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Worrying Myself to Death: PW Talks with Bob Mould
No conversation about the ‘80s underground rock scene is complete without Hüsker Dü. And no discussion about Hüsker Dü is complete without Bob Mould, who helped to lift the band to iconic status. But in Mould’s new autobiography, See A Little Light, the band is merely a leaping-off point to a surprising, engaging life full of fury and transformation.
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Spring 2011 Flying Starts: John Corey Whaley
In late 2005, on his drive home from Louisiana Tech University, John Corey Whaley heard a story on NPR about singer songwriter Sufjan Stevens. Stevens traveled to a small town where an ivory-billed woodpecker, previously thought extinct, possibly appeared and thousands of people flocked in to see it. Like his main character, Cullen Witter, in his YA novel Where Things Come Back (Atheneum), Whaley had a history of coming up with possible titles that he developed to varying degrees. "And in that 20 minutes, just like that," he says, "after coming up with book ideas that never really went anywhere since I was 12 years old, suddenly I knew this was the plot of a novel that I could finish."
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Spring 2011 Flying Starts: Cathleen Daly
Cathleen Daly has been writing since she was a kid. "In fourth grade, I used to get blank journals," she says. "One of my best friends and I used to write books together in the library. I write poetry, too. It's become a career only more recently."
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Spring 2011 Flying Starts: Veronica Roth
On a long drive from her home near Chicago to Carleton College in Minnesota—which she attended as a freshman before transferring to Northwestern—Veronica Roth saw on a billboard an image of a person leaping off a building.
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Spring 2011 Flying Starts: Jenny Hubbard
Novelist, playwright, stage actor: when it comes to arts and letters, Jenny Hubbard is something of a triple threat. And that doesn't even take into account her 17 years as an English teacher, both at the college level and at an all-boys boarding school, one similar to the fictional Birch School of her first novel, Paper Covers Rock (Delacorte), which has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, and Horn Book. The young adult novel went on sale just last week—one day before a play Hubbard wrote, Pinocchio's Sister, debuted on stage in her hometown of Salisbury, N.C. And later this summer, Hubbard will herself appear on stage in a production of August: Osage County in Charlotte, N.C.
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Spring 2011 Flying Starts: Matthew Myers
All Matthew Myers had to do to get the attention of Writers House agent Steven Malk was send him a link to his Web site. ("Paintings so good you'd swear he's dead," the splash page says.) In another sense, though, he'd been preparing for the introduction for years.
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Spring 2011 Flying Starts: Thanhha Lai
When Thanhha (pronounced TANG-Ha) Lai decided to fictionalize the story of her own early life in Vietnam and immigration to Alabama after the war, she wrote her novel Inside Out & Back Again (HarperCollins) in six months. "It was shockingly easy to write," she recalls. "Because it is my story and I'd already been processing it for years and years."
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The Spy Behind the Curtain: PW Talks with Matthew Dunn
Matthew Dunn's debut, Spycatcher, introduces tough, resourceful MI6 agent Will Cochrane.
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Q & A with Jessica Morgan and Heather Cocks
Jessica Morgan and Heather Cocks, authors of the fun and funny fashion blog Go Fug Yourself, are newly minted YA authors with their just-published first novel, Spoiled.
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'American Psycho' at 20: Catching Up with Bret Easton Ellis
Despite a rapidly changing cultural landscape, American Psycho continues to be relevant—it was published by Vintage in e-book format last June and is currently being developed into a Broadway play.
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Crossing Borders: PW Talks with Sebastian Rotella
Journalist Sebastian Rotella makes his fiction debut with Triple Crossing, a thriller that examines corruption in Latin America.
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Q & A with Tomi Ungerer
Tomi Ungerer's name is instantly recognizable to those who grew up reading his books in the 1960s and '70s. But Ungerer's catalog was allowed to go out of print when his outspoken political views and ribald erotic drawings alarmed U.S. publishers.
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Methtown, U.S.A.: PW Talks with Frank Bill
Frank Bill works in a paint factory and writes the grittiest, grizzliest rural noir this side of Knockemstiff. His debut collection, Crimes in Southern Indiana, is a bruising odyssey into the dark heart of the heartland.
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Home Again, Home Again: PW Talks with Elizabeth Thomson
Originally published in the mid 1980s, Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home, a portrait of the Bob Dylan’s career through the late ‘70s, was met with wide acclaim (and, to be fair, some derision). Shelton’s immersive portrait was an exemplary take on what an artist’s biography could be.
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To Live and Die in Mexico: PW Talks with John Gibler
Gibler, a San Francisco-based journalist, reports from the front lines of the drug war in To Die in Mexico. He risked his own life to bring readers the stories of communities struggling to survive in a land terrorized by violence and where the authorities are complicit in—and profiting from—the chaos.
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Abbott and Cloak-and-Dagger: PW Talks with Jeff Abbott
Jeff Abbott's thriller Adrenaline, the first in a series, introduces Sam Capra: former CIA agent, husband, and soon-to-be father.
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Shakespeare's More Prosaic Elder Brother: PW Talks with Rory Clements
John Shakespeare once again serves Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I's spymaster, in Rory Clements's second historical thriller, Revenger: A Novel of Tudor Intrigue.
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For Shame: PW Talks with Wayne Koestenbaum
The poet and critic investigates shame—in the body and body politic—in Humiliation.
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Q & A with Anthea Bell
Anthea Bell is a translator who has won many top awards, and whose work has appeared on many bestseller list, yet many outside of the publishing industry don’t know her name.
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A Formidable Female Detective: PW Talks with Lynda La Plante
An imprisoned serial killer helps London Det. Insp. Anna Travis track a serial killer on the loose in Lynda La Plante's Blind Fury.
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