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Cooking the Books with David Lebovitz
In May, Ten Speed will publish pastry chef, cookbook author and food blogger David Lebovitz’s new book, Ready for Dessert: My Best Recipes. The book is a “greatest hits” of sorts, with updated versions of 150 previously published recipes, plus 10 brand new ones. In this interview, Lebovitz talks about how his recipes have evolved, what he tries to accomplish when writing head notes, and why he’s totally fine with giving away recipes free online.
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When the ALA Calls: Stead and Pinkney on Winning the Big Prize
When you win a Newbery or a Caldecott Medal, you find out in a phone call — usually very early in the morning—and then your life is instantly changed. Both Rebecca Stead and Jerry Pinkney got recently that phone call; we spoke with both of them to find out where they were when the phone rang, what their reactions were, and what came next.
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Cooking the Books with Marcy Goldman
Cookbook author Marcy Goldman's site, BetterBaking.com, has pioneered a pay-for-content model that charges visitors $2.49 per recipe and also offers quarterly and six-month subscriptions. As Goldman continues work on her fourth cookbook, she talked to PW about fiercely guarding her content: "Everything has its value. We have to just not panic. Publishers are confusing the delivery system with thinking people don’t want content anymore."
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Why I Write: David Allen Sibley
Even before The Sibley Guide to Birds, people would sometimes ask if I considered myself an ornithologist first or an artist first. I always wished I had a simple answer for them, but the truth is that the two things—science and art—have always gone together for me.
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PW Talks with Randy Wayne White
"As much as I miss the marina, losing my job was the best thing that ever happened to me. I had to make my living as a writer. I had two young sons, and failure wasn't an option."
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PW Talks with Gabrielle Zevin
Credit card debt plagues a modern American family in Gabrielle Zevin’s The Hole We’re In, a witty, frightening look at how we spend now.
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PW Talks with Joe R. Lansdale
Versatile East Texan storyteller Lansdale goes all over the genre map in The Best of Joe R. Lansdale: "They're not all jewels, but they're all mine."
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PW Talks with Nancy Martin
"My children think I'm a gracious lady, but I came of age in tumultuous times. I know my way around the concert parking lot."
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PW Talks with Melissa Milgrom
"I visited the Schwendeman family [taxidermy] studio, expecting them to be creepy animal killers like Norman Bates. But instead I felt as if I had fallen into Darwin's study with all the skeletons and birds, the beauty and the strange tools."
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Cooking the Books with Clotilde Dusoulier
Clotilde Dusoulier talks about her translation and adaption of the French classic I Know How to Cook, first published in 1932, with more than six million copies in print in France. As holiday shoppers snap up the just-out DVD of Julie & Julia, Dusoulier discusses I Know How to Cook versus Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
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PW Talks with Connie Willis
"Books should never be too fat to read in bed or take up all the memory on a Kindle, so my publisher split it up. I hope the wait between the two books will whet people's appetites rather than just annoying the heck out of them."
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PW Talks with Cathleen Schine
Cathleen Schine's The Three Weissmans of Westport is a little bit 21st-century homage to Sense and Sensibility and a little bit homecoming to her childhood town of Westport, Conn.
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PW Talks with John D'Agata
"Is the boy who kills himself a metaphor for what's going on at Yucca, or is Yucca a commentary on this boy's suicide? I like not being entirely clear where the emphasis lies."
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PW Talks with Dana Stabenow
The discovery of gold and other precious metals on land within a state park leads to murder in A Night Too Dark, Dana Stabenow's 17th mystery featuring Alaska PI Kate Shugak.
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PW Talks with Eric Puchner
A Pushcart Prize winner and former Wallace Stegner Fellow, Eric Puchner follows his lauded story collection with his first novel, Model Home, which portrays the financial ruin and personal crises of the Ziller family in devastating detail against a backdrop of California in the early 1980s.
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Q & A with Hilary McKay
Q: Do you have strong childhood memories of reading A Little Princess?
A: Oh, yes. As a child, I read the novel so many times. In fact I read it and reread it until my copy almost fell to pieces. My sister and I knew the novel so well that we could actually recite it. It became almost like theater to us. -
Monday Interview: Sarah Schulman
An interview with Sarah Schulman, whose Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, was just published by the New Press.
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Cooking the Books with Julie Powell
Julie & Julia author Julie Powell is back—but don’t think her new book, Cleaving, picks up where the Amy Adams movie left off. Cleaving tells of the troubles in Powell’s marriage, and how she found solace by working as a butcher, of all things. As Powell explains, readers who come to Cleaving from the Nora Ephron romantic comedy are going to experience “some psychic whiplash.”
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Why I Write: Rory Freedman
So many people romanticize writing. And I get it. But I never once wanted to be a writer. I write because I have to. Because it's literally a matter of life or death.
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PW Talks with Roger Rosenblatt
In Making Toast, Time magazine essayist Roger Rosenblatt recalls his family's struggle to heal itself after losing the woman at its center: "When you reach a certain age—we're in our 60s—life becomes awfully self-indulgent. Now, helping with the grandchildren, we have made our lives useful, and that matters."
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