-
A Mutual Admiration Society: PW Talks to Allegra Kent and Emily Arnold McCully
Author-illustrator Emily Arnold McCully has been a fan of Allegra Kent since, as a college student sitting in nosebleed seats, she first saw the famed ballerina perform with the New York City Ballet in 1959. But the creator of Mirette on the High Wire, which received the 1993 Caldecott Medal, never dreamed that her life would become intertwined with that of Kent more than 50 years later. “When my editor sent me the manuscript for Ballerina Swan (Holiday House), and I saw her name on it, I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ It was incredible,” says McCully.
-
Master of the Cold Case: PW Talks to Jussi Adler-Olsen
There are worse things than being called “the new ‘it’ boy of Nordic noir,” which is how the Times of London hailed thriller writer Jussi Adler-Olsen, comparing him to Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, and Jo Nesbø. A wildly popular author in his native Denmark, Adler-Olsen was introduced to American audiences last year with the acclaimed Keeper of Lost Causes, the first in a series featuring the put-upon, world-weary police detective Carl Mørck and his sidekick, Hafez el-Assad, both employees in Department Q, the Copenhagen police division for the coldest of cold cases. The Absent One (Dutton) is the second book in the series, with many more no doubt to come.
-
Time for Terror: PW Talks to Wendy Corsi Staub
After the tragic events of 9/11, bestselling author Wendy Corsi Staub was haunted by two things. First, that crime rates dropped drastically in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks. “The cops were all busy downtown, and obviously everybody was distracted. I always thought if you were diabolical and wanted to do something, that was a good time to do it because the city was in chaos,” Staub says.
-
Zen Writing: PW Talks with Dinty W. Moore
In a world where we are bombarded with texting, tweeting, Facebook updates, e-mail, and all sorts of other distractions, Ohio University creative writing professor Dinty W. Moore offers to writers a “still, small voice” amid the madness. “I think we need a mindful approach,” he explains, “the type of paying attention and slowing down a writer needs to practice, even before he or she starts putting word to the page.” Moore admits, “In many ways, the basic teachings of letting go that are part of Buddhism seem entirely incompatible with the highly meticulous and in many cases obsessive practice that’s necessary to be a successful writer. At the heart of it, I am trying to reconcile the two.”
-
Never Say Never: PW Talks with Hanna Pylvainen
“The mantra of M.F.A. programs was you won’t sell your book,” remembers Hanna Pylväinen. “And I certainly never expected to live a writer’s life at this young age.” But at 27, Pylväinen, with an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan and a MacDowell Colony residency, has indeed defied the odds and will see her first novel, We Sinners, published by Henry Holt.
-
On the Case: PW Talks with Hank Phillippi Ryan
“She’s tough, focused, and a little vulnerable.” That description of news reporter Jane Ryland, one of the key characters in Hank Phillippi Ryan’s new series, and fifth book, The Other Woman (Forge), could also describe the award-winning mystery/thriller author. A longtime investigative news reporter for 7News in Boston, Ryan has earned 27 Emmys for her reporting and was recently nominated for another three. She’s also the author of four Charlotte McNally mysteries—the first won an Agatha Award—and she’s incoming president of Sisters in Crime and sits on the board of Mystery Writers of America.
-
Yiddish with a Twist: PW Talks with Steve Stern
“It’s a daunting thing to publish a retrospective book,” says novelist and short story writer Steve Stern, referring to his new collection, The Book of Mischief: New and Collected Stories (Graywolf Press), which draws from work throughout his 25-year career. Six of the stories have never been collected before; all have Jewish themes. “My writing friends say, don’t get excited, it’s just a book of stories. But I’ve never been so excited about the existence of a book. I would like to honor it with events that might promote it. I’ve always been good at discouraging people from reading my work. With this one I’d like to find lots of readers.”
-
Mission: Improve Education: PW Talks to Harold Kwalwasser
Harold Kwalwasser is the first to say that he is “perversely proud” of having been general counsel for the Los Angeles Unified School District under Roy Romer, 2000–2003. He came to the position by way of a career in public service, having served on the staffs of three U. S. senators and as chief of staff for a California state senator. Now a writer and consultant on education, Kwalwasser says he wrote Renewal: Remaking America’s Schools for the Twenty-First Century (Rowman & Littlefield) more for parents and community leaders than for educators. But make no mistake, he thinks education reform is everyone’s business—and attainable.
-
Book Long in the Making: PW Talks to David Ezra Stein
A girl’s contagious smile sets off a chain of good feelings that make their way around the world in Because Amelia Smiled (Candlewick), the latest picture book by David Ezra Stein, whose Interrupting Chicken was a Caldecott Honor book. The story, which he wrote in 1999 while a student at Parsons the New School for Design, came quite quickly to the author. The art did not.
-
Loving Comics Pays Off: PW Talks to Lincoln Peirce
Yes, a kid’s obsession with comics really can lead to big things. Lincoln Peirce is a case in point. His Big Nate character, a high-energy sixth-grader who serves up big laughs and gets lots of detentions, is the star of a daily syndicated comic strip, an island on kids’ site Poptropica.com, a number of popular comic strip compilations, and a series of bestselling chapter books.
