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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