Adam C. English

Adam C. English is Associate Professor of Religion at Campbell University where he teaches on the philosophy of religion, constructive theology, and the history of Christian thought. His new book is The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus: The True Life and Trials of Nicholas of Myra.

From his Q & A with Randy Dotinga at The Christian Science Monitor:
Q: Who was Saint Nicholas in real life?

A: The

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Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides's first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published in 1993.

From his 2009 interview with Guy Raz for NPR:RAZ: Where were you in life when you wrote "The Virgin Suicides"? What was going on?

Mr. EUGENIDES: I was working at the Academy of American Poets as an executive secretary and earning a very small salary and living out in distant Brooklyn. And I, you know, I decided to

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Ben Mattlin

Ben Mattlin is the author of Miracle Boy Grows Up: How the Disability Rights Revolution Saved My Sanity.

From his Q & A at The Daily Beast with Jay McInerney:
What’s the genesis of Miracle Boy? Didn’t you first try an autobiographical fiction approach?

You’re exactly right! I was afraid to tell my story directly, wanted to couch it in a fanciful (and imitative) yarn of sex and intrigue. That

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Ken Jennings

Ken Jennings broke game show records in 2004 with his unprecedented seventy-four game, $2.52 million victory streak on Jeopardy!. Jennings’s book Brainiac, about his Jeopardy! adventures, was a critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller, as was his follow-up, Maphead. He is also the author of Ken Jennings’s Trivia Almanac.

Jennings’s new book is Because I Said So!: The Truth Behind the Myths

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Richard Russo

Richard Russo's new memoir is Elsewhere.

From his Q & A with Irene Lacher at The Los Angeles Times:
Why your first memoir now?

In a sense I would have preferred that it be never. I'm a perfectly happy novelist. I love to invent things. But in the months after my mother's death, which was about five years ago, she was very much on my mind and also visiting my dreams as well, which made it feel

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Alexander Rose

Alexander Rose, a New York historian, is the author of American Rifle: A Biography (2008).

From his Q & A with Randy Dotinga at The Christian Science Monitor:

Q: When did the rifle first appear?

A: The rifle made its first appearance in Europe in the early-modern era, around the 16th century, but there were exceedingly few of them. German immigrants to Pennsylvania in the early 18th century

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Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon's latest novel is Telegraph Avenue.

From his Q & A with Irene Lacher at the Los Angeles Times:
I know that you always strive to entertain. Do you think "entertainment" has become a dirty word among purveyors of high culture?

Sure, and with good reason, in the sense that most of what gets labeled "entertainment" is really terrible. We get the entertainment we deserve. To me, being

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Caroline Kennedy

Caroline Kennedy, the only living child of JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy, wrote the foreword to Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy.

From her Q & A with Irene Lacher at the Los Angeles Times:
Why did your father start taping? He wasn't making tapes at the beginning of his administration.

Right. They don't really start until almost halfway through — July '62. So no

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Karen Thompson Walker

Karen Thompson Walker is author of the debut novel The Age of Miracles. In the novel, an 11-year-old girl wakes up one morning to the news that the earth’s rotation is slowing.

From her Q & A with Liesl Schwabe at Publishers Weekly:
Did you always know that Julia, an adolescent girl, would be your narrator?

I did. I always had a sense of her voice. She has an adult perspective on her childhood,

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Jonathan Odell

Jonathan Odell is the author of the acclaimed novel The View from Delphi, which deals with the struggle for equality in pre-civil rights Mississippi, his home state. His novel The Healing (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) explores the subversive role that story plays in the healing of an oppressed people.

From Odell's Q & A with Lois Alter Mark:

Lois Alter Mark: I loved everything about The Healing --

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Oliver Sacks

The famed neurologist and author Oliver Sacks's new book is Hallucinations.

From his Q & A with Noah Charney at The Daily Beast:
Please recommend a book that makes science accessible to trade readers, and that has influenced your own work.

One book that was very influential for me was published in English in 1968, and it’s called The Mind of a Mnemonist, by A. R. Luria. When I started to read

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Kim Barnes

Kim Barnes's books include two memoirs, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country—a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize—Hungry for the World, and the novels Finding Caruso and A Country Called Home.

Her latest novel is In the Kingdom of Men. It is the story of a young American woman who follows her husband to the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. In the American compound she meets women

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Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His debut story collection, Drown was a national bestseller and won numerous awards. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao “a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible

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James Lee Burke

In James Lee Burke’s Creole Belle, the New Iberia, La., deputy sheriff Dave Robicheaux and his best friend, Clete Purcel, take on corrupt politicians, oil men, and a possible Nazi war criminal.

From the author's Q & A with Patrick Millikin for Publishers Weekly:
Many of your books have had classical antecedents. Was there a particular classical model for Creole Belle?

I made use of some Greek

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Jessica Fellowes

Jessica Fellowes is the author of The World of Downton Abbey and The Chronicles of Downton Abbey: A New Era.

From her Q & A with Molly Driscoll at the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: During the process of writing the two books, how often were you on the set when the seasons were being filmed?

A: When I was doing the first book, I wasn't writing it until after the first series wrapped, because

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Ben H. Winters

Ben H. Winters is the author of several novels, including the New York Times bestseller Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and the middle-grade novel The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman, an Edgar Award nominee and a Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of 2011. Winters’ other books include the science-fiction Tolstoy parody Android Karenina, the Finkleman sequel The Mystery of the

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Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey

Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey are the authors of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America.

From their Q & A at the University of North Carolina Press website:
Q: Why does Jesus's race matter in America?

A: Race matters in every facet of American life. And religion matters deeply in American life, as well. The two collide when we think about Jesus's race. There, race

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Eric Jay Dolin

Eric Jay Dolin is the author of Leviathan: The History of Whaling In America, which was chosen as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe, and also won the 2007 John Lyman Award for U. S. Maritime History; and Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. A graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, where he received his Ph.D. in

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Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich's The Round House, her 14th novel, won the coveted National Book Award for Fiction.

From her Q & A with Sara Nelson:
What is the most important book you never read?

There are so many but one would be Ulysses. I've never been able to forge all the way through it. It's one of those that I've got on a shelf and it stares at me. It says, "You're going to pick me up." Maybe someday.

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David Nasaw

David Nasaw's new book is The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy.

From the author's Q & A with Randy Dotinga at The Christian Science Monitor:Q: What drew to you to the story of this man whose children include a president, an attorney general, an ambassador and one of the most storied senators of all time?

The family asked me to do it.

I met with Senator

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Andrew Solomon

Andrew Solomon is the author of The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost, A Stone Boat, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, winner of fourteen national awards, including the 2001 National Book Award, and Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity.

From his Q & A with David Daley at Salon:
Each chapter in [Far From the Tree] presents a very unique kind of

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Marc Myers

Marc Myers is the author of Why Jazz Happened.

From his Q & A with Scott Timberg:Part of me wonders why it took so long for someone to do this. But: What made you want to write this kind of atypical, outside-in musical history? Did you have a specific historian or historical school in mind as a model?

Most jazz histories have been written from the inside out—meaning the writer’s perspective and

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Ayana Mathis

Ayana Mathis's debut novel is The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. From Mathis's Q & A with Miwa Messer of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program:
What was your inspiration for the novel, why did you want to write about these people?

I grew up in unusual family circumstances: I had lots of aunts and uncles, but my mother and I had very little contact with them after I was ten or so. My

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Timothy Ferriss

Tim Ferriss' latest book is The 4-Hour Workweek.

From his Q & A with Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog:Speakeasy: Why is there is a chapter on guns in what is essentially a cooking skills cookbook?

Mr. Ferriss: ‘The Wild’ section of the book is about reconnecting with ingredients, including foraging and hunting. I wanted a clean kill for my first deer, which

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Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. His latest novel is Silent House.

From the author's Q & A with Anna Metcalfe at the Financial Times:
Who would you most like to sit next to at a dinner party?

García Márquez or Borges or Dostoevsky – and the most charming or intellectual woman in the world.

* * *

What keeps you awake at night?

I have the legacy of my father and his

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Debra Dean

From a Q & A with Debra Dean about her latest novel, The Mirrored World:
Q: Your new novel, The Mirrored World, involves the story of St. Xenia, a Russian holy figure. How did you learn about her, and why did you decide to write a novel based on her life?

A: When I finished The Madonnas of Leningrad I thought I was going to follow it with a novel set in my hometown of Seattle. Best laid plans.

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John and Colleen Marzluff

John M. Marzluff is a highly regarded scientist known for his work on the ecology and behavioral biology of jays, crows, ravens, and their relatives. He is professor of wildlife science, College of the Environment, University of Washington, and the author of four books, including In the Company of Crows and Ravens and Gifts of the Crow. Colleen Marzluff trained in wildlife biology, worked as a

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Linda Geddes interviewed Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Antifragile: How To Live in a World We Don't Understand, for Slate. Part of their dialogue:Linda Geddes: In your new book you talk about things being "antifragile." What do you mean exactly?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: When you ask people what is the opposite of fragile, they mostly answer something that is resilient or unbreakable—an

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Matthew Quick

Matthew Quick is the author of The Silver Linings Playbook, now a major feayure film starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. From Quick's Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:
The Silver Linings Playbook is that rare bird that is not only an extraordinary book but a fabulous movie as well. Were you anxious about how they were going to transform the book?

Thank you! So glad you enjoyed both.

I

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Jenny White

Jenny White's new book is Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks. From her Q & A with Today's Zaman:What does Islam mean in Turkey?

There are so many different ways of expressing that. There is a female sheikh [Cemalnur Sargut] on Bağdat Caddesi in İstanbul who does not cover her head and attracts a lot of professional women who are secular. The question is why? I think it's because if you don't

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Christine Schutt

Christine Schutt's new novel is Prosperous Friends.

From her Q & A with Michelle Y. Burke at HTMLGiant:
Burke: One of the things I admire most about your writing is how it sounds. Your sentences are so rich and lyrical. To what extent are you thinking about sound when you’re writing?

Schutt: I do think about sound. What I want to do is wed sound to scene. What comes first is a picture. I’m

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C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa

C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa is assistant professor of history at Illinois College.

His new book is Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War.

From his Q & A at the publisher's website:How did you arrive at this research project?

Originally, I imagined writing a book that focused solely on the National Indian Defense Association and its efforts in the

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Jami Attenberg

Jami Attenberg's new novel The Middlesteins follows a Midwest family that is forced to face or ignore its problems when its matriarch, Edie Middlestein, begins to eat herself to death.

Jonathan Franzen (author of Freedom) says: “The Middlesteins had me from its very first pages, but it wasn’t until its final pages that I fully appreciated the range of Attenberg’s sympathy and the artistry

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Karen Engelmann

Karen Engelmann's new novel is The Stockholm Octavo.

From her Q & A with Hilary Williamson:Q: You chose a fascinating period in Swedish history for The Stockholm Octavo, one little known to Westerners aside from those of us who have read Annemarie Selinko's Désirée. What drew you to this era?

A: Living in Sweden for nine years, it was impossible to avoid the Gustavian age — even for an American

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J. Robert Lennon

J. Robert Lennon's books include the novels Castle and Mailman, and a story collection, Pieces for the Left Hand. His latest novel is Familiar.

From his Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:I love books that cast you in this eerie, unsettling world where reality and non-reality blur. Elisa could be in a strange new world, or she could be suffering delusions, and the whole novel juggles this uneasy

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Pallavi Aiyar

Award winning journalist and author Pallavi Aiyar spent six years living in a hutong home in the heart of the old imperial city of Beijing. She reported from across China for The Hindu and Indian Express in addition to teaching English at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute. She is the winner of the 2007 Prem Bhatia Memorial Award for excellence in political reporting and analysis for her

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Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers’ books include, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002), Zeitoun (2009), and A Hologram For The King.

From his June 2012 Q & A with Stephen Elliott at The Rumpus:
The Rumpus: A Hologram for The King is your first imagined-from-scratch book in a while. In a lot of ways it seems like a real departure from the last book we talked about,

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Ben H. Winters

Ben H. Winters is the author of several novels, including the New York Times bestseller Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and the middle-grade novel The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman, an Edgar Award nominee and a Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of 2011. Winters’ other books include the science-fiction Tolstoy parody Android Karenina, the Finkleman sequel The Mystery of the

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Gillian Flynn

Gillian Flynn's latest novel is Gone Girl.

From her Q & A with Noah Charney at The Daily Beast:
You describe having a (pleasantly) dark childhood, enjoying horror films at an age when most kids would run from them with blankets over their heads…

I was a quirky kid. I think that’s the kind way of putting it. My favorite picture book was Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies (Z is for Zillah who

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V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan

Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan, a fiction writer and journalist, lives in New York. She is a 2002 graduate of Harvard College. In 2005, she received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and in 2005-2006, she was the Bennett Fellow and writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy. In 2007, she graduated from the new MA program at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where

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Edward J. Blum

Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey are the authors of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America.

From Blum's Q & A with Terry Gross on Fresh Air:
GROSS: Edward Blum, welcome to FRESH AIR. So knowing what you know about religious history, if you were painting a picture of Jesus Christ, what color would he be?

EDWARD BLUM: Well, the best American painting I've ever seen of

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Anne C. Heller

Anne C. Heller is the author of 2009's Ayn Rand and the World She Made.

From her Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: [Rand is] known for being sexually free. Would you say she was not only an atheist but a hedonist too?

A: She was a Russian to a core. She grew up in a time of free love in Russia, and she felt that was everybody's right, as long as they weren't hurting

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Oliver Burkeman

Oliver Burkeman is a writer for The Guardian based in Brooklyn, New York. His new book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, explores the upsides of negativity, uncertainty, failure and imperfection. Each week in "This Column Will Change Your Life" he writes about social psychology, self-help culture, productivity and the science of happiness, and makes unprovoked

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Benjamin Anastas

Broke, his promising literary career evaporated, Benjamin Anastas is hounded by debt collectors as he tries to repair a life ripped apart by the spectacular implosion of his marriage, which ended when his pregnant wife left him for another man. Such is the story Benjamin Anastas recounts in his new memoir, Too Good to Be True.

From the author's Q & A with Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg for the Wall

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Megan Abbott

Megan Abbott's latest novel is Dare Me.

From her Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:
What I so deeply admire about your work is the lean, mean and fiercely gorgeous prose you employ. So, what kind of writer are you? Do you plot things out or fly by the seat of your pen? Do you write every day or when the muse’s whispers begin to turn into shouts? What’s your writing life like?

Thank you for your kind

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Richard Russo

Richard Russo's new memoir is Elsewhere.

From his Q & A with Jane Ciabattari at The Daily Beast:
How were you inspired to write Elsewhere?

John Freeman, the editor of Granta, played a key role. He was planning an issue for Granta about going home. He’d been driving along the thruway, and saw the sign for Gloversville and contacted me on the off chance I might be willing to write about

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M.J. McGrath

M.J. McGrath is the author of the new thriller The Boy in the Snow, the sequel to her acclaimed debut novel, White Heat.

From her Q & A with J. Kingston Pierce of The Rap Sheet:
JKP: White Heat succeeded in part because it was set in such an alien environment. However, for The Boy in the Snow, you leave the barrens of Ellesmere Island in favor of setting your story among the more recognizable

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Robert Sullivan

Robert Sullivan's books include The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year) and the best-selling Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants. His latest book is My American Revolution: Crossing the Delaware and I-78.

From his Q & A with Matthew Fleagle at January Magazine:
Matthew Fleagle: In

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Matthew Parker

Matthew Parker recently earned an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and has been drug- and crime-free since 2002. Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, he now lives in New York City.

His new book is Larceny in My Blood: A Memoir of Heroin, Handcuffs, and Higher Education.

From his Q & A with Bwog’s Diana Clarke:Bwog: How did you decide to tell your story in graphic form? Did

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Sheila Hale

Sheila Hale's new book is Titian: His Life.

From her Q & A with A.L. McMichael at Publishers Weekly:
Why did you choose to write about Titian?

Titian was suggested to me by the publisher of a previous book that I had written. He knew that I knew Venice very well [from living there often] and that I was interested in painting. I also happen to be a close friend of Charles Hope, the pre-eminent

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Jo Nesbø

Jo Nesbø is a musician, songwriter, economist, and author. He has won the Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel. His Harry Hole novels include The Redbreast, Nemesis, The Devil's Star, The Snowman, The Leopard, and Phantom. He has written nine novels featuring the alcoholic, still-smarter-than-you detective Harry Hole.

From his Q & A with Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at the Wall Street

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Joe Schreiber

Joe Schreiber's young adult novels include the critically acclaimed Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick and the newly released Perry's Killer Playlist.

From his Q & A with John A. Sellers at Publishers Weekly:
One gets the sense from reading your books that you’re having a lot of fun with them—is that a fair way to describe your relationship with writing?

Absolutely. It came out of a desire to

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Jim Krusoe

Jim Krusoe is the author of the novels Toward You, Erased, Girl Factory, and Iceland; two collections of stories; and five books of poetry. His stories and poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Bomb, the Chicago Review, the Denver Quarterly, the American Poetry Review, and other publications. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lila Wallace

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Jasper Fforde

From Jasper Fforde's Q & A with Sue Corbett at Publishers Weekly:
Where does your sense of humor come from?

It’s probably an amalgam of having been brought up in the ’70s when there were some fantastically good sitcoms on TV, having a tremendously funny older brother, and having parents who were academics who insisted on dragging us off to see Shakespeare. So my humor, I’d say, comes from a

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Robert A. Caro

The Passage of Power is the fourth volume of Robert A. Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson.

From the author's Q & A with James Mustich at the Barnes & Noble Review:
JM: Let's take a moment to talk about the Johnson project in a longer view. In the course of thinking about his life for three decades now, has your idea of him shifted at all? Or have you found yourself able to connect the dots of

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David Mitchell

David Mitchell's novels include Cloud Atlas.

From his Q & A with Carolyn Kellogg at Jacket Copy:
One of the things I like about your work is a real delight in how words function, how they look on a page, how they sound. You said Samsung is a better word than sony. Why?

It ends on a hard g, Samsunggg. That’s great. Sony – don’t know what I was thinking of, really. Y is about the weakest letter

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Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan's new novel is Sweet Tooth.

From his interview about the book with Barbara Chai of the Wall Street Journal:
What was the seed for “Sweet Tooth”?

It started with fascination with that old Encounter scandal. It was a literary political magazine called Encounter. In 1966-67, an American magazine revealed, and then the New York Times picked it up, that it was funded indirectly by the CIA

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Kate Mosse

Kate Mosse is the author of the New York Times bestselling Labyrinth and Sepulchre and other books.

From her 2012 Q &A at the Independent:Choose a favourite author and say why you admire her/him

They change from week to week... But stalwarts include Emily Bronte, Willa Cather, MR James and TS Eliot.

* * *

Which fictional character most resembles you?

Allan Quartermain – hero of 'King

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Simon Sebag Montefiore

Simon Sebag Montefiore read history at Cambridge University. His latest book is Jerusalem: The Biography.

From his Q & A at the Guardian:
What has changed for you since [Jerusalem: The Biography] was first published?

It has been a life-changing book for me. The number of people from so many countries who write to me about it on Facebook or want me to speak in their country is much greater than

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Elizabeth Gilbert

Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of Eat, Pray, Love. After coming across a long-lost copy of her great-grandmother’s 1947 cooking and entertainment guide, At Home On the Range, she teamed up with McSweeneys to produce a new edition of the book.

From Gilbert's Q & A with Marc Schultz at Publishers Weekly:
How much did you know about this book before re-discovering your old copy?

I knew about it

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Cherie Burns

Cherie Burns is the author of The Great Hurricane: 1938.

From her Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: What's the biggest difference between the 1938 hurricane and Hurricane Sandy?

A: I was marveling over how everything has been forecast about Sandy over the last five days. The reason the hurricane of 1938 was so devastating was that it took people completely by

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Kenneth C. Davis

Kenneth C. Davis is the author of Don't Know Much about the American Presidents.

