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PW Talks with Jen Lancaster
One might assume that since she’s written several bestsellers (memoirs Such a Pretty Fat, Pretty in Plaid, My Fair Lazy, and her first novel, If You Were Here) and sold over a million books, Lancaster has been to BEA before. Yet this is her first time here: until now, her annual tour schedule (she writes one book per year!) always conflicted with BEA’s dates.
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PW Talks with Kevin Anderson
Little did bestselling sci-fi writer Kevin Anderson know that when he acknowledged the popular rock band Rush for inspiring his first novel, Resurrection, Inc., back in 1988, he’d be collaborating with the group’s percussionist and lyricist, Neil Peart, in a novelization of one of their CDs. The author sent copies of his first book to Mercury Records, and a year later, a seven-page letter from the group’s drummer showed up in his mailbox. They’ve been friends ever since.
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PW Talks with James Meek
He’s an award-winning, internationally bestselling author, but this is his first visit to BEA. So do make James Meek feel welcome when he signs his forthcoming novel, The Heart Broke In, for Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the Macmillan booth.
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PW Talks with Heather Gudenkauf
For New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Heather Gudenkauf, writing her latest novel, One Breath Away (Harlequin Mira), required a journey to her past. During her senior year at the University of Iowa, a former student who had been passed over for an award entered a classroom and killed five people before turning the gun on himself. “That shooting was an event that has always stayed with me,” says Gudenkauf, who would graduate with a degree in education and spend the next 20 years as a teacher.
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PW Talks with Selden Edwards
As difficult as it was for Selden Edwards to write his first novel, The Little Book, which had a 30-year trajectory of multiple rejections, being put away, and then rewritten, his second novel, The Lost Prince (Dutton) presented different kinds of challenges. Edwards tells Show Daily, “The first one is built on unfulfilled promise—there’s a lot of yearning and ambition—but no expectations. The second one is the opposite because everybody is saying, ‘Okay, now what are you going to do?’ And there’s the nagging fear that when it comes out, people are going to say, ‘Well, it’s certainly not as good as the first one,’ and of course there’s the accusation of being a one-trick pony.”
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PW Talks with Frank Deford
Award-winning journalist Frank Deford has been covering the wide world of sports since the 1960s, most consistently for Sports Illustrated but also for NPR, HBO, Newsweek, the National Sports Daily (which he headed for its short but legendary run), and the book-reading public, in titles like The Old Ball Game and Big Bill Tilden. His newest, Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter (Atlantic Monthly Press), is more than a memoir—it’s a gold mine for sports fans, including more than 50 years of insider stories, as well as a thumbnail history of sportswriting perfect for those dreaming of a career like his. What it isn’t, Deford tells Show Daily, is an exercise in self-scrutiny: “I’m a writer. A writer’s memoir is not so much about himself as about the people he has known.”
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PW Talks with Melissa Francis
Melissa Francis is no stranger to the spotlight. As a successful child actor in the 1980s, she appeared in many commercials and television shows, becoming best known for her stint as Cassandra Cooper Ingalls on the beloved hit Little House on the Prairie. Cut to adulthood, where a variety of roles in TV journalism have led to Francis’s current spot as an anchor for the Fox Business Network. But despite all that time spent under the lights and in the public eye, only now, in her new memoir, Diary of a Stage Mother’s Daughter (Weinstein Books), is Francis telling the very private story of the less-than-perfect side of her childhood.
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PW Talks with Joy Bauer
For four years, NBC’s Today nutritionist, Joy Bauer, has produced a series on the show featuring weight-loss success stories about individuals who lost 100 pounds or more and have kept the weight off. They are members of her Joy Fit Club, and her latest book—appropriately titled The Joy Fit Club—showcases 30 of those individuals (who now number close to 150) from all walks of life. “I picked a sampling of people from around the country—males, females, different ages, different backgrounds—so that whoever was reading would be able to relate to at least three or four stories,” Bauer tells Show Daily. “It shows you people who have overcome every obstacle, from financial constraints to serious medical scares and conditions, from time restraints to juggling multiple jobs, as well as problematic family abuse and dysfunction.”
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PW Talks with R.L. Stine
After giving kids goose bumps for two decades—and continuing to do so—R.L. Stine taps into grown-up fears in Red Rain, his second adult hardcover horror novel (after 1995’s Superstitious). In the novel, which Simon & Schuster’s Touchstone imprint will publish with an announced first printing of 150,000 copies, a travel writer impulsively adopts two orphaned boys—with horrific results.
