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Looking Back, Fondly: A Profile of Nicholas Delbanco
It's not often that a novelist gets to have a second bite of the proverbial apple, but Nicholas Delbanco has been nibbling away. Delbanco's series of novels, the Sherbrooke trilogy, was published more than 30 years ago by William Morrow.
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Lily Tuck: A Reflection on Marriage and Grief
In Lily Tuck's new novel, I Married You for Happiness (Atlantic Monthly Press), National Book Award–winner Tuck tracks a Boston wife's random, reflective chain of thoughts as she sits at her dead husband's bedside.
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Read, Kiddo, Read: James Patterson
James Patterson, the bestselling author on Earth, doesn't want to talk about writing today. He wants to talk about reading. For a man with scores of blockbuster books under his belt (it might be north of 70, but even the author isn't sure how many he's written at this point), Patterson is now fascinated with a new challenge: hooking kids on books. And his latest effort, "Read, Kiddo, Read," aims to do just that.
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The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone
Brooke Gladstone, longtime cohost of On the Media, NPR's weekly radio show on journalism and media, has turned to comics: The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media (Norton), a nonfiction comics work created in collaboration with Josh Neufeld.
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America's Skeptic Laureate: A Profile of Michael Shermer
Over the past 15 years, Michael Shermer, 56, has created a cottage industry out of debunking everything from UFO sightings and paranormal experiences to religious faith.
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Great Balls of Fire! A Profile of William Gurstelle
Reserved, erudite, professorial describes William Gurstelle, 55, along with polite and soft-spoken. So how could he ever have written a book with such an explosive title? The Practical Pyromaniac: Build Fire Tornadoes, One-Candlepower Engines, Great Balls of Fire, and More Incendiary Devices, his latest on blowing things up, comes out from Chicago Review Press.
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Poetry Profiled 2011
April, National Poetry Month, the cruelest, and busiest, month for poets, is here again. We thought we'd showcase four poets with new or upcoming books to watch this spring. Poetry's alive and well, and here are the writers to prove it.
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Native Son: A Profile of Ishmael Reed
Norman Mailer walks into a bar. Not just any bar, though: it's the legendary White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, and where, in the 1960s, a young jazz journalist from Buffalo, N.Y., named Ishmael Reed, liked to lurk and stargaze.
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The Not So Old Woman and the Sea: A Profile of Danielle Sosin
Danielle Sosin has always been fascinated by Lake Superior. So fascinated, in fact, that she decided to leave the Twin Cities and relocate to Duluth, Minn., for a year to live next to the largest freshwater lake in the world while researching local archives for a novel that she felt compelled to write.
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War and Peace in Jerusalem: A Profile of James Carroll
James Carroll, a novelist, memoirist, and historian, may have left the priesthood as a young man, but the priesthood has never quite left him. Passionate and charismatic, he goads our conscience and tells painfully inconvenient truths, whether about the Catholic Church's history of anti-Semitism (Constantine's Sword) or what he calls "sacred violence" in his forthcoming book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
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Lauren Myracle: 'This Generation's Judy Blume'
If a writer's potential to incite controversy could be gauged by her Web site, Lauren Myracle would not register as a candidate.
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A Memoir of Loss: A Profile of Meghan O'Rourke
Meghan O'Rourke, 35, has a literary reputation. She was a longtime editor at the pioneering online magazine Slate, was a poetry editor for the Paris Review, and won praise for her first collection of poems. This April should bring her more attention with her first book of prose though in a way that may be bittersweet.
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Heads Will Roll: A Profile of Lisa Lutz and David Hayward
Most of us have a hard enough time staying friends with our exes, never mind writing books with them. But that's exactly what Lisa Lutz and her onetime boyfriend, poet and editor David Hayward, have done. And the result is pure comic genius.
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Enemies: An Unusual Love Story: A Profile of Chelsea Cain
Though guns aren't her literary weapon of choice, Oregon crime writer Chelsea Cain is a crack shot. "I prefer knives and razor blades," she says, and I might believe her if I hadn't just seen her add a third eye to the paper target from 20 feet away.
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First Fiction Spring 2011: Alan Heathcock: Electric Stories
Alan Heathcock, the 39-year-old author of the story collection Volt (Graywolf), teaches writing at Boise State University, but he's also been a swimming pool manager and toiled at the American Bar Association, among other jobs. Two other career paths were considered but discarded. Heathcock says, "I thought long and hard about pursuing a career as a police officer, and separately as a minister. The police officer in me told me I was too blunt/curt to be an effective minister, and the minister in me told me I was too forgiving to be an effective police officer. I became a writer, in part, because it was the only significant profession that allowed both sides of my personality to exist and be expressed."
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First Fiction Spring 2011: Manuel Muñoz: Not Scared of the Dark
Algonquin executive editor Chuck Adams acquired Manuel Muñoz's debut novel, What You See in the Dark, to be published in March, based on a proposal. Agent Stuart Bernstein paired the novel with Muñoz's story collection, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, in a two-book deal. (The collection was shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and Muñoz won a Whiting Writers' Award in 2008.)
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First Fiction Spring 2011: Taylor Stevens: Back into Africa
Taylor Stevens terms her process for writing The Informationist (Crown), which received a starred review in PW, "akin to pray and spray: I had absolutely no idea what I was doing."
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First Fiction Spring 2011: Paul McEuen: Science and Fiction
Dial publisher Susan Kamil says, "I was blown away by Paul McEuen's ability in Spiral to take the most cutting edge nanoscience, interweave it with bio-weapon development in World War II, and create a spellbinding thriller." Jane Gelfman of Gelfman Schneider represented Spiral. (Film rights have also been sold.)
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First Fiction Spring 2011: Cara Hoffman: A Journalist Turns to Fiction
Cara Hoffman didn't have a traditional career trajectory, to say the least: leaving high school, she did manual labor in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. "When I came home I had a baby and got a job delivering papers for a small independent. I begged for page space until they let me write." She went on to work as a reporter for 15 years, covering environmental politics and crime.
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First Fiction Spring 2011: Laura Harrington: From Stage to Page
Playwright Laura Harrington, 57, who teaches playwriting at MIT, has seen her work produced around the U.S., as well as in Canada and Europe. In 2008, she won a Kleban Award (funded by A Chorus Line writer and lyricist Edward Kleban) for most promising librettist in the American musical theater. The generous cash prize afforded Harrington two years of writing time.
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