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Jamil Ahmad: Treasure Chest
Jamil Ahmad, born in 1931 in Punjab, had never heard that Vladimir Nabokov was twice caught on his way to the incinerator with the manuscript of Lolita. Both times, his wife, Vera, intercepted him. With a deeper understanding of this anecdote than most, Ahmad laughs on the phone from Islamabad.
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Tom Perrotta: Disappearing Act
Tom Perrotta rules suburbia. It’s been the backdrop for all of his books, including his new novel, The Leftovers (St. Martin’s) even while he explains that he never made a decision to write about it.
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Paul Starr: Taking on Health Care Reform
Paul Starr, 61, a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, American Prospect magazine cofounder and Princeton sociology professor, is firmly rooted in a past infused with the lessons from his pediatrician father, who ran his busy office from the family’s Midwood, Brooklyn, home.
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Gender Envy: Anne Enright
Anne Enright is the author of eight works of fiction, most recently [attach review] (Norton), and The Gathering, which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2007. And just the morning PW talks to her, she finished a screenplay. When asked if it's an adaptation of one of her novels, she smiles wryly. "No, no. Nothing happens in my books."
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The Year of Michael Connelly
It's shaping up to be an epic year for novelist Michael Connelly. First a movie version of The Lincoln Lawyer, his first legal thriller to feature Mickey Haller, was released. Then his fourth Haller novel, The Fifth Witness, zoomed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, and soon Connelly's 24th novel will be published.
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Binyavanga Wainaina: Talking About Writing About Africa
In his essay "How to Write about Africa," published in Granta in 2005, Binyavanga Wainaina, 40, offers satirical advice to Westerners writing about Africa. In doing so, he points out the clichés and simplifications of much of Western media's coverage of the continent.
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David Whitehouse: Good in Bed
David Whitehouse lounged on a sumptuous, oversized bed outdoors at the Southbank Centre in London on June 5 to launch his first novel, [attach review] (Scribner) in an all-day stunt that drew hundreds of people curious to meet the 30-year-old former journalist whose book had been published in the U.K. two days earlier.
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First Fiction 2011: Frank Bill: Great Writing Is No Crime
The gritty, vivid stories in Crimes in Southern Indiana (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) have the ring of authenticity. Author and 37-year-old Corydon, Ind., resident Frank Bill, represented by Stacia Decker at Donald Maass Literary Agency, says, "Everything I write about comes from a real place.
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First Fiction 2011: Alexander Maksik: Double Debut
Not only is You Deserve Nothing the debut of writer Alexander Maksik, but the title also marks the debut of the new Tonga Books imprint at Europa Editions. Bestselling novelist Alice Sebold acquired and edited You Deserve Nothing—along with four other titles for the nascent imprint.
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First Fiction 2011: Chad Harbach: Take Me Out to The Ball Game
Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding will be published by Little, Brown. The first printing is 75,000 copies, and writers as disparate as Jonathan Franzen and James Patterson have praised it.
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First Fiction 2011: Justin Torres: We Are Family, Too
Justin Torres, author of We the Animals (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), may be only 31, but he's held a lot of different jobs. Currently he's a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and he just left a part-time gig at the collectively owned and operated Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco's Mission neighborhood.
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First Fiction 2011: Kevin Wilson: We Are Family
It was parenthood that inspired Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang (Ecco). He explains, "My wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and I had our first kid, Griff, right before I started this book.
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First Fiction 2011: David Whitehouse: Bed Head
Paul Whitlach, the Scribner associate editor who acquired David Whitehouse's debut novel, Bed, from agent Claudia Ballard at William Morris Endeavor, says, "When I first got the pitch for a novel about a bedridden recluse who becomes the fattest man in the world, I was wearing my most skeptical Dana Scully face.
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First Fiction 2011: Vanessa Diffenbaugh: Say It with Flowers
In August, Vanessa Diffenbaugh isn't just publishing her debut novel, The Language of Flowers (Ballantine); she's also launching a nonprofit organization, the Camellia Network, designed to support emancipating foster children as they leave the system and begin their adult lives.
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First Fiction 2011: Naomi Benaron: A Fictional Look At an All-Too-Real Genocide
Naomi Benaron drew on her volunteer work teaching English and life skills to refugees from Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, and Burundi to write Running the Rift, the story of a Tutsi Olympic contender who flees Rwanda.
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First Fiction 2011: Nikolai Grozni: From One Keyboard To Another
Growing up in Sofia, Bulgaria, Nikolai Grozni, author of the novel Wunderkind (Free Press), began playing piano at age four and won his first major competition by age nine.
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Fiction First Timers: First Fiction 2011
Reading debut fiction opens up new worlds and, if you're lucky, marks the beginning of a long and satisfying relationship with an author. Below, PW looks at 10 of this season's most intriguing, each promising in its own way.
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James Sallis: Ready for His Closeup
After decades of toiling in relative obscurity, building a small but fiercely devoted readership, James Sallis, 66, may have finally made it to the big time. A major motion picture adaptation of Sallis's 2005 novella, Drive, is slated for release, close to the publication of his new novel, The Killer Is Dying (Walker). The writer/musician, best known for his literate, exquisitely crafted crime novels—the Lew Griffin detective series, the Turner trilogy, Death Will Have Your Eyes, and, of course, Drive—has created an impressive body of work over the past 40 years, with more than two dozen volumes of fiction, poetry, translation, essays, and criticism.
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Looking Back, Fondly: A Profile of Nicholas Delbanco
It's not often that a novelist gets to have a second bite of the proverbial apple, but Nicholas Delbanco has been nibbling away. Delbanco's series of novels, the Sherbrooke trilogy, was published more than 30 years ago by William Morrow.
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Lily Tuck: A Reflection on Marriage and Grief
In Lily Tuck's new novel, I Married You for Happiness (Atlantic Monthly Press), National Book Award–winner Tuck tracks a Boston wife's random, reflective chain of thoughts as she sits at her dead husband's bedside.
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