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Richard Russo Writes What He Knows
On Richard Russo's last day on the job, in his final summer doing manual labor during college breaks, one of the carpenters on his crew told him, “Have a good life. You're going to go out and do other things, and you're going to forget about guys like us.” That's how Russo remembers it now, decades later, as we sit talking in his comfortable home in Camden, Maine.
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Giving Monsters a Voice
Turning traditional fairy tales inside out, Tiptree Award—winner Valente lets witches, demons and beasts tell their own stories of seeking—and not always finding—happily ever after. The tone of In the Cities of Coins and Spice is much darker than the first Orphan’s Tales book, In the Night Garden.
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Imagining the Roads Not Taken
Two Jungian psychoanalysts suggest an inner dialogue called “active imagination” as a way to deal with unrealized dreams in Living Your Unlived Life.
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Children's Bookshelf Talks with Peter Sís
Peter Sís, two-time Caldecott Honor artist (for Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei and Tibet: Through the Red Box) draws from his own childhood in his latest book, The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain.
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A Second Career at 90: PW Talks to Millard Kaufman
Ninety is an unusual age to embark upon a second career, but that’s just what Oscar-nominated screenwriter and co-creator of Mr. McGoo is doing. McSweeney’s will publish Kaufman’s debut novel, Bowl of Cherries.
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The Jack Kerouac I Knew
It was autumn of 1951, and I had been warned that Jack would be coming in. Two weeks earlier, Bob Giroux, of Harcourt, Brace, had called me. Giroux had edited The Town and the City, Jack’s first and conventional novel. Jack had just been in to see him, and he needed a literary agent. Giroux thought I would be the right man.
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Writers Reveal What Winning Really Means
Sure, it's an honor just to be nominated. But what does winning an award do for an author's career? Baby boomer writers speak out.
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When Things Get Tough
Throughout the recorded history of armed conflict, there has been this certainty: that no writer, no matter how gifted, can truly relate what it is like to be in war. “War happens inside a man,” the great correspondent Eric Sevareid said with resignation in 1945, sure he had failed the test of bringing back to his readers the essence of the fighting, “…and that is why, i...
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All Food Is Local
When you find heirloom tomatoes at your supermarket, when the menu at your favorite bistro informs you where the pork loin spent its childhood, when in mid-July you bite into a peach that tastes of summer and its juice trickles down your chin, you can thank Alice Waters, 63, who opened the seminal restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif.
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Not the End of the World
Blogger and freelance writer Diane Vadino captures the premillennial hopes and fears of a single New York City editor in her debut novel, Smart Girls Like Me.
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Not Just for Vegetarians
The prolific—and omnivorous—author of the New York Times’ “Minimalist” column has written How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, a follow-up to his classic book, How to Cook Everything.
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Children's Bookshelf Talks with Eric Carle
Four decades ago, Eric Carle teamed up with Bill Martin Jr. to create the classic Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, which the author wrote during one extraordinarily creative half-hour ride on the Long Island Rail Road.
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When Things Get Tough
Master documentarian Ken Burns on rendering the war to those who were not there
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Veteran Politico Raises Hell In New Memoir
As candidates compete to become the next president of the United States, one memoir, Raising Hell for Justice: The Washington Battles of a Heartland Progressive (University of Wisconsin Press), renders judgment on every person who has held that office in the post-Vietnam era--offering some surprising verdicts.
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A Web-Exclusive Q & A Brian Steidle Bears Witness Two Ways
The author of The Devil Came On Horseback: Bearing Witness to the Genocide in Darfur talks to PW about the book and documentary that resulted from his experiences as an observer in a country torn apart by violence.
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Love (and War) in a Time of Tuberculosis
Andrea Barrett, whose historical fiction spans centuries and the globe, follows a group of tuberculosis patients at the onset of WWI in her latest novel, The Air We Breathe. What made you decide to write a novel about tuberculosis patients? It grew sideways out of something I had written before, a story called “The Cure” in the book Servants of the Map—about two women running ...
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Epistolary, My Dear Watson: PW Talks With Charles Foley
Literary sleuths will find many clues about the creator of Sherlock Holmes from the letters in Arthur Conan Doyle, co-edited by the writer’s great-nephew Charles Foley.
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The Gift of Lightning
I'm just a writer,” Charlaine Harris says. “I write whatever I'm interested in at the moment. And I'm definitely a genre author. But the question is: Which genre? Harris's Harper Connelly and Southern Vampire series have been described as “urban fantasy,” but Harris laughingly insists that they are actually “rural fantasy.
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