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First Fiction Spring 2011: Jenny Wingfield: From Screen to Page
Though The Homecoming of Samuel Lake (Random House) is Jenny Wingfield's first novel, she has plenty of screenwriting experience—on films including The Man in the Moon (starring Reese Witherspoon) and The Outsider (starring Naomi Watts). Wingfield is 65 and lives on a farm in East Texas.
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First Fiction Spring 2011: Stephen Kelman: Curious Young Men
Stephen Kelman, author of Pigeon English (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) discovered an upside to unemployment. After being "made redundant" at a job in local government administration, the 34-year-old inhabitant of Luton (a town about 30 miles outside of London) took six months to write a first draft of his debut novel, about an 11-year-old Ghanaian immigrant in a London housing project who sets out to solve the murder of a classmate. Kelman signed on with agent Jo Unwin at Conville & Walsh, spent another six months editing the manuscript (losing 30,000 words along the way), and saw it sell in seven countries worldwide.
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First Fiction Spring 2011: Eleanor Henderson: Angry Young Men
Ecco editorial director Lee Boudreaux says that Eleanor Henderson's Ten Thousand Saints (Ecco), set in the late 1980s, "takes the seminal elements of an era—the music, the graffiti, the social upheaval of gentrification, the opening salvos of the AIDS epidemic—and combines them with a handful of brilliantly conceived characters to tell a story of virtuosic ambition and grace." When Henderson's agent, Jim Rutman of Sterling Lord Literistic, submitted the manuscript, Boudreaux read it in one night and pre-empted it the following day.
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First Fiction Spring 2011: Paul Elwork: Spooky Story
Paul Elwork, the 38-year-old author of The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead (Putnam/Amy Einhorn Books), read Carl Sagan's Broca's Brain (Random House, 1979) when he was in high school and was intrigued by the story of the Fox sisters, who founded the "spiritualist movement" in the 19th century.
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First Fiction Spring 2011: Novel Undertakings
The joyful sense of discovery derived from reading the work of a first-time author—both the excitement of encountering a voice for the first time and the promise of more great work to come—cannot be underestimated. Below, PW looks at 10 of this season's promising fictional debuts, each with the potential to thrill.
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Kate Atkinson's Gumshoe Develops a Taste for Poetry
"Yorkshiremen don't do emotional problems. They don't get ill. They don't have breakdowns," says British author Kate Atkinson. She had to explain this to the TV production company adapting her series featuring Yorkshireman Jackson Brodie, an ex-cop turned PI, when they were trying to give Jackson a "problem."
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A Man and His Island: Jonathan Evison
On Bainbridge Island, across Elliot Bay from Seattle, novelist Jonathan Evison, 42, is sitting back with a beer in the restaurant his brother-in-law recently opened, contemplating his good fortune: a happy marriage, a healthy son, and a second book.
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Reality, Really: A Profile of Novelist Andrew Foster Altschul
Novelist Andrew Foster Altschul sums up all the Hobbesian viciousness of reality TV in two words: Sarah Palin. "She just embodies that personal ethic of ‘do whatever it takes,' " he says. It's no surprise, then, that the former Alaska governor and would-be veep makes a key cameo in Altschul's second novel, Deus Ex Machina (Counterpoint), a taut meditation on the savagery behind popular shows like Fear Factor and I Love Money.
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Go East, Young Man
It's been a truth universally acknowledged that a young man in pursuit of his fortune travels West. So in 2008, when a New York Times columnist, Anand Giridharadas, observed that not only were India's best and brightest increasingly likely to stay put, but the children of immigrants were being lured back to Chennai and Chandigarh—it caused a small splash (and an e-mail forwarding frenzy) among South Asians.
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The Hit Man: A Profile of Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard is the coolest man in America. He just turned 85, still smokes, likes Mad Men, thinks Stieg Larsson's books are boring, and couldn't care less about social networking. Ask him about e-books and you can't finish the question before he answers: don't know, don't care.
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The Art of Cancer
For Siddhartha Mukherjee, science is an art and art is a science, the two cultures married, literally and figuratively, in his life.
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Fathers and Sons
Unwanted celebrity, dysfunctional family, famous children's books, and coming-of-age are all part of the mix that propelled Charles Elton's debut novel, Mr. Toppit, onto the bestseller list in the U.K., where it was published by Penguin.
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A Literary Imagination Goes Graphic
After publishing Voodoo Hearts, a critically acclaimed short story collection from 2006, Scott Snyder has teamed up with horror master Stephen King and artist Rafael Albuquerque to create American Vampire, a hardcover graphic novel collection of this unusual collaboration that will published by DC/Vertigo in October.
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A Poet for Obama
Imagine getting this impossible assignment: write a poem that hundreds of millions of people will hear and read; make sure all of them can understand it; make it hopeful, but acknowledge the hardship America's undergone in recent years, and in not-so-recent ones; make it reasonably short. You've got, like, a month to work on it: go!
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Tony Hiss Finds the Everyday Extraordinary
Tony Hiss was raised knowing the importance of public service and taught to look at the prices on the menu. Both lessons have served him well: he's a man who uses his position and intelligence, hopefully, to guide the rest of us to an appreciation of the everyday world around us.
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Good Fortune Leads to Great Crime: Louise Penny
In her 2006 debut crime novel from Minotaur, Still Life, Louise Penny's acknowledgments pluck at the heartstrings: "I went through a period in my life when I had no friends, when the phone never rang, when I thought I would die from loneliness. I know that the real blessing here isn't that I have had a book published, but that I have so many people to thank."
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Loaded Questions
After years of professional banishment, controversial historian Michael Bellesiles is back this month with a new book—1877: America's Year of Living Violently (New Press), his first since the scandal over his 2000 effort, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture.
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Prose to Graphic Novel: Audrey Niffenegger & Diana Gabaldon Make the Leap
Novelists known for their time-traveling abilities (or at least their characters') are making a different move in the fall--to graphic novels. Audrey Niffenegger's The Night Bookmobile will be published by Abrams, while Ballantine will release Diana Gabaldon's The Exile: An Outlander Graphic Novel.
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From Addis Ababa to Paris, via Peoria: Dinaw Mengestu
Born in Addis Ababa in 1978, Dinaw Mengestu moved with his mother two years later to Peoria, Ill., to join his father, who had escaped Ethiopia's Communist regime just before his son was born. Mengestu calls his childhood "quintessentially American. Riding my bike, going to Sunday school. Ronald Reagan and solid American values."
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Scott Spencer Turns Up the Heat
Writers are often hesitant to reveal the real people upon whom they model characters, but Scott Spencer enthusiastically, unabashedly, identifies Shep, the rescue dog at the heart of his 10th novel, Man in the Woods (Ecco).
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