-
Veni, Vidi, Vichi: PW Talks with Marco Vichi
Set in 1963 Florence, Marco Vichi’s Death in August introduces Inspector Bordelli.
-
Every Book a Grimoire: PW Talks with Jim C. Hines
In Jim C. Hines’s Libriomancer, librarian Isaac Vainio uses libriomancy to bring characters and items from books into the real world as he battles vampires, romances a dryad, and looks for missing mage Johannes Gutenberg.
-
Life After War: PW Talks with Logan Mehl-Laituri
Returning from Iraq and starting seminary was a culture shock. Now Logan Mehl-Laituri is working to bridge the divide between evangelicals and pacifists.
-
War Is Hell: PW Talks with John Boyne
Irish novelist John Boyne is best known as the author of the YA novel, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which takes place at Auschwitz during WWII. In his latest novel, The Absolutist, Boyne provides a graphic account of what life was like for British soldiers in the trenches during WWI.
-
The Return of the Scorpion: PW Talks with Andrew Kaplan
Andrew Kaplan has followed 1986’s Scorpion with two sequels
this year, Scorpion Betrayal and Scorpion Winter. -
The Age of Exploration: PW Talks with G. Willow Wilson
In her memoir, The Butterfly Mosque, American journalist and graphic novelist G. Willow Wilson described her move to Cairo after college, meeting her future husband, converting to Islam, and learning to
acclimate to a Muslim culture very different from the secular one
she’d grown up in. She turns to fiction with Alif the Unseen, her debut novel. -
Worth the Wait: PW Talks with Michael Chabon
“It’s a family novel,” says Chabon, “revolving around two families that live in Oakland and Berkeley. The husbands are in business together in a used record store called Brokeland Records, and they also play in a band together. Their wives share a practice as midwives. One family is black and the other is white, and we meet them at the end of 2004 as their lives unravel and come together again over the course of about two weeks.” When a retired NFL quarterback, now a wealthy black media mogul, wants to open a mini-mall anchored by an enormous record store, the two families set out to protect their neighborhood from gentrification.
-
Risky Business: PW Talks with Francesca Segal
As a book critic herself, she knows what can happen with reviews, but although she claims there is some trepidation, there is also understanding. “There is a human being at the other end who may have had a bad day, filed late, or simply doesn’t like the book very much,” she said. “In my experience as a critic, I know that books that came to me could have gone to someone else that would have loved it. Nevertheless, to be on the other side is humbling.”
-
A Name for God to Unite All: PW Talks with Rabbi Wayne Dosick
In The Real Name of God: Embracing the Full Essence of the Divine, just published by Inner Traditions/Bear, Dosick tells how the many aspects of God—simultaneously vengeful and loving, angry and peaceful, militant and kind—are paradoxical and fail to capture the full essence of the being he describes as “perfect.”
-
New Yorker Dreaming: PW Talks with Janet Groth
Groth, an Edmund Wilson scholar in her own right, said that she and her late collaborator, David Castronovo, had exhausted their academic subject and were both ready to move on to other things. She tells Show Daily, “I had been thinking about using materials that were in my long-stashed-away journals and diaries, and I thought, ‘Well, everyone who could be hurt by this is dead now, so I’ll do it.’ ”
-
Spills the Beans: PW Talks with Crissa-Jean Chappell
“It’s been a real-life 21 Jump Street in south Florida,” Chappell—a Florida native who now lives in New York City—says, relating a news report about a teenager caught up in the sting after he’d fallen in love with an undercover female police officer and “wanted to impress the girl” by buying drugs. While Narc contains all the elements of both police procedurals and thriller novels, what most intrigued Chappell was exploring the complex universe of high school social hierarchies. Before he became entangled with the Miami police, Foster describes himself as “human wallpaper,” a stoner who spent much of his time alone, smoking pot, playing video games, and performing street magic.
