-
Mother & Daughter Coauthors: Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer Talk to PW
Can an author who has sold millions of books learn from her daughter about writing? For the mother-daughter author team of Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer, writing Between the Lines was enlightening for each in different ways.
-
Crime Pays: Linda Fairstein
Linda Fairstein chose Vassar because of its excellent English department (she graduated in 1969, in the last all women’s class), but aware that supporting herself as a writer wouldn’t be easy, she went on to get a law degree at the University of Virginia.
-
Paradise Found: Steve Hamilton
“There is a bullet in my chest, less than a centimeter from my heart. I don’t think about it much anymore. It’s just a part of me now. But every once in a while, on a certain kind of night, I remember the bullet. I can feel the weight of it inside me. I can feel its metallic hardness. And even though that bullet has been warming inside my body for fourteen years, on a night like this when it is dark enough and the wind is blowing, that bullet feels as cold as the night itself.”
-
Girls on Top: Megan Abbott
Megan Abbott first made a name for herself in the world of noir fiction, where hard-drinking girls call one another “buttercup,” don silk stockings, and someone is always wearing a trench coat. Within the genre there are few female writers, and Abbott’s fresh perspective, delicious language, and rich, historical details garnered immediate attention.
-
JLove Calderon: Author, Activist, White Girl
Jennifer Calderon’s panelist bio at the recent National Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, N.Y., said she was “a white woman, an author, activist, and social entrepreneur”—not your usual conference introduction. But Calderon, better known to the hip-hop community as JLove, uses her race as well as her books to challenge white supremacy and racism and to mobilize a multicultural audience around issues of social justice.
-
Occupying Democracy: Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco
Individually, journalists Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco have reported from some of the world's most chaotic war zones, including Bosnia, Gaza, and Iraq. In their first book-length collaboration, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (Nation Books, June), Hedges's words and Sacco's pictures form a mosaic portrait of the United States at a low point of economic dysfunction.
-
Alias Benjamin Black: John Banville
The Dublin office of John Banville—novelist, screenwriter, critic—is where he writes the literary fiction he’s famed for, Booker Prize–winning The Sea and The Infinities, and more recently, under the pen name of Benjamin Black, the Dr. Quirk mysteries, which are becoming as popular in America as they are in Banville’s native Ireland.
-
Religion Update Spring 2012: In Profile
Tracie Peterson: Inspired and Inspiring and more
-
A Diamond in the Rough: Peter Lovesey
In 1969, Peter Lovesey’s mystery fan wife, Jax, pointed out a notice to her husband that read: “Macmillan and Panther Books announce a First Crime Novel Competition open to all nationals of the United Kingdom, Commonwealth and the Republics of Eire and South Africa.” Lovesey, a teacher at a technical college, was reluctant to respond although he did have some background in the genre.
-
Book Criticizing 'Globe and Mail' Self-Published
When no Canadian publisher was willing to take on journalist Jan Wong’s book criticizing her former newspaper, she had to self-publish.
-
Unfettered Imagination: Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones has taught creative writing at the University of Colorado in Boulder for four years, and while he can find his office, he’s not sure of the address. An apt metaphor for a writer who has created a narrator in his latest novel, Growing Up Dead in Texas (MP Publishing), who is ready to take you to a wrapped-up conclusion, but not quite sure how to get you there.
-
North of the Border: Richard Ford
Richard Ford leaves Frank Bascombe -- and his longtime publishers -- behind for his highly anticipated new novel, "Canada."
-
Materfamilias: Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel—creator of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and author of the lauded 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home and now the new biocomic Are You My Mother?—doesn’t know what to call herself. “I know I’m a cartoonist. The drawing is completely inextricable from my writing,”she says from her home in Vermont. “I do feel, since Fun Home came out, I’ve had to sort of reimagine myself a little bit.”
-
Lucky Ticket: Alyson Hagy
“This was not the planned book,” Alyson Hagy says of her third novel and seventh book, Boleto (Graywolf, May). “I was working on another novel and sitting in a lecture and this book just came to me,” she says, about remembering an encounter she once had with a ranch hand.
-
Poetry Profiled 2012
Some of this year’s best poets are the newest. PW talked to three poets publishing their debut volumes this year, and one whose highly anticipated second collection will appear.
-
Inside Out: Anouk Markovits
Anouk Markovits never intended to write about the Satmar Hasidic community in which she grew up, but then came 9/11, and Markovits thought, “I’ve had personal experience with fundamentalist environments.” Still, writing about that world didn’t come easily. Whether fiction or memoir, most books set in these environments are written by and about those who, like Markovits, have left, and that wasn’t the story she wanted to tell. Which raised the question: “Could I possibly write a book about the people who stayed?”
-
Emily St. John Mandel: Once a Dancer, Now a Noir Phenom
While The Lola Quartet, Emily St. John Mandel's third novel, has plenty of criminals, guns and double-crossings, there’s also love among characters who once bonded through jazz and now hover one step away from disaster.
-
Of Reversals and Reunions: Deborah Copaken Kogan
The first piece of writing Deborah Copaken Kogan remembers being proud of appeared in the 1998 Red Book on the occasion of her 10th Harvard College reunion.
-
Can Jon Klassen Top 'Hat'?
A lot of things astonished Jon Klassen about the reception given his first picture book, I Want My Hat Back: hearing Daniel Pinkwater read it aloud on NPR, being invited to talk about it with Martha Stewart on TV, learning it had become an Internet meme.
-
Sacre Bleu!: Christopher Moore
Walking through San Francisco’s Legion of Honor Museum’s impressionist art collection and a special exhibit on Camille Pissarro with Christopher Moore, who’s as irrepressible in person as he is in his novels, the conversation ricochets from thoughtful comments about the paintings on the walls to laugh-out-loud anecdotes about the artists—including Pissarro—who populate Moore’s 13th novel, Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d’Art (Morrow).
Browse archive by date:
