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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