But she also says she felt it was time for something new.
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Thomas Steinbeck: The Last Steinbeck
On the patio of a restaurant in Malibu, Thomas Steinbeck, Nobel laureate John Steinbeck’s eldest son, is in his favored environment, along the California coastline, which, like his father, he has gravitated to for many years.
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Joan Didion: Stepping into the River Styx, Again
“This was a much harder book to write than The Year of Magical Thinking,” says Joan Didion about Blue Nights. “With Magical Thinking, there was no place to go except where it went.”
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Archer Mayor Writes Vermont Through a Cop's Eyes
"It’s approximately 12:25. And I swear to the accuracy of all I’m about to say," Archer Mayor says into my tape recorder, but this is no interrogation. All the crimes we’ll be discussing were committed on paper. Tag Man (Minotaur), Mayor’s latest Gunther novel, is about a burglar who steals quiet time in the homes of sleeping or absent victims; a drifter who may be butchering and then photographing young women; and a prep school student caught in her family’s criminal dysfunction.
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