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Q & A with David Pogue
David Pogue is the personal technology columnist for the New York Times, and is a tech contributor to both CBS News and CNBC. He has authored a number of technology books, including the Missing Manual series of computer guides. Pogue has just written his first children's novel, for middle-grade readers, and he spoke with Bookshelf about it.
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Keeping Secrets
"Any secrets that people take pains to hide can be explosive and therefore dangerous. I do think there's a host of seemingly fine reasons to keep secrets, until you realize it's the pretense that's the burden."
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You Can Always Clean the Sheets
"I started out writing with such furrowed brow, like I was trying to write the way I thought writers wrote."
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A Nigerian Sorceress Makes Her Way
Nnedi Okorafor’s gentle demeanor is so disarming that it’s impossible not to relax in her company. The Chicago State University professor has a sweet smile, three graduate degrees, numerous awards and prize nominations for her writing, and a razor-sharp mind that is changing the face of speculative fiction.
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Q & A with Kathryn Erskine
Kathryn Erskine's second novel, Mockingbird, sprang from the intersection of two life-changing events—a daughter diagnosed with Asperger's, and the April 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech near Erskine's home in Charlottesville, Va.
Q: Your daughter, Fiona, has Asperger's Syndrome. When did you decide you wanted to write a novel about a character with that condition?
A: I had been jotting down notes, mulling over the idea of a main character who had Asperger's almost as an exercise—trying to see the world through her eyes, but I didn't have a compelling plot.
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Becoming Mexican
"The idea of ethnicity is a little weird for me because, for a number of years, I believed that my biological father was Native American. I'm a Mexican, but a Mexican is not all that I am."
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Matt Thorn Talks About Publishing Manga
The director of Fantagraphics' new manga line, Matt Thorn, talks about his relationship with shojo manga pioneer, Moto Hagio, and the importance of high-quality translations to a new generation of American manga readers.
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Why I Write...
A momentous event in my seventh year started me on a lifelong passion: my grandmother gave me a typewriter. I began to write to understand what I was living.
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Rick Riordan's Big Year
With two new trilogies launching this year, Percy Jackson author Rick Riordan stands likely to boost his already (ahem) Olympian output—and sales. Disney-Hyperion will release one million copies of The Red Pyramid, first in his Kane Chronicles series inspired by ancient Egyptian magic. An as-yet-unnamed Percy Jackson spin-off will follow, which will combine familiar characters with some new half-human, half-Greek-god kids.
Until now, Riordan has stuck to one book a year. "I've set myself a challenge of putting out two books a year so the readers don't have to wait longer than a year for either series," said Riordan. "That's a pretty big jump for me." -
Q&A with Deb Caletti
Deb Caletti knows she was "meant to be holed up in my room wearing my pjs and talking to my imaginary friends." And, even though becoming a young adult author wasn't part of her original plan, her complex stories about distressed families and complicated romances have certainly connected with teen readers—and critics. Her book Honey, Baby, Sweetheart was named a finalist for a National Book Award in 2004. Here, Caletti talks with Bookshelf about what it's like to write after winning such an honor, the inspiration behind her newest novel, The Six Rules of Maybe, and the actual rules she chooses to live by.
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Molto, Bene!: PW Talks with Scott Turow
"I've been lucky that in the course of my work as a novelist there's always been a character who runs away with the book."
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Paradise Regained
"Nothing is better to me than the unmediated meeting with the natural world. But I also know that writing about it, having to make something coherent and real for a reader who isn't there, is a powerful lens turned onto what you think you already know."
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Why I Write: Tina Chang
When I began writing poems, I was struck by how much a poem looked like the physical structure of a house. Each word seemed like a window, each comma a blade of grass, each line was a slow locomotive passing through a quiet town.
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A Classical Poet, Redux: PW Profiles Anne Carson
"I just really have no idea what I'm writing most of the time," she says, claiming, "I still feel most at home making things into blocks of prose"; "there are all these kinds of fun available in poetic forms, and I experiment with them from time to time, but I never feel very adept at any of that." Her legions of fans would disagree.
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Zombies on Steroids
Former soap opera actor Brown pits zombies against a high school football team of drug-addicted hooligans in his explosive debut, Play Dead (Reviews, Mar. 1). Do you have a background in football? I went to a very football-heavy school in Texas. I wasn't a player, but I shot video for the booster club and the coaches, so I mostly observed it through a viewfinder.
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Q & A with Carrie Ryan
Carrie Ryan is the author of The Forest of Hands and Teeth (2009) and The Dead-Tossed Waves (Mar.), both from Delacorte. Ryan is currently crossing the country on tour to celebrate the publication of her new novel. PW caught up with her via phone on her Lansing, Mich., stop.
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Make Mine Yours
At last week's Copyright Clearance Center “OnCopyright 2010” seminar at the Union League Club in Manhattan, a roomful of lawyers, publishers, artists, and creators gathered for a discussion, aptly titled “The Collision of Ideas.” Over the course of the day, panelists hit all the high notes of a media business struggling with rapid, disintermediating, technology-fueled ch...
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A Girl Gets Off a Boat...
Jean Kwok, once a Girl in Translation herself, relives her arrival in America with her debut novel.
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Q & A with Ally Carter
In Ally Carter's Heist Society, a crew of teenage thieves—led by Kat, youngest in a clan of accomplished heistmasters—gets down to the sticky business of retrieving valuable paintings stolen from an Italian mobster. Kat has strong incentive for recovering the masterpieces: to clear the name of her father, prime suspect in the theft, and to return the paintings, plundered by the Nazis decades before, to their rightful place. Launching a series, this latest work by the author of I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You and subsequent Gallagher Girls novels was published by Disney-Hyperion with a 200,000-copy printing. Carter talked to Bookshelf about why—and how—she dunnit.
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Why I Write: Mark Kurlansky
To answer the question of why I wrote my newest book, The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macorís, I first have to ask why I write at all. I have thought a great deal about why I spend usually more than 50 hours a week alone in a room having a conversation with myself.
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