-
Friendship Begets Teamwork: PW Talks with Jenny Han and Siobhan Vivian
These authors’ friendship began in New York City, where they were both in a graduate children’s literature writing program at the New School. They lived in the same Brooklyn neighborhood, and they’ve been working together and critiquing each other’s work since those early days.
-
Balances Tragedy and Humor: PW Talks with Susin Nielsen
After being hired in the late 1980s to serve snacks to the cast and crew of the television series Degrassi Junior High, Vancouver author Susin Nielsen wrote a spec script for the show. The head writer liked what he read, and gave her a shot at writing an episode, which turned into 16 episodes—and launched her writing career.
-
Follow the MacGuffin: PW Talks with Mary Higgins Clark
Clark credits her longtime editor, Michael Korda, with the idea for The Lost Years, though he is quick to emphasize he is not her Svengali. He tells Show Daily, “All Mary’s novels start with a premise that is believable, intriguing, and chilling. It’s her trademark. It’s a privilege and a pleasure to have occasionally suggested the right one and to see where she takes it, often to places that I wouldn’t ever have dreamed of.”
-
Sympathy for the Devil: PW Talks with J.R. Moehringer
Mix a lifelong fascination with bank robber Willie Sutton (1901–1980) together with turbulent economic times, and the chances you’ll come up with Sutton (Hyperion), a historical novel based on the man’s life, are pretty slim. For J.R. Moehringer, however, the result was almost inevitable.
-
A Chat with Kirstie Alley
Popular actress and product spokesperson Kirstie Alley is master of ceremonies at this morning’s Adult Book and Author Breakfast. Immediately afterward, she will be signing book cover art postcards at the Atria Books booth (3657), 10–10:30 a.m. Alley recently penned The Art of Men (I Prefer Mine Al Dente), pubbing this November, a tell-all account featuring the men in her life.
-
Here Comes the Judge: PW Talks to Judge Lynn Toler
Judge Lynn Toler, who presides over the Fox syndicated reality television show Divorce Court, is making an appearance at BEA today. No, she’s not here to scout booksellers to appear on her show; Judge Toler is going to preside over signing ARCs of her August release, Making Marriage Work: New Rules for an Old Institution (Agate). After all, who would know better the rules for a successful marriage than Judge Toler, who has heard sad stories of marital failure from thousands of estranged couples over the years? Even though Judge Toler deals more with warring individuals than blissful lovers, she insists that “people in marriages are looking not to get divorced.” They just need a little advice so they don’t wind up in divorce court or even worse, on Divorce Court.
-
The Power of Writing: PW Talks with Damien Echols
As one of three teenagers wrongly convicted of murder, Damien Echols was sentenced in 1994 to the death penalty, spending 18 years in prison, most of them on Arkansas’s death row, before his release last August in a plea deal that went just short of exoneration. Echols’s prison diaries, first collected and self-published in 2005, form the foundation for his forthcoming memoir, Life After Death, out from Blue Rider Press. Along with his day-to-day, year-to-year experience in a supermaximum prison, Echols’s memoir details the botched investigation that put him behind bars and the forces that gathered around his cause and ultimately freed him, as well as his two friends, who together became known as the West Memphis Three.
-
Looking Forward to the Movie: PW Talks to Lee Child
Craving a copy of A Wanted Man, bestseller Lee Child’s next Jack Reacher adventure? Then show up at the Random House Booth at BEA and you could be one of the lucky recipients as the bestselling author signs a limited number of ARCs of number 17 in his bestselling series from Delacorte.
-
Help from the Other Side: PW Talks to John Edward
It should come as no surprise that renowned psychic John Edward gets guidance for his fiction writing from unusual sources. “I always joke around and say I want to put on a book, ‘Written by John Edward and his band of merry invisible men.’ I don’t think I write like a writer—it’s kind of strange, I write like a psychic—I’m capturing the movies that somebody allows me to see,” he explains to Show Daily.
Browse archive by date:
