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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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Read, Kiddo, Read: James Patterson
James Patterson, the bestselling author on Earth, doesn't want to talk about writing today. He wants to talk about reading. For a man with scores of blockbuster books under his belt (it might be north of 70, but even the author isn't sure how many he's written at this point), Patterson is now fascinated with a new challenge: hooking kids on books. And his latest effort, "Read, Kiddo, Read," aims to do just that.
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The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone
Brooke Gladstone, longtime cohost of On the Media, NPR's weekly radio show on journalism and media, has turned to comics: The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media (Norton), a nonfiction comics work created in collaboration with Josh Neufeld.
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America's Skeptic Laureate: A Profile of Michael Shermer
Over the past 15 years, Michael Shermer, 56, has created a cottage industry out of debunking everything from UFO sightings and paranormal experiences to religious faith.
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Great Balls of Fire! A Profile of William Gurstelle
Reserved, erudite, professorial describes William Gurstelle, 55, along with polite and soft-spoken. So how could he ever have written a book with such an explosive title? The Practical Pyromaniac: Build Fire Tornadoes, One-Candlepower Engines, Great Balls of Fire, and More Incendiary Devices, his latest on blowing things up, comes out from Chicago Review Press.
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Poetry Profiled 2011
April, National Poetry Month, the cruelest, and busiest, month for poets, is here again. We thought we'd showcase four poets with new or upcoming books to watch this spring. Poetry's alive and well, and here are the writers to prove it.
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Native Son: A Profile of Ishmael Reed
Norman Mailer walks into a bar. Not just any bar, though: it's the legendary White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, and where, in the 1960s, a young jazz journalist from Buffalo, N.Y., named Ishmael Reed, liked to lurk and stargaze.
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The Not So Old Woman and the Sea: A Profile of Danielle Sosin
Danielle Sosin has always been fascinated by Lake Superior. So fascinated, in fact, that she decided to leave the Twin Cities and relocate to Duluth, Minn., for a year to live next to the largest freshwater lake in the world while researching local archives for a novel that she felt compelled to write.
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War and Peace in Jerusalem: A Profile of James Carroll
James Carroll, a novelist, memoirist, and historian, may have left the priesthood as a young man, but the priesthood has never quite left him. Passionate and charismatic, he goads our conscience and tells painfully inconvenient truths, whether about the Catholic Church's history of anti-Semitism (Constantine's Sword) or what he calls "sacred violence" in his forthcoming book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
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Lauren Myracle: 'This Generation's Judy Blume'
If a writer's potential to incite controversy could be gauged by her Web site, Lauren Myracle would not register as a candidate.
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