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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