-
Burger Queen: PW Talks to Rachael Ray
If you think a burger is simply ground meat between two halves of a bun, celebrity chef and television star Rachael Ray will set you straight in her latest cookbook, The Book of Burger, published this month by Atria Books. “I love playing with the idea of what people think of when they think of burgers,” she tells Show Daily. “You can make a burger out of anything—seafood, vegetables, all kinds of ground meats.”
-
The Bank Robber's Son Makes Good: PW Talks with Deni Bechard
In 2007, Deni Béchard’s novel, Vandal Love, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book, but the Canadian-American author was missing from the U.S. scene until Milkweed Editions released Béchard’s novel (starred by PW) as well as a brand-new memoir called Cures for Hunger. In it, Béchard reveals his own novel-worthy tale: how the son of a French-Canadian bank robber grew up to be a globe-hopping journalist and award-winning author.
-
A Tribute to His Mom and Books: PW Talks with Will Schwalbe
Mary Anne Schwalbe was an educator who worked at Harvard University and the Dalton School in New York City and spent 10 years building libraries in Afghanistan. She loved books, a passion shared by her son, Will, a former editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books and founder of Cookstr.com. When his mother was diagnosed with cancer, Schwalbe began accompanying her to chemotherapy treatments. During one of those trips, a casual conversation about what she was reading evolved into a book club with two enthusiastic members.
-
PW Talks with Justin Cronin
Even though Justin Cronin writes about vampires wreaking havoc in a postapocalyptic world, what he’s really interested in, he says, is exploring human relationships. The Passage, a 2010 release that was one of the most talked-about books at that year’s BEA, is “very much a novel about people in a familial structure,” as groups of humans fleeing the vampires who’ve taken over band together into communities and attempt to recreate some semblance of normal life for their families. Cronin is particularly interested in how relationships between parents and their children evolve in such a setting because, he explains, “If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what’s worth saving about it.”
-
PW Talks with Lee Woodruff
A chance phone call inspired Lee Woodruff, a contributor to CBS This Morning, to write her first novel. The author, with her journalist husband, Bob, had written the bestselling In an Instant, which chronicles the family’s path to recovery in the aftermath of Bob’s traumatic brain injury in Iraq. Since then, Lee has become the go-to person for brain injury information, which is why a friend called about an accident in which a 17-year-old drove a car into a young child riding his bike. The child subsequently recovered from a brain injury. “What struck me was the randomness of the act,” Woodruff tells Show Daily. “That one ‘in an instant’ moment is probably why it hit home, because my moment was when I picked up the phone and got the news about Bob. And as a mother I wound up thinking, ‘God, this could have so easily happened to my 17-year-old son.’ And look at all of those lives that were affected by that one moment.”
-
PW Talks with Leonard Goldberg
After nearly a decade’s hiatus, Leonard Goldberg, known for his bestselling Joanna Blalock medical thrillers, is back in the writing saddle with Patient One, the first in a new series from Midnight Ink, featuring a trauma nurse and an emergency room physician. Inspired by the first Die Hard movie, in which actor Bruce Willis scurried around crawl spaces to thwart terrorists, the physician author tells Show Daily, “I wondered what would happen if terrorists took over a hospital where the president or some high-ranking dignitary was, and in the crawl space was a physician who had at one time been in the special forces.” He adds, “I wanted people to see that there are people in the civilian world—doctors and nurses—who sometimes are called upon to do things outside their realm, but they do it and function in a heroic capacity that equals in every way the heroics they do in medicine.”
-
PW Talks with Joseph Holland
Joseph Holland, attorney, entrepreneur, and longtime Harlem community activist, is at BEA to promote his book on Harlem history, From Harlem with Love: An Ivy Leaguer’s Inner-City Odyssey (Lantern Books).
-
PW Talks with Lynn Povich
If there’s one character in Mad Men that journalist Lynn Povich can relate to, it’s Peggy Olson, the secretary who is promoted to copywriter at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce just as the 1960s women’s movement is picking up steam. “There were a lot of us who were like Peggy,” Povich says. She started out as a secretary at Newsweek’s Paris bureau in 1965, before returning to New York City in 1967 to work at Newsweek’s headquarters. During the 25 years Povich worked at the magazine, she was a researcher and a reporter before being named Newsweek’s first female senior editor in 1975.
-
PW Talks with Patrick McDonnell
Since 1994, Patrick McDonnell has created the Mutts comic strip, which has earned him numerous awards and now appears in more than 700 newspapers in 20 countries. The strip’s stars—Earl the dog and Mooch the cat—have also appeared in a handful of picture books. McDonnell has also written and illustrated other children’s books, among them Me... Jane, a portrait of a young Jane Goodall, which is a 2012 Caldecott Honor book.
-
PW Talks with Courtney Sheinmel
Being a good aunt often brings sweet rewards. For Courtney Sheinmel, it unexpectedly brought a publishing contract from Sleeping Bear Press for her books starring eight-year-old Stella Batts, whose parents own a candy store in their California suburb. “I had a young niece who complained that I never wrote anything she could read,” Sheinmel explains. “The first Stella Batts book is dedicated to her. It was initially written for a very private reason, and I never thought it would become a book. But then I thought, ‘I may as well get paid for it!’ ”
Browse archive by date:
