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First Fiction 2012: Scott Hutchins: A Literary Turing Test
The Turing test of artificial intelligence, invented by Alan Turing and introduced in 1950, is meant to determine whether machines can “think.” Neill Bassett, the briefly married and recently divorced hero of Scott Hutchins’s debut novel, A Working Theory of Love (Penguin Press) is battling the Turing test and trying to create the world’s first sentient computer.
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First Fiction 2012: Eduardo Halfon: A Grandfather's Inspiration
Eduardo Halfon’s English-language debut, The Polish Boxer (Bellevue Literary Press, Oct.), about a grandson investigating his grandfather’s past, was translated from the Spanish by a team of five literary translators who split the book’s 10 chapters among themselves. Halfon also had input—although he was born in Guatemala, he left the country when he was 10 years old and now, at 40, divides his time between Nebraska and Guatemala. “English is my second and perhaps stronger language,” he says, “but I write only in Spanish.”
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First Fiction 2012: David Abrams: War as a Laughing Matter
Debut war novel Fobbit (slang for a U.S. Army employee stationed at a Forward Operating Base) has won accolades from Matterhorn (Atlantic Monthly, 2010) author Karl Marlantes and Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone (Putnam/Amy Einhorn, 2011) and a starred review in PW. The book will be published by Black Cat. Assistant editor Peter Blackstock, who acquired the title from Nat Sobel at Sobel Weber Associates, says, “Fobbit exposes the banalities of daily life during the war in Iraq and the aggressive bureaucracy at the heart of the American war machine.”
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First Fiction 2012: Kevin Powers: Bonds of War
Two young soldiers tightly bonded since their days in basic training hang on through a battle in Iraq in Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds (Little, Brown)
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First Fiction 2012: Amanda Coplin: Sitting Under The Apple Tree
Amanda Coplin didn’t live through the experiences of the two sisters in her debut novel, The Orchardist (Harper). After all, Coplin is only 31 years old, and the events take place at the turn of the 20th century. But the setting is autobiographical. Coplin explains, “The novel is set in and around Wenatchee, Washington, where I was born. I spent a lot of time in my grandparents’ apple, cherry, and pear orchards growing up, and this landscape affected my imagination in a major way. The novel is sort of a love letter to that place, and an homage to my grandfather, who was my best friend when I was a child.”
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First Fiction 2012: Peter Heller: After Extinction
“I was hooked on The Dog Stars from page one,” recalls Jenny Jackson, the Knopf senior editor who acquired the debut novel from David Halpern at the Robbins Office. “I guiltily closed my office door, ignored my e-mails, and prayed the phone wouldn’t ring. From the eerie opening pages to the jaw-dropping ending, I was utterly transported by this novel.” The title concerns a pilot who believes he is the only survivor of a flu, but then receives a radio transmission and realizes he is not alone. Knopf will print 60,000 copies in August.
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First Fiction 2012: David R. Gillham: Wrong Side of History
Amy Einhorn, v-p and publisher of Amy Einhorn Books, which will publish David R. Gillham’s City of Women, says the manuscript immediately caught her attention because “I love stories I’ve never heard before. City of Women tells the story of an ordinary German woman [in Berlin during WWII]—a perspective I hadn’t seen yet. What was it like to be on the wrong side of history?” She acquired the book from Rebecca Gradinger at Fletcher & Co.
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First Fiction 2012: Franck Thilliez: Thriller from Across The Atlantic
Thirty-eight-year-old Franck Thilliez, who lives in a small town in the north of France with a population of about 10,000 people, was a computer engineer for a decade before he began writing, but it was his love of cinema that inspired the novel Syndrome E, a scientifically minded thriller about two detectives investigating the sudden onset of blindness after a viewing of an obscure film from the 1950s. The book, already a bestseller in France, was acquired by Viking and translated by Mark Polizzotti.
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Fiction Firsts for Fall: First Fiction 2012
PW looks at 10 particularly intriguing and promising debut novels. A strikingly varied assortment, these fictional works discuss artificial intelligence, the extinction of human life, and the Iraq War from two distinctly different viewpoints.
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Jo Nesbo is Not the Next...
And this October, Nesbø’s earnest but seriously flawed homicide detective, Harry Hole (pronounced HEU-leh in Norwegian) is back for a ninth mystery, Phantom, coming from Knopf in October.
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Life After the Caldecott: Erin and Philip Stead
When your first book wins the Caldecott Medal, life tilts. Doors open. Everyone is your friend. It’s hard to know what to do next. So Erin Stead put the medal in a drawer and got back to work.
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Mad Cats and an Englishwoman: Ruth Rendell
Rendell was in New York for BEA in June to promote her latest novel, The St. Zita Society, on one of her increasingly rare trips to the U.S. “I come over once a year,” she says. “I’ve done the big 12-city tours, and I’m never going to do that again—never. I was younger then. It wears you out, you know.”
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Home on the Range: Ivan Doig
Like Faulkner and his beloved Yoknapatawpha County, Ivan Doig, who’s written 10 novels—the 11th, The Bartender’s Tale, comes out from Riverhead—and three works of non-fiction, most notably his memoir, This House of Sky (Harcourt, 1978) spends most of his time on the page in his home state of Montana. “I’ve hung on to the country and community,” he says, though his characters do venture far afield, from Harlem to Vietnam. Doig himself now lives in Seattle.
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Collisions with Strangeness: James Meek
British author and journalist James Meek talks process -- it involves spoiling paper -- and how experience informs his fiction.
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Spring 2012 Flying Starts: Marissa Meyer
When Marissa Meyer decided to remake the popular fairy tale Cinderella, little did she know that she would soon be living out her own fairy tale. Cinder (Feiwel and Friends), a dystopian, sci-fi young adult novel about an outcast cyborg who unwisely falls for a handsome prince and winds up at the center of an interplanetary war, was released in early January and soon found a place on bestseller lists.
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Spring 2012 Flying Starts: emily m. danforth
No, that’s not a typo: emily m. danforth does not capitalize her name. “But not for interesting theoretical or political reasons,” she says. “I just like the way that it looks, and I’ve done it ever since high school.” She’s happy to see her name any way people want to style it, though, most especially on the cover of her debut novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post (HarperCollins/Balzer & Bray).
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Spring 2012 Flying Starts: Christopher Healy
Like so many little girls, Christopher Healy’s daughter went through a “heavy princess phase” a few years back. Healy, then a freelance magazine writer, discussed what he termed parental “princess fatigue” in an essay for Salon.com. And while he would often commiserate with other parents who were troubled by archetypical images of passive princesses, he was also perturbed by the vacuous nature of Prince Charming in fairy tales like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, and Cinderella. “He’s so inconsequential,” Healy says. “He’s presented as the ideal man, but he has no personality.” If princesses are going to fall in love with princes, he continues, then “shouldn’t we care about who these men are?”
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Spring 2012 Flying Starts: Leigh Bardugo
Leigh Bardugo’s path to publication took a few twists and turns before her first book, Shadow and Bone (Holt), finally hit the shelves. Born in Jerusalem and raised in Los Angeles, Bardugo graduated from Yale with a degree in English. From there, she worked in journalism and copywriting, including some time spent crafting movie trailers. However, writing was her dream. “I’d always wanted to be a writer. Come hell or high water, I’d finish a book.”
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Spring 2012 Flying Starts: Caroline Starr Rose
In 2009, with nearly a dozen unpublished manuscripts, stacks of rejections, and no leads, Caroline Starr Rose seized what she terms a “you only live once” conviction and quit her job teaching middle-school social studies to write full-time. Her husband, a Presbyterian minister, and two sons, now nine and 11, cheered her along, and four months later Rose completed the manuscript for May B. (Random/Schwartz & Wade, Jan.), a historical novel in verse set in the 19th-century, about a 12-year-old girl left to fend for herself during a brutal Kansas winter. She quickly secured an agent, Michelle Humphrey at the Martha Kaplan Agency, and in another four months she had a book deal.
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Hollywood Confidential: Bruce Wagner and 'Porn Culture'
Bruce Wagner's new novel stars Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, an 11-year-old breast cancer survivor, and an American Idol reject. It's called Dead Stars, and writing it helped save his life.
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