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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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, &

Read More

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,

Read More

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

Read More

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.
* * *

Which fictional character most

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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 –

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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,

Read More