From his Q & A with Erik Spanberg at the Christian Science Monitor:
What surprised you most as you researched this book on the presidents?

Obviously, I know the history pretty well, having written about American history for more than 20 years, starting with "Don’t Know Much About History." A lot of the basics were

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Susie Boyt

Susie Boyt's books include and the novels The Normal Man, The Characters of Love, The Last Hope of Girls, Only Human, and the soon forthcoming The Small Hours.

Boyt is the daughter of Lucian Freud and great-granddaughter of Sigmund. The Small Hours is a psychological drama about Harriet, a brash but troubled woman who opens the

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Julie Klam

Julie Klam's latest book is Friendkeeping: A Field Guide to the People You Love, Hate, and Can't Live Without.

From her Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:
I have to say, from your book, you sound like the kind of friend everyone on the planet would be thrilled to have. What can others learn at your feet?

I don’t know about everyone on the planet, there’s a huge group of shepherds in Ulan Bator that

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Terry Pratchett

Sir Terence David John Pratchett, more commonly known as Terry Pratchett, is an English novelist, known for his frequently comical work in the fantasy genre. He is best known for his popular and long-running Discworld series of comic fantasy novels. Pratchett's first novel, The Carpet People, was published in 1971, and since his first Discworld novel (The Color of Magic) was published in 1983,

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Jay Wexler

Jay Wexler is a professor of law at Boston University, a former law clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the author of three books, Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battleground of the Church/State Wars, The Odd Clauses: Understanding the Constitution Through Ten of its Most Curious Provisions, and the recently released book of fiction, The Adventures of Ed Tuttle, Associate Justice, and

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Karen Engelmann

Karen Engelmann's new novel is The Stockholm Octavo.

From her Q & A with Aaron Jaffe at the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog:How did the book come about?

In many respects it was an improbable project. I’m not a historian. I’m not even Swedish. I lived there a long time. But there was something about Sweden, especially Stockholm at that particular period, that was so captivating for me. And

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Victor LaValle

Victor LaValle’s latest novel, The Devil in Silver, tells of New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital in New York, where patients trudge through a drug-induced haze and are visited by night terrors.

From his Q & A at Granta with John Freeman:
JF: The mental hospital novel has such a giant ur-text, let’s address it at the start. One Flew Over ... what do you think of it, and does it need ... updating?

VLV:

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Jami Attenberg

Jami Attenberg's new novel The Middlesteins follows a Midwest family that is forced to face or ignore its problems when its matriarch, Edie Middlestein, begins to eat herself to death.

Jonathan Franzen (author of Freedom) says: “The Middlesteins had me from its very first pages, but it wasn’t until its final pages that I fully appreciated the range of Attenberg’s sympathy and the artistry of her

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Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan's books include The Invisible Circus, which was released as a feature film by Fine Line in 2001, Emerald City and Other Stories, Look at Me, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 2001, The Keep, and A Visit From the Goon Squad, a national bestseller, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the LA Times Book Prize.

From her

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Megan Abbott

Megan Abbott's new novel is Dare Me.

From her Q & A with Laura Lippman at the Mulholland Books blog:
Laura Lippman: One thing that struck me about DARE ME is that it’s told by an insider, someone inside the group, not an outsider who’s infiltrating it (Mean Girls) or an outsider (pretty much every book I read as a teen). And it struck me that was a bit new for you, too, especially when compared

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Julianna Baggott

Critically acclaimed, bestselling author Julianna Baggott also writes under the pen names Bridget Asher and N.E. Bode. She has published seventeen books over the last ten years.

After receiving her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Baggott published her first novel, Girl Talk, which was a national bestseller and was quickly followed by Boston Globe bestseller The Miss

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Antoine Wilson

Oppen Porter, the protagonist of Antoine Wilson's Panorama City, is a self-described “slow absorber.” Porter thinks he’s dying. He’s not, but from his hospital bed, he unspools into a cassette recorder a tale of self-determination, from village idiot to man of the world, for the benefit of his unborn son.

From Wilson's Q & A at Amazon with fellow novelist, Curtis Sittenfeld:
Curtis Sittenfeld

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Moira Crone

Moira Crone is the author of several novels and story collections including What Gets Into Us and A Period of Confinement; her works have appeared in Oxford American, The New Yorker, Image, Mademoiselle, and over forty other journals and twelve anthologies. She has won prizes for her stories and novellas, and in 2009 she was given the Robert Penn Warren Award from the Fellowship of Southern

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Janna Malamud Smith

Janna Malamud Smith is a writer and psychotherapist. Her books include Private Matters (1997), A Potent Spell (2003), and My Father is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud (2006).

Her new book is An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery.

From the author's Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:Why call art an errand? Can you talk about that?

Actually, it's not simply an

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Bruce DeSilva

Bruce DeSilva is the author of the Liam Mulligan crime novels, Cliff Walk, which has just been released, and Rogue Island, winner of the Edgar and Macavity awards. He was a journalist for 40 years, most recently for the Associated Press, before retiring to write hardboiled crime novels full time.

From his Q & A with Zoë Sharp at Murderati:

ZS: You were a journalist for many years before turning

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Bronwen Hruska

Bronwen Hruska is the author of Accelerated, her fist novel.

From her Q & A with Jasmine Elist at the Jacket Copy blog:
"Accelerated" explores some controversial subjects: the competitiveness that exists in many schools and a laxness when it comes to prescribing drugs to young students. What inspired you to write this as a novel?

When my son was in third grade, his school suggested we get him

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Susan Millar Williams & Stephen G. Hoffius

Susan Millar Williams and Stephen G. Hoffius are the authors of Upheaval in Charleston: Earthquake and Murder on the Eve of Jim Crow.

From their Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: What was Charleston like at that time [125 years ago], barely 20 years after the end of the Civil War, which had begun just outside town at Ft. Sumter?

Hoffius: Charleston was hammered by

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Sarah Pekkanen

Sarah Pekkanen is the author of The Opposite of Me, Skipping a Beat, and These Girls.

From her Q & A with Jodi Picoult:
Jodi: These Girls explores the nuances of female friendships. How hard was it to create a sense of realism between your main characters - Cate, Renee, and Abby - and how much of that came from your own personal experience in your relationships with female friends?

Sarah:

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Debra Ginsberg

Debra Ginsberg is the author of the memoirs, Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress, Raising Blaze: A Mother and Son's Long, Strange Journey Into Autism, and About My Sisters, and the novels Blind Submission, The Grift, and The Neighbors Are Watching. Her latest novel is What the Heart Remembers.

From Gisberg's Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:

The tension in What the Heart Remembers is

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Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon's latest novel is Telegraph Avenue.

From his Q & A with Andrew O'Hehir at Salon:
Maybe we can talk a little about the handling of gender and sex in the book. You’ve reached into two super-duper-male narrative modes, by going into the blaxploitation movies and all the obscure record-store stuff, the jazz and funk and soul from the ‘70s. I don’t think I’m off base in saying that the

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Ace Atkins

Ace Atkins's novels include the Army Ranger Quinn Colson series, The Ranger and The Lost Ones.

From the author's Q & A with Allen Mendenhall at Southern Literary Review:
SLR: You seem to have located The Ranger in regions of the South that you know well. Would you call this book “Southern literature”?

AA: Absolutely. I don’t get into working in a certain genre — that’s up to readers and

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Gregg Hurwitz

Gregg Hurwitz is the critically acclaimed, internationally bestselling author of The Tower, Minutes to Burn, Do No Harm, The Kill Clause, The Program, Troubleshooter, Last Shot, The Crime Writer, Trust No One, They’re Watching, and The Survivor.

In The Survivor, Nate Overbay — a divorced former solider suffering from PTSD and slowly dying from ALS — goes to an eleventh-floor bank, climbs out of

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Joy Castro

Joy Castro is the author of the thriller Hell or High Water, which received a starred review from Booklist for its “exquisite New Orleans background, intriguing newsroom politics and atmosphere, a flawed but plucky heroine, and skillfully paced suspense.” Also the author of two memoirs, The Truth Book and Island of Bones, she lives with her husband in Lincoln, Nebraska and teaches

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John Banville

John Banville's many books include The Sea, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Infinities, the newly released Ancient Light, and several crime novels under the pseudonym Benjamin Black.

From his Q & A with Noah Charney at The Daily Beast:

Your work has been variously, and positively, compared to Nabokov, Dostoevsky, and Camus, to name a few. Which authors were formative to your writing

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Maria Semple

Maria Semple's novels are This One Is Mine and the recently released Where'd You Go, Bernadette.

From her Q & A with Molly Driscoll for The Christian Science Monitor:
Q: Your first book, "This One Is Mine," was set in Los Angeles, while "Bernadette" is set in Seattle. Is there anything particular about the places you have lived that draws you to use them as settings?

I think because I try to

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Leah Hager Cohen

Leah Hager Cohen is the author of nonfiction books, including Train Go Sorry and Glass, Paper, Beans, and four novels, most recently The Grief of Others.

From her Q & A with Noah Charney at The Daily Beast:
What’s the story behind the publication of your first book?

I had an extremely generous journalism professor who asked me to stay after class one day, a few months before graduation. I had

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Matthew Parker

Matthew Parker recently earned an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and has been drug- and crime-free since 2002. Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, he now lives in New York City.

His new book is Larceny in My Blood: A Memoir of Heroin, Handcuffs, and Higher Education.

From his Q & A with Cynthia Clark Harvey for the Phoenix NewTimes blog:
You had written a substantial amount

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Thomas Mogford

Thomas Mogford is the author of Shadow of the Rock and Sign of the Cross.

From his Q & A with Declan Burke:
What crime novel would you most like to have written?

DIRTY TRICKS by Michael Dibdin. A stand-alone novel, rather than one of the ‘Zen’ series, it pulls off the near-impossible trick of making a thoroughly reprehensible main character utterly likeable. As someone who was brought up in

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Maggie Stiefvater

Maggie Stiefvater's latest novel is The Raven Boys.

One exchange from her Q & A with Doug Stanton at The Daily Beast:

What is it about mythology in your novels that people respond to?

I think fiction has been around for so long—you can go back and back, and we’ve been telling stories not only about what happens in our day-to-day life, but we’ve been putting magic and folklore into them, even

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Linwood Barclay

Ali Karim recently interviewed Linwood Barclay, author of Trust Your Eyes, for The Rap Sheet.

Part of their dialogue:

Ali Karim: What was the genesis of Trust Your Eyes?

Linwood Barclay: Wow. Where does any idea come from? However, I think I should thank Winston, our friend’s dog. When the Google Street View car passed by their house, Winston was looking out the window. If you look up the

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Douglas Smith

Douglas Smith's new book is Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy.

From a Q & A at the author's website:
​How did you first get interested in this story?

It was back in 2005 when I was writing a book on the scandalous love affair between Count Nicholas Sheremetev and his serf Praskovya Kovalyova, the famous opera singer who performed as “The Pearl.” I got to know some of the

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Kitty Pilgrim

Kitty Pilgrim worked as a CNN correspondent and news anchor for 24 years. As a New York-based reporter her normal beat included politics and economics but her assignments also have taken her around the world – Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba, the Middle East, Korea and South Africa. Pilgrim anchored her own CNN morning show, Early Edition in 1998-1999 and was anchor for prime

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Attica Locke

Attica Locke's latest novel is The Cutting Season.

From her Q & A with Irene Lacher for the Los Angeles Times:
Is there a story behind your first name?

Yes, I was named after the prison riot at Attica prison in New York.

Because you were such an adorable baby?

All I know is I was born three years later, in '74. [My mother] has since said it's a fit for my personality. I guess I'm fiery or

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George Pelecanos

George Pelecanos is a screenwriter, independent film producer, award-winning journalist, and the author of bestselling novels set in and around Washington, D.C.

From his Q & A with Noah Charney for The Daily Beast:
You’ve had a number of jobs before writing: woman’s shoe salesman, line cook, dishwasher. How do these various jobs color your work as a writer?

I started working in my dad’s diner

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Martin Amis

Martin Amis's latest novel is Lionel Asbo: State of England.

From his Q & A with Irene Lacher at the Los Angeles Times:
The subtitle of your new novel, "Lionel Asbo," is "State of England." But I think your story of a sociopathic criminal who wins the lottery and becomes a tabloid celebrity could easily have happened here.

Yeah, it could. But it's not just for that reason the subtitle is there.

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Enid Shomer

A widely published fiction writer and poetry, Enid Shomer is the author of seven books. Her work has been collected in more than fifty anthologies and textbooks, including POETRY: A HarperCollins Pocket Anthology, Best American Poetry, and New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best.

Shomer's new novel is The Twelve Rooms of the Nile.

From her Q & A with Lauren Bufferd:

With a novel like this

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Hanna Rosin

Claire Zulkey interviewed Hanna Rosin, the author of The End of Men: And the Rise of Women.

Part of the Q & A:After completing your book, did you consider changing your parenting tack in order to raise sons who not only do right by themselves but also do right by women (particularly after you worked on your "hookup culture" chapter)?

My concern about raising my sons has more to do with teaching

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Tony Horwitz

For Chapter 16, Christopher Hebert interviewed Tony Horwitz about his book Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War.

Part of the Q & A:Chapter 16: Midnight Rising is not your first book about the Civil War. You also wrote the bestselling Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Pantheon, 1998), in which you explore the thrall in which

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Drew Gilpin Faust

Drew Gilpin Faust's books include This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.

From her Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: How did the death toll of the Civil War – an estimated 620,000 soldiers and 50,000 civilians and perhaps even more, according to a new estimate – change us as a nation?

A: We learned about our obligations to the dead. If we are to

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Goce Smilevski

Goce Smilevski was born in 1975 in Skopje, Macedonia. He was educated at Charles University in Prague, Central European University in Budapest, and Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, where he works at the Institute for Literature. He has won numerous prizes for his writing, in Macedonia and abroad; his novel Freud's Sister won the European Union Prize for Literature and is being

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John Kelly

John Kelly is the author of the acclaimed bestseller The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time, Three on the Edge: The Stories of Ordinary American Families in Search of a Medical Miracle, and The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People.

From his Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:Can you talk about the title?

The

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William Boyd

William Boyd's books include A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Any Human Heart, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet; Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year; and Ordinary

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Ian Rankin

Ian Rankin is a #1 international bestselling author. Winner of an Edgar Award and the recipient of a Gold Dagger for fiction and the Chandler-Fulbright Award, he lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

From his May 2012 Q & A with the Guardian:
Who's your favourite writer?

I don't think I have one particular favourite writer. I have many whose works I will always buy or reread – Muriel Spark, Anthony

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Ken Follett

Thriller writer Ken Follett has sold 100m copies of his 31 books worldwide. His first major success was Eye of the Needle (1978).

From his Q & A with Boyd Tonkin at the Independent:
Choose a favourite author, and say why you admire her/him

I'm very fond of Edith Wharton. She's a great storyteller... but she's also unapologetically intelligent. Her analysis of people's motivations always strikes

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Michelle Gagnon

Michelle Gagnon has been a modern dancer, a dog walker, a bartender, a freelance journalist, a personal trainer, and a model. Her bestselling thrillers for adults have been published in numerous countries and include The Tunnels, Boneyard, The Gatekeeper, and Kidnap & Ransom.

Don't Turn Around, her first novel for young adults, was published this summer.

From Gagnon's Q & A with Noah Charney

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Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith's new novel is NW.

From her Q & A with Ted Hodgkinson for Granta:
Technology in the novel can act as a portal to fantasy, in Natalie/Keisha’s case, but can also prompt a ‘level of self-awareness literally unknown in the history of human existence’, to borrow a phrase from the book. Does being at such a historical moment signal a potential sea change in human behaviour and what kind

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Alice LaPlante

Alice LaPlante has written four books of nonfiction and the novel, Turn of Mind.

From her Q & A with the Guardian:
How did you come to write Turn of Mind?

My mother has Alzheimer's, so it's a topic we've been dealing with as a family for nearly a decade. I'd tried writing about it, privately, but had trouble getting "at" the material. I tried a short story, and that went nowhere. One night my

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Nick Dybek

Nick Dybek is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the recipient of a Hopwood Award for Short Fiction, a Maytag Fellowship, a 2010 Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and a Granta New Voices selection. He lives in New York City.

Dybek is the author of When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man.

From his Q & A with Ted Hodgkinson for Granta:TH:

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Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds’s latest book of poems, Stag’s Leap, has just been released this week.

From her Q & A with Barbara Chai at the Wall Street Journal's blog:

What is your approach to writing poetry, as opposed to writing journalism or memoir or fiction?

I’m trying to be accurate but what I’m trying to be accurate to is experience – emotional, physical, soul, social. Experience of an ordinary-enough

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Howard Jacobson

An award-winning writer and broadcaster, Howard Jacobson is the acclaimed author of The Mighty Walzer (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Kalooki Nights (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), No More Mr. Nice Guy, The Act of Love, and the Man Booker Prize-winning The Finkler Question.

His latest novel is Zoo Time.

From Jacobson's Q & A with Elizabeth Day at the Observer:
Your

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Lee Child

Lee Child's latest Jack Reacher novel is A Wanted Man.

From his Q & A with Boyd Tonkin at the Independent:
Choose a favourite author and say why you admire her/him

Joseph Kanon. He sets his books in periods of recent history – they're inherently fascinating, plus he adjusts his style to reflect the period in subtle, satisfying ways.
* * *

Which fictional character most resembles you?

Little

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David Owen

David Owen is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse.

From his Q & A with Belinda G at Galvanize Press:I know nothing of science and have to trust what I'm told about the environment--how we have damaged it and how to limit our damage. An introduction

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Candice Millard

Candice Millard is the author of Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President.

From her Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: How did you come across the little-known story of President Garfield?

A: I came in to this book without an interest in Garfield. I didn't know anything about him other than he'd been assassinated.

I was

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D. E. Johnson

D. E. Johnson's new novel is Detroit Breakdown.

From his Q & A with J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet:
JKP: Your first couple of books are replete with information about automobile technology and operations. How did you come by such an education? Or were you simply making it all up as you went along?

DEJ: Mostly, I was learning it as I went along. I live in fear of people shooting holes in

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Anita Desai

Anita Desai is the author of Fasting, Feasting, Baumgartner’s Bombay, Clear Light of Day, Diamond Dust, and The Artist of Disappearance, among other works. Three of her books have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

From her Q & A at the Guardian:How did you come to write The Artist of Disappearance, your trio of novellas about the influence of the past on modern India?

The ideas had

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Deon Meyer

Deon Meyer is one of South Africa's top crime authors. His new novel is Seven Days.

From his Q & A with Alison Flood at the Observer:
Some might say that Griessel, your troubled but brilliant alcoholic detective, is a bit of a cliche. Was that a worry?

When I first wrote him, in Dead Before Dying, he was never supposed to become a major character. He was supposed to be the comic relief in a

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Elie Wiesel

From Oprah's 2000 interview with Elie Wiesel:
Oprah: In your memoir Night, you write of the Hungarian soldiers who drove you from your homes, "It was from that moment that I began to hate them, and that hate is still the only link between us today."

Elie: I wrote that, but I didn't hate. I just felt terribly angry and humiliated. At that point, our disappointment was not with the Germans but

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Megan Abbott

Megan Abbott's new novel is Dare Me.

From her Q & A with Mark Coggins at The Rap Sheet:MC: I read an interview you did for your previous book, The End of Everything, in which you said that part of the idea behind writing Dare Me was to set Shakespeare’s Richard III in the world of high-school cheerleaders. I can see the power struggle for leadership of the cheerleading squad being like Richard’s

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William Landay

From Linda Yezak's Q & A with William Landay about his latest novel, Defending Jacob:Q: Defending Jacob is an excellent psychological study of the impact of traumatic news on a family, in this case, not so much the fourteen-year-old defendant himself, but on his parents. Your characterization is amazing. For a prosecutor, you illustrate incredible powers of empathy to be able to step into the

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Maria Semple

Maria Semple's novels are This One Is Mine and the recently released Where'd You Go, Bernadette.