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PW Talks with Warren Adler
Warren Adler has achieved more than most writers could dream of—he has sold 12 of his books to the movies, including the blockbuster hit The War of the Roses. But at 84, he’s still hungry for more. “I have a tremendous need to keep writing. I’m not going to go into the wilderness without a fight,” he declares in a firm and steady voice that belies his octogenarian status. “A lot of guys that started out with me in publishing novels have disappeared from the scene,” he adds. “I’m like a long distance runner—I just keep at it.”
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PW Talks with Maggie Stiefvater
Maggie Stiefvater’s fans got a first peek at the launch installment of her four-book series, the Raven Cycle, at BEA on Tuesday, when Stiefvater signed ARCs of The Raven Boys, due from Scholastic Press with a 150,000-copy first printing. Mystery, romance, and the supernatural come together in the novel, which introduces a boy on the hunt for a vanished Welsh king and a girl who has been told that if she ever kisses her true love, he will die.
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PW Talks with Vaddey Ratner
How does a person make sense of the brutalities of genocide? Can unspeakable atrocities be transformed into something redemptive?
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PW Talks with Walter Mosley
Acclaimed and prolific writer Walter Mosley believes science fiction writers are a cut above the rest: “That’s my experience—the people I know who are science fiction writers are the smartest of all the writers I know in general. And I think that science fiction readers are the freest.”
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PW Talks with Gordon Korman
Gordon Korman has written more than 70 middle-grade and YA novels over the past 25 years, and with total sales of more than seven million copies, he has obviously accumulated quite a hefty fan base. His latest novel, Ungifted, will be released by HarperCollins’s Balzer + Bray imprint with a 75,000-copy first printing. The story centers on Donovan, a middle-school student who accidentally gets placed in the gifted and talented program and shares his own distinctive gifts with the other kids in the program.
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PW Talks with Molly Ringwald
Actress Molly Ringwald has been writing fiction for as long as she can remember. Best known for her coming-of-age movies, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and The Breakfast Club, she tells Show Daily she is looking forward to her fiction debut, When It Happens to You: A Novel in Stories, due in August from It Books, an imprint of HarperCollins (3339, 3340).
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PW Talks with Joe Kanon
That Istanbul was a magnet for spies in the 1940s made it a perfect location for Joe Kanon’s latest thriller, Istanbul Passage (Atria Books), not to mention that Kanon fell in love with the place as a tourist because of its physical beauty and many layers of history: “More than 2,000 years of being at the center of events,” notes Kanon. He tells Show Daily, “Where you set a book is really important in what happens to people’s lives. It also begins to suggest part of the story—things that would happen there and not happen somewhere else.”
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PW Talks with Marla Frazee
Marla Frazee, who won Caldecott Honors for her own A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever and for All the World by Liz Garton Scanlon, received accolades for her book illustration early on—as a fourth-grader, in fact. Her best friend announced that she wanted Frazee to draw pictures for a story she’d written. “She was very precocious and told me that if I wanted to illustrate children’s books, I should start with hers, ” recalls Frazee. “So I did. And someone at our school sent it to the California State Fair, and we won an award. We were asked to make a duplicate copy for the school library, and every time I saw it on the shelf, I was so happy that I was a published author!”
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PW Talks with Junot Diaz
One might assume that Junot Díaz, who burst onto the literary scene with his short story collection, Drown, and followed that up with the Pulitzer Prize–winning conquest that was The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, would be an old hand at negotiating the madness that is BEA. In fact, this year will be his maiden voyage to the convention about which he has heard only rumors, and not even salacious ones at that. With the eagerness and enthusiasm of a boy about to ride a bike for the first time, Díaz tells Show Daily, “I heard that everyone wanders out with a huge pile of books.... It’s like finding a library that is giving all their books away.”
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PW Talks with Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver, of Poisonwood Bible and Lacuna fame, requested her publisher not to be too explicit about a major plot point of her new novel, Flight Behavior (HarperCollins), in which a fearsome and unexplained vision is revealed in the opening chapter to the book’s protagonist, Dellarobia Turnbow. “Requested” is too weak a word for Kingsolver. “I begged them not to put it on flap copy or the cover,” she says. The result of some environmental catastrophe caused by climate change, Dellarobia’s vision fuels the events of the novel, as people in her small Southern town try to make sense of what she witnessed, offering up explanations religious, secular, scientific, and magical.
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PW Talks with Stephen Colbert
Attendees at today’s Adult Book and Author Breakfast can expect a heaping helping of truthiness alongside the traditional morning fare. When emcee Stephen Colbert takes the microphone, he’ll likely have witty things to say about the other speakers—Junot Díaz, Barbara Kingsolver, and Jo Nesbø. But he’ll also be plugging two new books of his own from Grand Central Publishing: his latest for adults, America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t, and his children’s title, I Am a Pole (And So Can You!).
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