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The Crime of Being Different
In Black Sheep, Australian author Ben Peek envisions a grim world segregated along racial lines, where cultural mixing and questioning authority are both swiftly punished by the complete loss of one’s identity.
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Class Rules
A Village Voice writer once called Russell Banks “the most important living white male American on the official literary map.” Flattering, but as Banks sees it, a bit off the mark. “As a writer I don't have a nationality,” he says. “As a writer I don't have a race. As a writer I don't have a gender.
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In the Shadow of Order: PW Talks With Michael Kruger
A writer—and publisher of Germany’s Hanser Verlag—finds productive chaos in Turin, Italy, where he sets The Executor: A Comedy in Letters. Your narrator has to manage the competing interests fighting over a famous novelist’s estate, including his unpublished magnum opus.
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Children's Bookshelf Talks with Anthony Horowitz
Anthony Horowitz plans to tour the U.S. to promote Snakehead, the seventh book in a series about teen spy Alex Rider.
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Conrad Black on Writing, Nixon
Canadian media mogul Conrad Black was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in jail yesterday for mail fraud and obstruction of justice. Earlier this fall he was out promoting his book Richard Nixon: A Man in Full, where PW caught up with him for a brief interview.
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The Most Remote Place on Earth
In Kitty Sewell's debut, Ice Trap (Reviews, Oct. 8), Welsh surgeon Dafydd Woodruff unearths some disturbing secrets in a Canadian Arctic outpost, where 14 years earlier he had served as a physician. How did you choose such a remote setting for Ice Trap? I love the Canadian Arctic, having lived in this region myself for three years.
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Bringing History to Life
In Amalia’s Tale, David Kertzer tells how in 1890 an illiterate Italian peasant woman—who contracted syphilis from wet-nursing a foundling—took on Bologna’s social and medical elite. Both with Amalia’s Tale and your earlier The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, you show a knack for finding stories that were sensational in their time but then forgotten.
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Q & A with Eoin Colfer
Eoin Colfer’s latest novel, Airman (Hyperion), takes place a century ago on a pair of tiny islands just off the Irish coast. Bookshelf caught up with him to discuss his foray into historical fantasy.
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A System of Facelessness
In Hope’s Boy, Andrew Bridge tells of his hard road from foster care to Harvard Law School.
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Questions of Identity
“This isn't as warm and fuzzy as those earlier books,” Charles Baxter comments, somewhat ruefully, about his latest novel, The Soul Thief (Pantheon), as we eat lunch in a trendy Minneapolis restaurant above the Walker Art Center.
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Smoking in the Boys' Room
Self-described “pulp writer” Christa Faust, who recently won an award for her novelization of the 2006 film Snakes on a Plane, celebrates another coup with Money Shot: the first female writer in Dorchester’s neo-noir Hard Case Crime imprint. How does it feel to break into the Hard Case Crime boys’ club? It’s really fantastic, almost unreal.
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The Beat Goes On, and Business, Too
Along Columbus Avenue in San Francisco, at the nexus of North Beach and Chinatown, a bronze plaque in front of a jazz/seafood joint called the Condor reads, “Where It All Began. The Birthplace of the World’s First Topless/Bottomless Entertainment.” Down the street, a barker stands in front of another club, the Roaring Twenties, exhorting tourists to “come in for a great ...
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PW Talks with Libba Bray
After completing The Sweet Far Thing (Delacorte, Dec.), the third book in her trilogy about Gemma Doyle and the girls of Spence Academy, author Libba Bray has started a new project—a film about how she works.
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On the Road with Benjamin Percy
With the publication of his second collection of short stories, Refresh, Refresh (Graywolf), Benjamin Percy is becoming something of a small press superstar, lauded by The Paris Review, among others. PW caught up with him on tour to discuss the short fiction scene, small press publishing, and life on the road.
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Experiencing a Mother's Death
In Swimming in a Sea of Death, David Rieff recounts his mother, Susan Sontag's final year of illness and her death from cancer.
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Writing the Words of God
In Douglas Preston’s thriller Blasphemy, a physicist builds a giant particle accelerator that allows people to talk with God.
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Oh Pure and Radiant Millet
Lydia Millet is lovely to look at and hugely pregnant, but she's driven more than an hour from her home west of Tucson in the Avra Valley to eat enchiladas and hang out at the Circle Z, a dude ranch 20 miles from the Mexican border.
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On the Road with Dorothea Lasky
When Wave Books published Dorothea Lasky’s debut collection, Awe, Lasky wasn’t sure she’d be able to mount a full scale tour to support the release. She decided, instead, to hold readings in different rooms of her house over the course of a month, invite a few close friends, then film the events and post them to her website, calling it her “tiny tour.”
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An Introspective Inspector
Inspector Alan Banks and his on-again-off-again partner and lover, Annie Cabbot, make flawed but empathetic heroes in Friend of the Devil, Robinson's 17th suspense novel to feature the Yorkshire policeman.
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Meaning Maker
Lee's fourth book of poems, Behind My Eyes, is an accessible mix of homespun spirituality, meditation on the plight of his Chinese immigrant family and musical language. Here, he talks about God, his readers and the contemporary poetry scene. Many of these poems have spiritual themes.
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