From her Q & A with Greg Olear for The Nervous Breakdown:

When I teach, I stress the idea that when we read a novel, we should have an idea of what it is that we’re reading. Gatsby is Nick Carroway sitting in St. Paul jotting down his recollections of the previous summer; Catcher is a transcript

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Alafair Burke

Alafair Burke's latest novel is Never Tell (Ellie Hatcher Series #4).

From her Q & A with Lauren Katz for the Washington Independent Review of Books:
You have experience in police work, as a prosecutor, and you are a professor of criminal law at Hofstra Law School. How did you decide to start writing novels? Was it your experience in law that encouraged that decision? Or something else entirely?

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Deanna Fei

For Fiction Writers Review, Kate Levin interviewed Deanna Fei about her debut novel, A Thread of Sky. Part of the Q & A:
You noted in an earlier interview that celebrity gossip sites are rich in stories. You make a similar observation in a piece for the Huffington Post, “Why Every Writer Should Watch Jersey Shore.” Thanks to blogs and Facebook and the million reality shows on TV, it seems like a

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Meg Donohue

Meg Donohue has an MFA from Columbia University and a BA from Dartmouth College. Born and raised in Philadelphia, she now lives in San Francisco with her husband, daughters, dog, and a weakness for salted caramel cupcakes.

Her first novel is How to Eat a Cupcake.

From Donohue's December 2011 Q & A with Johanna Burke at Publishers Weekly:You write about the professional and personal problems

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Paul Barrett

Paul M. Barrett is the author of American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion and The Good Black: A True Story of Race in America.

His latest book is Glock: The Rise of America's Gun.

From Barrett's January 2012 Q & A at The Daily Beast:
The Glock is a relatively new gun, compared with Smith & Wesson and Colt. What set it apart?

Gaston Glock, who manufactured window fittings in a

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Valerie Frankel

Valerie Frankel is the author of Thin Is the New Happy and such chick lit favorites as The Accidental Virgin, The Girlfriend Curse and Hex and the Single Girl. The former articles editor at Mademoiselle, Frankel has contributed to the New York Times, O, Glamour, Allure, Self, Good Housekeeping, among many other publications.

Her books include the memoir It's Hard Not to Hate You and the novel

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Shon Hopwood

Shon Hopwood is a law school student at the University of Washington School of Law who, prior to law school, served over ten years in federal prison for a string of bank robberies he committed as a young adult. While in prison, he learned the law and he wrote legal briefs for other prisoners, two of which were granted by the U.S. Supreme Court—the equivalent of winning the legal lottery

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Adam Brent Houghtaling

Adam Brent Houghtaling is the author of This Will End in Tears: The Miserabilist Guide to Music.

From his Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: What makes sad songs unique?

A: Sad songs are a really intimate thing. They're not something you listen to with all your friends at a dinner party or when you're hanging out at a lake house with your buddies. You're doing it by

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Margaret Dilloway

Margaret Dilloway was inspired by her Japanese mother's experiences when she wrote The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns, and especially by a book her father had given to her mother called The American Way of Housekeeping.

From Dilloway's Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:
I adored the heroine of your new novel. She really starts off so prickly, and then gradually, she begins to unfold, much like

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Kitty Pilgrim

Kitty Pilgrim worked as a CNN correspondent and news anchor for 24 years. As a New York-based reporter her normal beat included politics and economics but her assignments also have taken her around the world – Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba, the Middle East, Korea and South Africa. Pilgrim anchored her own CNN morning show, Early Edition in 1998-1999 and was anchor for prime time

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Tracey Garvis Graves

Tracey Garvis Graves lives in a suburb of Des Moines, Iowa, with her husband, two children, and hyper dog Chloe.

In On the Island, her first novel, two people stranded on an island struggle to survive—and slowly fall in love.

From the author's Q & A at The Daily Quirk:

TDQ: On The Island deals with some rather unique subject matter. What was your inspiration for telling this story?

TGG: I

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Andrew Taylor

Andrew Taylor is the award-winning author of a number of novels, including the Lydmouth and Dougal crime series, psychological thrillers, and the groundbreaking Roth Trilogy. He is the only author to receive the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award twice, the first time for The Office of The Dead, the third novel in the Roth Trilogy, and the second time for An Unpardonable Crime (

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Molly Ringwald

Molly Ringwald's newly released novel-in-stories is When It Happens to You.

From her Q & A with Lianne Stokes at Interview Magazine:
LIANNE STOKES: As a Brat Pack icon, is it a challenge for you to be taken seriously as an author? If so, how do you overcome that?

MOLLY RINGWALD: I don't have control over how people choose to perceive me. The only thing I have control over is my writing. I think

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Ariel S. Winter

Ariel S. Winter is author of The Twenty-Year Death, "the brand-new and quite extraordinary crime novel" (according to crime fiction maven J. Kingston Pierce of The Rap Sheet).

From Winter's Q & A with Pierce:
JKP: This new novel is really three books in one, evoking the storytelling styles of Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler, and Jim Thompson. Whose style did you find the most enjoyable to

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Andrew Nagorski

Award-winning journalist Andrew Nagorski's books include The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II and Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power.

From his Q & A at the EWI website:Who were the Americans in German in the 1920s and 1930s, and how did you get their stories?

There was a broad range of

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Alex Preston

Alex Preston's first novel, This Bleeding City, was published by Faber and Faber in March 2010 in the UK, and across twelve further territories. It won the Spear’s and Edinburgh Festival first book prizes. His second novel, The Revelations, which came out earlier this year, is about what happens when a religious movement becomes more important than the lives of its followers.

From Preston's Q &

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Michael Grunwald

Michael Grunwald is a Time senior correspondent. He has won the George Polk Award for national reporting, the Worth Bingham Award for investigative reporting, and many other prizes. The Washington Post called his first book, The Swamp, “a brilliant work of research and reportage,” and the New York Times called him “a terrific writer.” His new book is The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change

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Beth Kephart

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of more than a dozen books. She teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania.

Her latest novel is Small Damages.

From Kephart's Q & A with novelist Caroline Leavitt:You are now the diamond in the sky. A rave NYT review, praise everywhere, and rightfully so, for a novel that is as luminously moving as it is smart. You and I have talked

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Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart's latest novel is Super Sad True Love Story.

From his 2010 Q & A with Emily Greenhouse for Granta:
Who would win in a ‘Great American Novel’ Celebrity Death Match – you or Jonathan Franzen?

Tony Blair.

Do you think Chelsea Clinton would have converted, had she married you?

To atheism? She’d better!

George Steiner said that the ‘genius of Judaism’ is its history of Diaspora:

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Edward Humes

From Jason Zasky's Q & A with Edward Humes, author of Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, at Failure Magazine:
Landfills are America’s preferred method for disposing of trash. But what are other countries doing?

Waste energy is a component of the European model. Germany landfills less than one percent of its waste, as opposed to sixty-nine percent for the United States. Germany recycles

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Zheng Wang

Zheng Wang is an Associate Professor at the John C. Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University. His research seeks to explain China's political transition and foreign policy behavior through the exploration of the country's indigenous culture, identity and domestic discourse.

His new book is Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in

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Joshua Henkin

Joshua Henkin's new novel is The World Without You.

From his Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:

Your subject seems to be family. So what was yours like? Do you draw on it at all?

Ron Carlson said that he writes from personal experiences whether or not he had them. I feel the same way. Good fiction has to be emotionally autobiographical. The writer has to be at risk; you have to be very close to

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Tabish Khair

Tabish Khair is an award-winning poet, journalist, critic, educator and novelist. A citizen of India, he lives in Denmark and teaches literature at Aarhus University.

His latest novel is The Thing about Thugs.

From the author's Q & A with Visi Tilak:

At what age did you start writing? When did you discover you wanted to become a writer?

TK: Pretty early, according to my parents. They

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Laura Lippman

Laura Lippman's new novel is And When She Was Good.

From her Q & A with Rosalind Sykes at the Financial Times:
What book changed your life?

Lolita. I read it for the first time when I was 12 because I heard it was really dirty. It has allusions to Edgar Allan Poe and it actually plays by the rules of a detective novel.
* * *

Who are your literary influences?

Anything I read between the ages

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Pam Houston

Pam Houston divides her time between her ranch in Colorado and the University of California at Davis, where she is director of the Creative Writing Program. She has been a frequent contributor to O, The Oprah Magazine, and her writing appears regularly in More and other publications. She in the author of the best-selling Cowboys Are My Weakness.

Houston's latest novel is

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Louise Welsh

Louise Welsh is a writer living and working in Glasgow, Scotland.

She is the author of five novels: The Cutting Room (2002), Tamburlaine Must Die (2004), The Bullet Trick (2006), Naming the Bones (March 2010), and The Girl on the Stairs (August 2012).

From her Q & A with the Independent:
Choose a favourite authors and say why you admire her/him

Robert Louis Stevenson because I read him before

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Joe Simpson

Joe Simpson is the author of several bestselling books, of which the first, Touching the Void, won both the NCR Award and the Boardman Tasker Award. His later books include This Game of Ghosts, Storms of Silence, Dark Shadows Falling, The Beckoning Silence and two novels.

From his Q & A with Peter Leggatt at the Financial Times:
What book changed your life?

The White Spider [first published in

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Ann Bauer

Ann Bauer is the author of the novels A Wild Ride Up the Cupboards and The Forever Marriage.

From her Q & A with writer Caroline Leavitt:
What I loved so much about The Forever Marriage is the character of Carmen. At first, I didn’t know how I felt about her because she was so prickly, so relieved about her husband’s death. But then, as she begins to look at their shared pasts, and her own

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Anthony Quinn

Anthony Quinn is an Irish author and journalist. He has written short stories for years, winning critical acclaim and, twice, a place on the short list for the Hennessy Literary Awards for New Irish Writing. He also placed as runner-up in a Sunday Times food writing competition. Disappeared is his first novel.

From his Q & A at Declan Burke's Crime Always Pays blog:
What crime novel would you

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Laura Lippman

Laura Lippman's new novel is And When She Was Good.

