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New Obama Speech, New Obama Book
President Obama’s speeches have provided fodder for a picture book from Simon & Schuster, and his inaugural address on Tuesday will become a new book as well. HarperCollins’s new Bowen Press imprint will release Our Enduring Spirit: President Barack Obama’s First Address to the Nation, a 40-page picture book with illustrations by Greg Ruth.
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Smart as Heller: A Web-Exclusive Profile of Zoe Heller
Zoe Heller’s books aren’t hard to read or pretentious or opaque, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy. What they are is deceptively complex, in the way they wrap a high-concept plot around extremely complicated characters. They’re also, to put it mildly, tart—sharp-witted, observant and not at all blithely accepting of human foibles. You don’t read Zoe Heller, in other words, to be coddled.
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What Do We Want? Freedom
Jedediah Purdy—who debunked irony in his attention-getting first book—now explores the conundrums of freedom in A Tolerable Anarchy.
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Odd Jobs: Brian M. Wiprud
Brian M. Wiprud talks about his new novel Feelers.
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PW Talks to Adam Cohen: A Web-Exclusive Q&A
Obama is sworn in and like FDR, the world looks to his First 100 Days to see if he can get a handle on the economic crisis gripping the country.
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Children's Bookshelf Speaks with Jacqueline Woodson
In Peace, Locomotion, Jacqueline Woodson returns to the story of Lonnie, aka Locomotion, a Brooklyn boy separated from his sister, Lili, after the death of their parents. Woodson talks about what it was like to return to Lonnie’s story, how her writing process has changed during her career—and why she will never write a novel through letters again.
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The Monday Interview: Efrem Sigel
An interview with Efrem Sigel, whose second novel, The Disappearance, will be published by the Permanent Press
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A Priest Without a Pulpit: Barbara Brown Taylor
An Episcopal priest without a parish, Barbara Brown Taylor wrote about how that came to pass in Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith. The next part of her journey is the subject of An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith.
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Natasha Wimmer on Translating Roberto Bolaño
Reviewing the late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño's posthumous masterpiece 2666 in the New York Times Book Review this past November, Jonathan Lethem echoed much of the book press, noting, “[I]n the literary culture of the United States, Bolaño has become a talismanic figure seemingly overnight.
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A Mental Puzzle: Mara Faye Lethem
Mara Faye Lethem (her brother is the novelist Jonathan Lethem) will publish two translations, Pandora in the Congo by Albert Sanchez Piñol and Wonderful World by Lethem's husband, Javier Calvo.
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The Farmer-Writer
Pakistani author and farm-owner Mueenuddin's first collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, follows the travails of a complex web of relations surrounding a Lahore landowner.
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Q & A with Javaka Steptoe
Javaka Steptoe won the 1998 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award for his first book, and has illustrated eight others, Bookshelf spoke with Javaka about Amiri and Odette: A Love Story (Scholastic), a collaboration with Walter Dean Myers on a contemporary adaptation of Swan Lake.
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A 21st-century Spy
After five crime novels set in a fictional Eastern European country during the Cold War, Olen Steinhauer examines the toll working for the CIA takes on one agent in a contemporary spy thriller, The Tourist (Reviews, Dec. 15). What drew you to the spy thriller? John le Carré. It wasn't until I picked up The Spy Who Came In from the Cold that it became clear how spy fiction can encompass all...
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Monday Interview: Azar Nafisi on Things I’ve Been Silent About
Azar Nafisi is the daughter of Ahmad Nafisi, a former mayor of Tehran, and Nezhat Nafisi, who was one of the first women to be elected to the Iranian parliament under the Shah. She left Iran in 1997 and in 2003, she wrote Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, (Random House) which has sold more than 1.5 million copies. Her new memoir is Things I’ve Been Silent About (Random House, $27; 978-1-4000-6361-1).
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An Antarctic Chiller
Robert Masello's Blood and Ice (Reviews, Nov. 10) blends Victorian-era romance, an Antarctic adventure set in the present-day and a science-based horror story. What audience are you hoping to reach with Blood and Ice? I hope it will appeal to people who read authors as diverse as Anne Rice, James Rollins, and Preston and Child.
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Passing Strange
In Passing Strange (Reviews, Dec. 1), Sandweiss uncovers the double life of Clarence King, the renowned geologist who mapped the American West—and crossed color lines, passing as a black Pullman porter, James Todd, to marry Ada Copeland, a black nursemaid. How did you come across this story? I read Thurman Wilkins's spectacular biography of Clarence King in graduate school.
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Q & A with Mo Willems
Bookshelf spoke with Mo Willems about his new picture book, Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed (Disney-Hyperion, Jan.).
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The Monday Interview: Meryl Gordon
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Journey of the Heart: Stephen Lovely
In Irreplaceable, Stephen Lovely maps the web of connections made after a heart transplant.
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She Loves Paris
Surely, the author of nine mysteries set in nine different neighborhoods of Paris must reside in Paris. No, Cara Black lives in San Francisco—but she does have an affinity for cafes. We meet at Bernie's, on 24th Street (where Black's last novel, Murder in the Rue de Paradis, is prominently displayed near the cash register), to talk about the next installment in her increasingly popular se...
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