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PW: Dorothy Dunnett: An Historical Pageant
Many of her readers probably picture Dorothy Dunnett, hailed by the Washington Post as "the finest living writer of historical fiction," living in the kind of castle pictured on the covers of her books.
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PW: Bill Bryson: An Ex-expat Traveling Light
PW Home Bestsellers Subscribe Search Interview Bill Bryson: An Ex-expat Traveling LightNorman Oder -- 5/4/98 Bill Bryson's office in his spacious Hanover, N.H., home surely reflects this ex-expatriate's rich career: the shelves hold copies of his books on travel and the English language, and on the walls hang posters for those books. On the coffee table lie books he's reading and sober magazines like the Economist. A family room by night, the space houses a pool table and a giant-screen TV.
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PW: Carole Maso: From Margins to Center
It's one of those too-perfect New York days. Spring has settled on Greenwich Village with a cinematic rapture, delivering to the neighborhood a dose of ideal sunglasses weather. The shoebox-sized French sidewalk cafe on West 4th Street where PW meets for a late lunch and conversation with novelist Carole Maso is jammed.
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Sue Grafton: Death and the Maiden
Grafton has been mowing down noir stereotypes of women ever since Henry Holt published 'A Is for Alibi' in 1982.
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PW: Gerald Posner: On the Trail of Assassins
Gerald Posner is not really an assassination buff, although on the study wall in his high-rise East Side apartment in New York are copies of the guns that allegedly killed John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
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PW: Mary Cantwell: Tales of the City
Greenwich Village on a brisk spring day sparkles in the morning sunlight as a few dog walkers stroll by and coffee drinkers sleepily make their way to the cafes just opening up along Hudson Street.
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PW: Jonathan Lethem: Breaking the Barriers Between Genres
Ever since a wise-cracking, motorscooter-riding kangaroo named Joey Castle pistol-whipped Conrad Metcalf in the parking lot of the Bayview Adult Motor Inn in Gun with Occasional Music, Jonathan Lethem has had the world of mainstream literary fiction looking nervously over its shoulder.
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PW: Donald Hall: Elegies from Eagle Pond
Eagle Pond Farm is familiar to even the casual reader of Donald Hall.
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PW: Thomas Cahill: Saving History, Book by Book
PW Home Bestsellers Subscribe Search Interview Thomas Cahill: Saving History, Book by Bookby Elizabeth Bernstein -- 3/16/98 As Thomas Cahill tells it, the heavens did not part, hosts of angels did not sing. "It was 1990, and I was attending my first sales conference as director of religious publishing at Doubleday," he says. "I had just met Nan Talese, and I was trying to make small talk, so I mentioned this idea I had for a series of historical books. ...
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PW: Mary Gordon: Confessions of a Good Girl
In a 1988 essay, Mary Gordon describes attending the funeral of a beloved uncle.
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PW: Dorothy Allison: A Family Redeemed
Back in 1992, when Dorothy Allison burst into the literary limelight with her bestselling novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, she dubbed herself the "Roseanne of Literature."
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Nora Roberts: A Celebration of Emotions
The home of Nora Roberts, hidden among the hills in the rural, western Maryland town of Keedysville, is not the Xanadu-like estate one might expect to be the abode of a bestselling romance author who by the end of this year will have written 126 novels, with over 42 million copies in print. It is in fact the same modest country ranch to which Roberts came as a 17-year-old bride over 30 years ago.
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PW: David Wisniewski: Crafting Serious Entertainment
In a second-floor den in his Maryland home, author/illustrator David Wisniewski stores the tools of many trades. One table is piled high with scraps of the color stock that he uses for his meticulous cut-paper illustrations. On his lamplit drafting table, a glass jar bristles with his favorite #11 X-Acto blades. Bookshelves serve as a combination display space and library, where antique Hans Christian Andersen volumes accompany a glossy set of the Cultural Atlas of the World.
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PW: Denise Giardina: Mining History in W.Va. &WWII
In Denise Giardina's 1992 novel, The Unquiet Earth, an Appalachian fifth-grader named Jackie, whose life roughly parallels the author's own, decides she can't become a writer.
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PW: Jane Hamilton: A Kinship With Society's Outcasts
A young man coming of age in suburban Illinois in the 1970s, obsessed with ballet, literature and classical music, aware that he's gay but determined to remain closeted. The protagonist of a novel by David Leavitt, Alan Gurganus or Dale Peck? Not this time. While these gay male writers would seem to own the territory, it's a female novelist praised for her depiction of women who has dared to trespass in an area generally reserved for men who have lived the experience.
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PW: Jo-Ann Mapson: Love, Grief and Horse Sense
Jo-Ann Mapson's great-grandfather founded California's first lemon-packing plant, but it's hard today to imagine citrus groves flowering anyplace near the nondescript one-story tract houses that fill block after block of Costa Mesa.
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PW: The Grisham Business
John Grisham's ninth novel, The Street Lawyer (Doubleday) opens as an armed homeless man invades a Washington, D.C., law firm and takes nine attorneys hostage.
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PW: Aharon Appelfeld: Re-telling the Unimaginable
The walls of Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld's modestly furnished writing studio in Mevasseret Zion, a suburb of Jerusalem, are hung with plaques and testimonials to his achievements as a writer.
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PW: Maria Flook: Diary of a Double Life
PW Home Bestsellers Subscribe Search Interview Maria Flook: Diary of a Double Lifeby Mallay Charters -- 1/12/98 "I'm not a writer who begins with ideas," says Maria Flook. "I begin with affliction -- the affliction of obsession." Flook's own affliction -- and the self-described source of her art -- is the disintegration of her family, which she chronicles in My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister's Disappearance, out from Pantheon this month (PW Forecasts, Nov. 24). ...
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PW: Brian Moore: Travels of a Literary Infidel
Wherever there's revolutionary fire and brimstone, spiritual upheaval and poverty, Brian Moore is sure to go.
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