From her Q & A at the Independent:
Choose a favourite author and say why you admire him/her

Philip Roth. With a lot of writers, I can say 'I'm done now', like you would in a relationship. With Roth, I'm in it for the long haul.
* * *

Which fictional character most resembles you?

Francie Nolan from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, whose love of

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Kurt Andersen

Kurt Andersen is the author of the novels Heyday and Turn of the Century, among other books. He writes for television, film, and the stage, contributes to Vanity Fair, and hosts the public radio program Studio 360. He has previously been a columnist for New York, The New Yorker, and Time, editor in chief of New York, and co-founder of Spy.

His new novel True Believers is about an attorney, Karen

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Dave Cullen

Dave Cullen is considered the nation's foremost authority on the Columbine killers, and has also written extensively on Evangelical Christians, gays in the military, politics, and pop culture.

From his July 2012 Q& A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: What lessons can we learn from the Littleton community and how it's dealt with Columbine for 13 years now?

A: The victims

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Vaddey Ratner

Vaddey Ratner's new novel is In the Shadow of the Banyan.

From a Q & A at her website:

In the Shadow of the Banyan is a novel, but it is closely based on your family’s experience in Cambodia during the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1979. Why did you decide to write it as a novel rather than a memoir?

I was a small child when the Khmer Rouge took over the

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Arnie Bernstein

Arnie Bernstein's Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing is about America's deadliest killing spree at a school.

From the author's Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: How was the reaction to this tragedy different than what we're seeing in Aurora?

A: While the people of Bath weren't any different than the people of our times, it was a different time, a different

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Robert O. Bucholz

From a Q & A at the publisher's site with Robert O. Bucholz, co-author (with Joseph P. Ward) of London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550-1750:
Can you summarise the subject of your book, and what inspired you to write?

Our subject is how London became (arguably) the greatest city in the Western world, the inventor of much of modernity, and therefore a city worthy of hosting the Olympics. We

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Catharine Arnold

Catharine Arnold is the author of The Sexual History of London: From Roman Londinium to the Swinging City.

From her Q & A with Kevin Canfield at The Daily Beast:

This is an entertaining book, but some of the material is pretty grim. For instance, you write about the many brothels to be found in Roman London. Isn’t it right that some of these brothels took hold because of an odd superstition on

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Thelma Adams

Thelma Adams has been Us Weekly’s film critic since 2000, after six years reviewing at the New York Post. She has written for Marie Claire, the New York Times, Cosmopolitan and Self.

Her 2011 novel is Playdate.

From the author's Q & A with Cherise Bathersfield for Ladies Home Journal:
You’ve been a film critic and entertainment writer for almost 30 years. How did that experience inform your

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Roger Smith

Roger Smith's thrillers Dust Devils, Wake Up Dead and Mixed Blood are published in seven languages and two are in development as movies in the U.S. His books have won the Deutscher Krimi Preis (German Crime Fiction Award) and been nominated for Spinetingler Magazine Best Novel awards. His novella, Ishmael Toffee, and a fourth novel, Capture, are now available.

From his Q & A at Crime

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Meredith Goldstein

Meredith Goldstein is an advice columnist and entertainment reporter for The Boston Globe. Her column Love Letters is a daily dispatch of wisdom for the lovelorn that gets about 1 million page views every month on Boston.com. Love Letters appears in the Globe’s print edition every Saturday. Goldstein also writes about fake rock stars, former boy banders, female werewolves, self-help

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Hilary Davidson

Hilary Davidson is a travel journalist and the author of eighteen nonfiction books. Her articles have appeared in more than 40 magazines, including Discover, Reader’s Digest, and Martha Stewart Weddings. Her short fiction has been widely praised and included in anthologies such as A Prisoner of Memory & 24 of the Year’s Finest Crime & Mystery Stories and Thuglit Presents: Blood, Guts, &

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Chris Pavone

Chris Pavone grew up in Brooklyn and graduated from Cornell. For nearly two decades he was a book editor and ghostwriter.

The Expats is his first novel.

From his Q & A with Paul Goat Allen at Publishers Weekly:
After your wife’s job took you to Luxembourg, do you remember the moment when you realized that it would make a perfect setting for a spy thriller?

I was sitting in a playground,

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Megan Abbott

Megan Abbott's new novel is Dare Me. From her Q & A at My Bookish Ways:

Will you tell us a bit about Dare Me?

It’s the final result of an obsessive descent into the world of high school cheerleading. About two years ago, I started becoming fascinated with how cheer has transformed since I was a teenager. Today, these girls perform death defying stunts and seem to embrace the risk. They’re proud

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Tracy Chevalier

Tracy Chevalier is the author of Girl with a Pearl Earring and the forthcoming The Last Runaway.

From her Q & A with Arifa Akbar at the Independent:
Choose a favourite author, and say why you admire her/him

Margaret Atwood. I admire the breadth and depth of her writing. She's written in all the genres and you never quite know what she's going to do next.
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Which fictional character most

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Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel's latest novel is The Lola Quartet.  From her Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:
I loved the jazz motif that plays throughout the novel. How do you come by your knowledge of jazz?

Thanks. I studied piano for years as a child and teenager, but I never played jazz and I still don't feel like I know that much about it, to tell you the truth. There's a gypsy jazz guitarist who plays

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David Thomson

From a Q & A with David Thomson about his book, Nicole Kidman:
Q: You are a well-known film scholar and historian. Why did you decide to do a book about a movie star—and why Nicole?

A: I think most people most of the time go to see movies because of who’s in them. We have always done this. And we have our favorites. We fall for movie stars when we’re very young. And I think critics often forget

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Gerald Seymour

Gerald Seymour's many novels include The Unknown Soldier. From his Q & A with Boyd Tonkin at the The Independent:
Choose a favourite author, and say why you admire her/him

Nevil Shute. They're stories that make my eyes a bit wet... they're beautifully written.
* * *

Which fictional character most resembles you?

One of those johnnies who sends agents off in the early Le Carré stories but stays

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Marcus Samuelsson

James Beard Award–winning chef and author of several cookbooks Marcus Samuelsson has appeared on Today, Charlie Rose, Iron Chef, and Top Chef Masters, where he took first place. In 1995, for his work at Aquavit, Samuelsson became the youngest chef ever to receive a three-star review from the New York Times. His new memoir is Yes, Chef.

From Samuelsson's Q & A with Tom Thornton at Austinist:
To

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Donald Ray Pollock

Donald Ray Pollock's writing has appeared in, or is forthcoming in, the New York Times, Third Coast, The Journal, Sou’wester, Chiron Review, River Styx, Boulevard, Folio, and The Berkeley Fiction Review. His 2008 book is Knockemstiff.

His latest novel is The Devil All the Time.

From Pollack's Q & A with Charles Tan for the Shirley Jackson Awards:
For The Devil All the Time, what was the

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Tim Jeal

Tim Jeal is the author of the acclaimed biographies Livingstone, Baden-Powell, and Stanley, each selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and the Washington Post. He was selected as the winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.

From Jeal's Q & A with the Guardian, about his latest book, Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great

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Timothy Hallinan

Zoë Sharp interviewed Timothy Hallinan at Murderati.  Part of the conversation:
Zoë Sharp: Your series characters go by the highly memorable names of Simeon Grist, Junior Bender and Poke Rafferty. Where did you find such wonderful names for them?

Timothy Hallinan: I always think they're just regular names and later ask myself what I'd been smoking. Actually, that's only partially true; I was

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Richard Ford

Richard Ford's new novel is Canada.

From his Q & A with J.P. O’ Malley at the Christian Science Monitor:
Q. What’s the significance of the title of this book, “Canada”?

I always found as an American, that Canada was a place that attracted me. I felt I could accommodate to Canada extremely well if I had to. I think of Canada as a kind of psychic-moral-spatial refuge, whereas I think America –

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George Pelecanos

Wallace Stroby interviewed fellow novelist George Pelecanos at the Mulholland Books blog. Part of their Q & A:

WALLACE STROBY: After four stand-alone novels that in some ways mirrored your TV work – multilevel stories with a broad array of characters and social concerns – THE CUT feels like a return to your early, leaner and meaner crime novels. What led to that?

GEORGE PELECANOS: On a whim I

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Rebecca Cantrell

Rebecca Cantrell's new novel is A City of Broken Glass.

From her Q & A with Kilian Melloy at EDGE:
EDGE: The new novel in the Hannah Vogel series finds Hannah and her son, Anton, in Berlin just before Kristallnacht--the infamous "Night of Broken Glass." This is a huge historical point for the era of the series, of course. What went into plotting out how to involve Hannah in the events of the

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Daniel Smith

Daniel Smith is the author of Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety.

From his Q & A with Cara Cannella at Biographile:

Cara Cannella: Does writing so honestly about your anxiety make you more or less anxious? Is it cathartic and/or scary as hell to put yourself out there as you do?

Dan Smith: Strangely, it doesn’t really make me anxious to talk about my anxiety. I don’t know why this is, exactly. I

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Åke Edwardson

Åke Edwardson has worked as a journalist, a press officer at the United Nations, and a university lecturer at the University of Gothenburg, the city in Sweden where his mysteries are set. He is one of Sweden’s bestselling authors, and his books featuring Detective Chief Inspector Erik Winter have been translated into more than twenty languages worldwide. He is a three-time winner of the Swedish

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Magnus Mills

Magnus Mills has produced three collections of short stories and seven novels, including The Restraint of Beasts, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 1998.

From his Q & A with Anna Metcalfe at the Financial Times:
What book changed your life?

The first one I wrote, The Restraint of Beasts. But in terms of reading it was The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien. It made me realise the

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Claire Tomalin

Claire Tomalin's latest book is Charles Dickens: A Life.

From her Q & A with Anna Metcalfe at the Financial Times:
What book changed your life?

J.E. Neale’s Queen Elizabeth, which I bought in 1945 when I was 12. I was very priggish as a child. I saved up for a book on medieval English nunneries, for which I was despised by my friends.
* * *

Who would you most like to sit next to at a dinner

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C.W. Gortner

C. W. Gortner, half-Spanish by birth, holds an M.F.A. in writing, with an emphasis on historical studies, from the New College of California and has taught university courses on women of power in the Renaissance. He was raised in Málaga, Spain, and now lives in California.

