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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