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Firsts in Fiction
Debut novelists can be counted on to bring fresh voices, diverse story lines, and singular characters.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Vaddey Ratner: Holding onto Hope
Vaddey Ratner’s journey to writing In the Shadow of the Banyan (Simon & Schuster) begins with silence. When she was five years old, the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia. An estimated two million people died between 1975 and 1979 in the genocide—including all the members of Ratner’s family except her and her mother. They managed to get to a refugee camp over the Thai border when Ratner was nine. She was practicing a self-imposed silence when an immigration official forced her to tell her story or risk being sent back to Cambodia.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Shehan Karunatilaka: The Universal Language of Sports
Shehan Karunatilaka was born in Sri Lanka in 1975 and describes growing up in Colombo “amidst bombs and curfews,” the kind of language the colorful characters in his debut, The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (Graywolf, May), might use. The novel—which recently won the $50,000 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature—tells the story of an aging sportswriter with a bad liver who heads out with a friend to search Sri Lanka for the title’s legendary cricket bowler, uncovering secrets about the country and encountering a six-fingered coach and a Tamil Tiger warlord.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Brandon Jones: Exploring the Axis of Evil
The characters of All Woman and Springtime by Brandon Jones (Algonquin, May) are far from his direct experience. Young girls Gi and Il-sun become friends growing up in a North Korean forced-labor camp. Eventually they escape and make it to the U.S., but human traffickers intercede on their journey. Over the course of the novel, which Algonquin compares to Memoirs of a Geisha, the author gets in close not just to the North Korean girls but to those who sell them.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Regina O'Melveny: A Poetic Renaissance
At first, poet Regina O’Melveny didn’t realize she’d started a novel. She began to write a series of prose poems chronicling strange maladies and gradually puzzled out that they were from a single character’s voice.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Chris Pavone: Luxembourg Redux
It wasn’t Chris Pavone’s two decades as an editor at various houses that ultimately inspired his hotly anticipated debut thriller, The Expats (Crown). Instead, it was becoming a stay-at-home dad for the first time, after his wife, Madeline McIntosh, took a job launching the Kindle overseas that required a family move to Luxembourg.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Karen Thompson Walker: A Shift in Gravity
The Indonesian earthquake and tsunami happened when 31-year-old Karen Thompson Walker was pursuing her M.F.A. at Columbia. She was struck by the revelation that the force had been powerful enough to shorten the length of the day by microseconds.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Carole DeSanti: Secret Passions Go Public
Carole DeSanti, v-p and editor-at-large for the Penguin Group, is well-known as a champion for women’s voices in literature, having worked with Terry McMillan, Tracy Chevalier, Marisha Pessl, and many others over the years.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Howard Anderson: Adventure Down Under
Howard Anderson’s biography on the jacket of Albert of Adelaide (Hachette/Twelve) reads like a novel of its own—he’s flown helicopters in Vietnam; worked on fishing boats in Alaska and in steel mills in Pittsburgh, Pa.; done a stint in Hollywood (his biggest success as a scriptwriter was writing the sequel to Annie); and is currently a defense attorney in New Mexico. And at 66, he’s also a first-time novelist. Asked about the publisher’s bio, he quips, “They have no idea. It’s much abridged.”
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Cristina Alger: Gotham Gossip
Cristina Alger’s The Darlings is set in the high stakes world of financial sector New York—the world she grew up in and almost found herself building a career in. Though she planned to work in academia or publishing while an English major at Harvard, after her father’s death on 9/11 she moved back to New York to be close to her mother and got a job at Goldman Sachs that then segued into corporate law.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: G. Willow Wilson: A Fantasy Revolution Gets Real
G. Willow Wilson’s memoir, Butterfly Mosque: A Young Woman’s Journey to Love and Islam (2010), chronicled her conversion to Islam and her move from America to Cairo. What she wasn’t able to include was what she saw as a growing movement online, “emerging digital history” taking place on social media. Many people were still questioning whether the Internet would have a true political impact on the Middle East.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: John Donatich: 'Variations' on a Theme
John Donatich is no stranger to publishing. Over a storied career spanning 20+ years, the 51-year-old director of Yale University Press has shepherded the work of such prominent authors as Christopher Hitchens and Steven Pinker into print. But he never gave up on the dream of publishing a novel of his own. After writing the well-received 2005 memoir, Ambivalence: A Love Story, about his marriage with wife and fellow industry veteran Betsy Lerner, he became interested in the Catholic archdioceses that were closing down along the eastern seaboard.
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Speaking in Tongues: Elizabeth Little
Imagine, for a moment, that lutefisk had the zip of gumbo, and Norwegian folk songs had the verve of zydeco. Were that the case, Minot, N.D., might have had a marketing advantage over New Orleans, and the buzz phrase for partying would be la de gode tider rull instead of laissez les bons temps rouler.
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A Literary Spy: Olen Steinhauer
Olen Steinhauer can thank James Joyce and an exchange program as an undergraduate in Eastern Europe for his writing aspirations. “I was living in a garret in Zagreb in 1989, reading Joyce for the first time,” he says over lunch at a French cafe in Carmel, Calif. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man completely floored me.”
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Ron Carlson Delivers the Whimsy
Ron Carlson, author of six short story collections and five novels, including Five Skies (Viking, 2007) and The Signal (Viking, 2009), has gathered 30 years' worth of his poems in the forthcoming Room Service: Poems, Meditations, Outcries & Remarks (Red Hen Press), about which he says, "Poems are necessary. By that, I mean to say there is no way I could not have written these things. I love words, don't you?"
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Suvir Saran Has a Farm...
Saran’s first cookbook, Indian Home Cooking (Clarkson Potter, 2004), focused on home-style Indian recipes, and his second, American Masala (Clarkson Potter, 2007), livened up American favorites with Indian flavors. In his third and newest book, with Raquel Pelzel and Charlie Burd, Masala Farm: Stories and Recipes from an Uncommon Life in the Country (Chronicle)—named after the 67-acre farm Saran and his partner, Charlie Burd, now own, live on, and care for in upstate New York—Saran “bares his heart and soul.”
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Girl Gone Wild
Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild (Knopf, Mar.) proves she’s fearless: in life and in her writing. In Wild, Strayed chronicles her three-month solo 1995 hike along 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail.
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Elizabeth Hand: Two of a Kind
On the narrator of her newest novel of psychological suspense: “She’s essentially a sociopath, but she has a certain charisma that stops her from being totally unlikable.”
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Fall 2011 Flying Starts: Marie Lu
Neither first-timer nerves nor the Santa Ana winds that brought massive power outages across Southern California could keep Pasadena resident Marie Lu from her very first signing as a published author—at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in Redondo Beach on December 1. “A dream come true,” says the author—a dream that was a long time coming.
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Fall 2011 Flying Starts: Robison Wells
Robison Wells did not aspire to be an author. In fact, as a teen, he hated English class and hated books. “I never wanted anything to do with writing,” he says now with a laugh. “Unlike so many of my colleagues, I was not born with a pencil in my hand.”
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