His new novel is The Queen’s Vow: A Novel of Isabella of Castile.

From his Q & A with Sarah Bower at the Historical

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Tupelo Hassman

Tupelo Hassman graduated from Columbia's MFA program. Her writing has been published in Paper Street Press, The Portland Review Literary Journal, Tantalum, We Still Like, ZYZZYVA, and by 100WordStory.org and FiveChapters.com. Hassman is a contributing author to Heliography, Invisible City Audio Tours' first tour and is curating its fourth tour, The Landmark Revelation Society. She kept a video

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Gerald Elias

A graduate of Yale, Gerald Elias has been a Boston Symphony violinist, Associate Concertmaster of the Utah Symphony since 1988, Adjunct Professor of Music at the University of Utah, first violinist of the Abramyan String Quartet, and Music Director of the Vivaldi Candlelight concert series.

His novels include Devil's Trill, Danse Macabre, Death and the Maiden, and the recently

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Margot Livesey

Margot Livesey's first book, a collection of stories called Learning By Heart, was published by Penguin Canada in 1986. Since then she has published seven novels, including: Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona, and The House on Fortune Street.

Her latest novel is The Flight of Gemma Hardy.

From her Q & A with Steven Wingate at Fiction Writers Review

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Jeffrey Siger

The Greek Press called Jeffrey Siger's work “prophetic,” Eurocrime described him as a “very gifted American author...on a par with other American authors such as Joseph Wambaugh or Ed McBain,” and the City of San Francisco awarded him its Certificate of Honor citing that his “acclaimed books have not only explored modern Greek society and its ancient roots but have inspired political change

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Joshua Henkin

Joshua Henkin's new novel is The World Without You.

From his Q & A with Barbara Chai at the Speakeasy blog:
In “The World Without You,” the setting is the Berkshires, but all of the characters are very shaped by New York City. Is New York an invisible character?

I think it is. All three of my books feel to me like very New York-centric books. Even though this book is based in the Berkshires,

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Eoin Colfer

Eoin Colfer is a former elementary school teacher whose Artemis Fowl series has become an international bestseller. The new novel in the series is Artemis Fowl: The Last Guardian.

From his Q & A with Boyd Tonkin at the Independent.
Choose a favourite author and say why you admire him/her

William Boyd... He expresses the inner working of the human mind so beautifully, it makes me want to quit.

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Richard Ford

Richard Ford's new novel is Canada.

From his Q & A with Tim Adams at the Guardian:
In the book, Canada becomes a sort of promised land, a refuge. There is a line characters cling to: "Canada was better than America and everyone knew that - except Americans." Is that how it feels to you?

I never had much conceptual idea of Canada being better. But whenever I go there, I feel this fierce sense of

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Elaine Pagels

Elaine Pagels earned a B.A. in history and an M.A. in classical studies at Stanford, and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. She is the author of Adam, Eve, and the Serpent; The Origin of Satan; and The Gnostic Gospels, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and National Book Award. Her latest book is Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation.

From

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Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh's books include The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, and Sea of Poppies.

From his May 2012 Q & A at the Independent:
Choose a favourite author, and say why you admire her/him

My favourite authors change week to week. I've just finished a reading Philip Hensher's 'Scenes from Early Life', about his partner's childhood. It is distantly like Gertrude Stein's book on Alice B

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William Faulkner

In 1956 Jean Stein interviewed William Faulkner for The Paris Review. The start of that interview:
INTERVIEWER
Mr. Faulkner, you were saying a while ago that you don't like interviews.

WILLIAM FAULKNER
The reason I don't like interviews is that I seem to react violently to personal questions. If the questions are about the work, I try to answer them. When they are about me, I may answer or I

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John Irving

From John Irving's Q & A with Athena McKenzie about his twelfth novel, Last Night in Twisted River:Is it true that a Dylan song was the beginning idea for this novel? How?

No, it’s not true. I had been thinking of a story about a cook and his son for more than 15 years. I knew it began in a northern New England logging camp; I knew it was a fugitive novel, that both father and son were on the

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Stephen King

Wallace Stroby interviewed Stephen King for Writer's Digest magazine in 1991.

Part of the Q & A:

STROBY: C.S. Forester, the British writer, once described his story-developing process as dropping assorted objects into the water of his subconscious and letting them sit there for weeks or months or years. Eventually, he said, he would feel them merge and meld and take some sort of shape until an

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Elizabeth Zelvin

Elizabeth Zelvin is a New York psychotherapist, a three-time Agatha Award nominee, and author of the mystery series featuring recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler, starting with Death Will Get You Sober. The third book, Death Will Extend Your Vacation, is now out, and “Death Will Tank Your Fish” was a 2011 Derringer Award nominee for Best Short Story.

From Zelvin's Q & A with The Stiletto Gang:

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Meg Howrey

Meg Howrey was a professional dancer and actress. Her new novel is The Cranes Dance.

From her Q & A with Barbara Chai for the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog:
Did you draw upon your own experience in the ballet world for “The Cranes Dance”?

I drew on some personal experience, of course, although much more so on things and people I observed. The ballet company in the novel is fictional.

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Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl's books include A Romantic Education, Virgin Time, Blue Arabesque, and The Florist’s Daughter, which received the Minnesota Book Award among many other honors.

From her ShootingStar* interview with Maureen Vance:

What writing do you consider to be of quality? What in other people’s writing strikes you, or what sort of writing do you like most to read?

I read in all the genres: I

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Jill Dawson

Jill Dawson is an award-winning poet and the author of several novels, including Fred and Edie, which was short-listed for the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize, and Lucky Bunny.

From her Q & A at the Guardian:
How did you come to write Lucky Bunny?

I've long been interested in writing about the appeal of risk-taking, destructive behaviours such as relationships with dangerous men.

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David Crystal

David Crystal is Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor. In 1995, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire for services to the English language. His latest book is The Story of English in 100 Words.

From the author's Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: Among languages, what makes English stand apart? What can it do that most other

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Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon is the author of the international bestseller, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction and the Whitbread Book of the Year award; and the New York Times bestseller A Spot of Bother. In addition to The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and The Village Under the Sea, a collection of poetry, Haddon has also written and

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David Eagleman

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action as well as the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. His scientific research has been published in journals from Science to Nature, and his neuroscience books include Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia, Why the Net Matters, Live-Wired, and the newly

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Alice Kaplan

Alice Kaplan is the author of French Lessons: A Memoir, The Collaborator, and The Interpreter, and the translator of OK, Joe. Her books have been twice nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, once for the National Book Award, and she is a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.She holds the John M. Musser chair in French literature at Yale.

Her new book is Dreaming in French:

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Yvvette Edwards

Yvvette Edwards is the author of A Cupboard Full of Coats, her highly acclaimed first novel.

From her Q & A at the Man Booker Prize site:
Was it always your ambition to be a writer?

I have always written. My two equal passions are reading and writing, always have been. I don't think I ever thought that writing for a living was realistic or achievable, but it has always been a dream and a hobby

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Lyndsay Faye

Lyndsay Faye is the author of critically acclaimed Dust and Shadow and the newly released The Gods of Gotham.

From her Q & A with novelist Michael Connelly:
Michael Connelly: I think the first question is about the challenge you gave yourself with this book. Re-creating New York City circa 1845. The question I ask is, Why then? But what I am really asking is why you took the difficult path. Why

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Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel is the bestselling author of numerous novels, including Wolf Hall, which won the 2009 Man Booker Prize, and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.

From her Q & A with Susan Bordo:

SB: We all know that any work of imagination has to go beyond the recorded facts. But do you think that there is a point at which historical fiction can go too far? What historical standards do you hold

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Catherine Hakim

Catherine Hakim is a social scientist and a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Policy Studies, London. Her publications include over 100 papers published in British, European and American refereed academic journals and edited collections, four textbooks, and over a dozen books and monographs on the labour market, changing patterns of employment and working time, women’s employment

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Veronica Roth

Veronica Roth is the New York Times bestselling author of Divergent and Insurgent, the first two books in a trilogy that she began writing while still a college student.

From her Q & A with the Jacket Copy blog:

Jacket Copy: "The Hunger Games," "Divergent" and dozens of other titles in this burgeoning dystopian genre showcase strong female protagonists. Do you see a new shape of feminism

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Michael Sims

Michael Sims is the editor of The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories.

From his Q & A with Lenny Picker at Publishers Weekly:
How did you come to be such a voracious reader?

I grew up in rural Tennessee. There were no bookstores in the town, but the school had a little library and the town had a little library, each with a patient and enthusiastic librarian,

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Tom Piccirilli

Tom Piccirilli is the award-winning author of Shadow Season, The Cold Spot, The Coldest Mile, A Choir of Ill Children, and many other titles. He’s won two International Thriller Writers Awards and four Bram Stoker Awards, as well as having been nominated for the Edgar, the World Fantasy Award, the Macavity, and Le Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire. His new novel is The Last Kind Words.

From

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Margaret George

Margaret George's historical novels include Mary, Called Magdalene.

From her Q & A about the book at her publisher's website:
The Bible hardly mentions Mary Magdalene. What other primary sources did you turn to for information on this historical figure? How much did you rely on the Gnostic Gospels, specifically the Gospel of Mary?

Scanty though they are, the four canonical gospels remain our

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Roger Smith

Roger Smith's thrillers Dust Devils, Wake Up Dead and Mixed Blood are published in seven languages and two are in development as movies in the U.S. His books have won the Deutscher Krimi Preis (German Crime Fiction Award) and been nominated for Spinetingler Magazine Best Novel awards. His novella, Ishmael Toffee, is available and a fourth novel, Capture, will be out in mid-2012.

From his Q &

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Paul Ingrassia

Paul Ingrassia won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 (with Joseph B. White) for reporting on management crises at General Motors. He is the author of Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry’s Road from Glory to Disaster and the newly released Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars.

Highlights from his May 2012 NPR interview:

On what the Chevy Corvette represented in

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Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His debut story collection, Drown was a national bestseller and won numerous awards. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao “a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible

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Pam Houston

Pam Houston divides her time between her ranch in Colorado and the University of California at Davis, where she is director of the Creative Writing Program. She has been a frequent contributor to O, The Oprah Magazine, and her writing appears regularly in More and other publications. She in the author of the best-selling Cowboys Are My Weakness.

Houston's new novel is Contents May

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Paul French

Paul French's new book is Midnight in Peking.  It is the true-crime tale of the murder of a British diplomat's daughter in Peking just before World War II.

From his Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: What was happening in Peking – now Beijing – in early 1937, when the young woman was so viciously murdered?

A: This was absolutely the last gasp of old China. The

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Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark (1 February 1918 – 13 April 2006)[1] was an award-winning Scottish novelist. Her many novels include Memento Mori (1959), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), and A Far Cry From Kensington (1988).

From the transcript of an interview Spark did with the BBC:
I want to talk about the emphasis I think you've always put on experience and the search for

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Melinda Moustakis

Melinda Moustakis is the author of Bear Down, Bear North, a collection of connected short stories set in rural Alaska.

From her interview with the Kenyon Review:KR: What internal or external factors have the biggest influence on your creative process?

MM: I know that I learned to write voice and dialogue from listening to my uncle and his fishing buddies tell fishing stories on the river.

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Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel is the bestselling author of numerous novels, including Wolf Hall, which won the 2009 Man Booker Prize, and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.

From her Q & A with Alexandra Alter at the Wall Street Journal:

In developing Thomas Cromwell as a sympathetic and in many ways admirable and influential figure, you’re going against the grain of how he’s historically been portrayed by

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Edward O. Wilson

Edward O. Wilson, one of the world’s preeminent biologists, is the author of more than twenty-five books, including Sociobiology, the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Ants, and the best-selling novel Anthill. His latest book is The Social Conquest of Earth. A professor emeritus at Harvard University, he lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.

From Wilson's Q & A with Liz Else:
You've recently been involved

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Tiffany Baker

Tiffany Baker has a graduate degree in creative writing from UC Irvine and a PhD in Victorian literature.

Her latest novel is The Gilly Salt Sisters.

From her Q & A at The Debutante Ball:
Talk about one book that made an impact on you:

I first read Jane Eyre when I was nine years old, and at various points in my life, I’ve gone back to read it again. When I was kid, I was mesmerized by Jane’s

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Megan Mayhew Bergman

Megan Mayhew Bergman grew up in Rocky Mount, North Carolina and attended Wake Forest University. She has graduate degrees from Duke University and Bennington College. Her stories have appeared in the 2010 New Stories from the South anthology, Ploughshares, Oxford American, One Story, Narrative, PEN American, The Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, Greensboro Review, and elsewhere.

Her new

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Chad Harbach

Chad Harbach is the author of the novel The Art of Fielding.

From his Q & A with Noah Charney at The Daily Beast:
Do you follow a favorite baseball team, and any specific player?

I’ve been a Brewers fan since birth. My favorite player is the great Vinny Rottino.

What is your earliest baseball memory?

My earliest memory of playing (and maybe my earliest memory, period) is of my dad pitching me

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Alan Gilbert

Alan Gilbert is a John Evans Professor in the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. He is the author of Marx’s Politics: Communists and Citizens, Democratic Individuality, and Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy?

His new book is Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence.

From Gilbert's Q & A at 3:AM Magazine:
3:

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William Dietrich

William (Bill) Dietrich's historical and action thrillers have been translated into 28 languages. Dietrich is also a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, nonfiction author, and college professor of environmental journalism. He has won the Washington Governor Writer's Award and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award.

His Ethan Gage Adventures feature an imperfect American adventurer who is

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Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins is co-author (with the late Mickey Spillane) of Lady, Go Die!

From his Q & A with J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet:

J. Kingston Pierce: In an opening note in Lady, Go Die!, you explain that you didn’t immediately recognize this novel as Spillane’s second, unfinished book, but thought that it was an early version of his 1966 Hammer work, The Twisted Thing. How long did it

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Julianna Baggott

Critically acclaimed, bestselling author Julianna Baggott also writes under the pen names Bridget Asher and N.E. Bode. She has published seventeen books over the last ten years.

After receiving her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Baggott published her first novel, Girl Talk, which was a national bestseller and was quickly followed by Boston Globe bestseller The Miss

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Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde (a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize), and the New York Times bestsellers The Falls (winner of the 2005 Prix Femina

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John Irving

John Irving's latest novel is In One Person.

From his Q & A with Joy Shan at the Yale Daily News:
Q. You come from an academic background: college and then an MFA program at the University of Iowa. What made you decide to get an MFA instead of just jumping into writing?

A. I think the choice to go to an MFA program in creative writing was guided by the fact that I was a very young father. I

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Alex Grecian

After leaving a career in advertising, working on accounts that included Harley-Davidson and The Great American Smokeout, Alex Grecian returned to his first love: writing fiction. He created the long-running and critically acclaimed graphic novel series Proof, which NPR named one of the best books of 2009. The series stars John “Proof” Prufock, a special-agent-sasquatch.

One of the Proof

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Alex Gilvarry

Alex Gilvarry is a native of Staten Island, New York. He has been a Norman Mailer Fellow and has written for The Paris Review, among other publications. He is the founding editor of the website Tottenville Review, a book review collaborative.

From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant is his debut novel.

From Gilvarry's Q & A with Doretta Lau for the Asia Wall Street Journal:
What inspired you

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Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett is the author of You Are Not A Stranger Here, a short story collection, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and won the PEN/Winship Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Zoetrope, and Best American Short Stories as well as National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts.

His debut novel Union Atlantic was published in 2010.

From

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Hesh Kestin

Hesh Kestin is a recovering foreign correspondent who reported on local wars, global business and exotic mayhem in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for such publications as Forbes, Newsday and the Jerusalem Post, and wrote for US magazines as diverse as Playboy and Inc.

His novel The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats is Stephen King’s recommended read for World Book Night.

From Kestin's Q & A with

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Gary Krist

Gary Krist's new book is City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago.

From his Q & A with Julie Zarlenga of the Gapers Block Book Club:

In the early 1900's things were changing across America as a whole. Why did you choose Chicago as a focus for this change?

I'm really interested in big cities and how they change over time, how they evolve, because it's always

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Anne Enright

Anne Enright's novels include The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, and The Forgotten Waltz. She lives in Dublin, Ireland.

From her Q & A at the Independent:

Choose a favourite author, and say why you admire her/him

Alice Munro. It's difficult to sum up why in one sentence. She's the kind of writer who lasts for a lifetime. I've been reading her for 30 years and she is as

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Edward Humes

From a Q & A with Edward Humes, author of Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, at Frugalista:
You always hear people talk about recycling, but that has its own set of issues. Is recycling a sham? Tell us more about “refusing” trend.

Recycling is no sham — it’s an important piece of the war on waste. It’s just not the best piece. Recycling itself creates waste — it’s a kind of last resort

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Lyndsay Faye

The beginnings of the New York City Police Department in 1845 are at the heart of Lyndsay Faye’s series debut, The Gods of Gotham.

From her Q & A with Lenny Picker at Publishers Weekly:

Where did this book come from?

I began with the concept of day one, cop one—the very first New York City police officer on his first day on the job. I knew nothing about the topic, and thus rolled up my sleeves

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Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick is the author of the novel Foreign Bodies and numerous other acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Man Booker International Prize. Her stories have won four O. Henry first prizes.

From her April 2012 Q & A at the Guardian:

How did you come to write Foreign Bodies?

A

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Jassy Mackenzie

Jassy Mackenzie's third South African crime thriller featuring P.I. Jade de Jong is The Fallen.

From her Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:

Q: For people who haven't read your books, what can you tell us about your main character, private investigator Jade de Jong?

A: Although she'd been away for 10 years in the first book, she is quintessentially a South African. She

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Wiley Cash

Wiley Cash is from western North Carolina. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and teaches English at Bethany College.

His stories have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Roanoke Review and The Carolina Quarterly.

Cash's first novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, is now out from William Morrow.

From his Q & A with Julianna Baggott:
What kind of child were you,

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Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel is the bestselling author of numerous novels, including Wolf Hall, which won the 2009 Man Booker Prize, and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.

From her Q & A with Foyles:
What is it about this period of history, and Thomas Cromwell in particular, that fascinates you?

The reign of Henry VII is so gruesomely fascinating that it's irresistible material for novelists and dramatists,

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Alan Ehrenhalt

Alan Ehrenhalt was the executive editor of Governing magazine from 1990 to 2009. His new book is The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City.

From Ehrenhalt's Q &A with Will Doig at Salon:
The revitalization of cities seemed to come out of nowhere, but you write that it was actually the result of deliberate efforts and policies. For instance, Chicago laid the groundwork for a

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Jerrold Seigel

From a Q & A with Jerrold Seigel, author of Modernity and Bourgeois Life: Society, Politics, and Culture in England, France and Germany since 1750:
What inspired you to research this subject?

I've long thought that making sense of the relationship between modernity and bourgeois life is crucial to understanding how the world we live in came about, how it differs from the past forms of life out

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Madeline Miller

Madeline Miller grew up in Philadelphia, has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Latin and Ancient Greek from Brown University, and has been teaching both languages for the past nine years. She has also studied at the Yale School of Drama, specializing in adapting classical tales for a modern audience. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Miller's first novel is The Song of Achilles.

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Beatriz Williams

Beatriz Williams is the author of the new novel, Overseas.

From her Q & A with Martha Schulman at Publishers Weekly:
You say the novel combines the two worlds you know best, Wall Street and the British experience in WWI. How did you come to know early 20th-century Britain?

I’ve been studying it all my adult life, starting from when I read Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. The war was such an

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Dan Barden

Dan Barden is the author of the novels John Wayne and The Next Right Thing.

From his Q & A with Jennifer Haupt:
Jennifer Haupt: I love how you wove in the themes of recovery in your novel. How did you go about your research?

Dan Barden: I am an alcoholic who doesn’t drink. I’m an alcoholic in recovery. I hate the way that sounds, but there’s no better way to describe it. I drank way too much

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