Amy Shearn

Amy Shearn's first novel, How Far Is the Ocean from Here, was published in 2008. Her latest novel is The Mermaid of Brooklyn.

From the author's Q & A at Traveling With T:Amy, how did the idea of The Mermaid of Brooklyn happen?

I was shopping with my grandmother for shoes to wear at my wedding when she told me the story of how a pair of shoes saved my great-grandmother’s life. My

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Virginia Morell

Virginia Morell's latest book is Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures.

From her Q & A with Ed Battistella at Welcome to Literary Ashland:EB: You’ve written about Africa’s natural treasures, about the Nile, and about the Leakey family. What brought you to the idea of animal minds?

VM: For my biography about the fossil-hunting Leakey family, I traveled to Tanzania to

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Alissa Nutting

Alissa Nutting's new novel is Tampa.

From her Q & A with Roxane Gay at The Daily Beast:
Are you nervous about this book in wide release or am I projecting?

Yes … realizing I’m running low on dish soap is enough to give me a panic attack, so you can imagine what the publication of my explicit novel about a taboo-breaking sexual psychopath does to my heart rate. It’s inevitable that the book

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Rhonda Riley

Rhonda Riley is a graduate of the creative writing program at the University of Florida.

Her recently released debut novel is The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope.

From the author's Q & A with Jaime Boler:
JB: Please describe The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope in ten words or less.

RR: Ten words! Okay, here goes: A woman finds a unique stranger who changes her world.

JB: How did you come up with the

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Tiffany Hawk

Tiffany Hawk is writer living near Washington D.C. whose work has appeared in such places as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, National Geographic Traveler and on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Her debut novel, Love Me Anyway, is a darkly funny look into the emotional heart of the airline industry, with all its allure, loneliness, and ever-present temptations.

From the author's Q &

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Reza Aslan

Reza Aslan is the author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. From his Q & A with Christopher John Farley for the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog:
In the book you say that Jesus was “very likely” illiterate, and there’s “no reason to think” he could read or write. But a lot of Biblical scholars disagree. In Luke 4:16, we see Jesus reading. [“And he came to Nazareth, where he

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Pawan Dhingra

The sociologist Pawan Dhingra is the author of Life Behind The Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream.

From the author's 2012 conversation with Aarti Virani for the Wall Street Journal’s India Real Time:WSJ: What sparked your interest in this particular demographic?

Mr. Dhingra: At first, I was caught by the numbers of it all: 40% of all motels in the United States are

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Laura Lippman

Laura Lippman's latest novel is And When She Was Good.

From her Q & A at Robb Cadigan's blog:
Hi Laura. Thanks for being here. Why don’t we start off with this: When did you know you wanted to be a writer? When did you know you were one?

Laura: I was four when I first attempted to write a book, I was 12 when I made a run at it, but I think I knew I was going to be a writer when I took some

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Jessica Anya Blau

Jessica Anya Blau's books include the nationally bestselling novel The Summer of Naked Swim Parties and the critically acclaimed Drinking Closer to Home.

Her new novel is The Wonder Bread Summer.

From the author's Q & A with Greg Olear at the Huffington Post:The opening scene of The Wonder Bread Summer takes place in the dressing room of a dress shop, when a coked-up coed is made to display her

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Adelle Waldman

Adelle Waldman’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, The Village Voice and other publications. She worked as a reporter at the New Haven Register and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal’s website before turning to fiction.

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is her first novel.

From

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Caroline Leavitt

Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You, which sold to six countries, went into five printings, and was a San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick, a Costco "Pennie's Pick" and a NAIBA bestseller. Pictures of You is also a USA Today ebook bestseller and is on the Best Books of 2011 List from the San Francisco Chronicle, Providence Journal, Kirkus Reviews and Bookmarks

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Paul Yoon

Paul Yoon's new novel is Snow Hunters.

From a Q & A at the publisher's website:You were born in New York City in 1980. How did you prepare to recreate the setting in post-war Brazil that your Korean protagonist, Yohan, inhabits in Snow Hunters?

Colum McCann once said that he’s always interested in writing about “the other.” William Trevor said something similar when he was asked why he often

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Matthew Specktor

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, as well as a nonfiction book about the motion picture The Sting. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, The Believer, Tin House, Black Clock, and Salon.com, among other publications. He is a senior editor and founding member of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

From Specktor's Q

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Philippa Gregory

Philippa Gregory, whose series of novels based on the Wars of the Roses has been adapted into the BBC television drama The White Queen. Her latest book in the series is The White Princess.

From her Q & A with Noah Charney for The Daily Beast:
The White Queen has recently appeared as a television series. Tell me about how that particular book was chosen and what the process of preparing the

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Ed Gorman

Ed Gorman's latest novel is Flashpoint.

From his Q & A with J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet:
JKP: Like your fellow mystery writers Dorothy L. Sayers and Philip Kerr, you started out doing advertising work. Can you tell us what you did in that field?

EG: I started out as a copywriter in Des Moines, then worked by phone and mail for a small group in Chicago, then went back to Cedar Rapids

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Stephen King

Stephen King's new novel, Doctor Sleep, will be published in September by Scribner. The author calls it a "return to balls-to-the-wall, keep-the-lights-on horror." Doctor Sleep, the sequel to 1977's The Shining, catches up with the now middle-aged Dan Torrance and finds him working at a hospice where he uses his innate supernatural powers to ease the suffering of the dying.

From King's Q & A

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Richard Lange

Richard Lange is the author of the story collection Dead Boys, which received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the novel This Wicked World. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2004 and 2011. He lives in Los Angeles.

Lange's latest novel is Angel Baby.

From his conversation with George Pelecanos

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Leighton Gage

Leighton Gage’s books are crime novels set in Brazil. The author has lived in Australia, Europe, and South America and traveled widely in Asia and Africa. He visited Spain in the time of Franco, Portugal in the time of Salazar, South Africa in the time of apartheid, Chile in the time of Pinochet, Argentina in the time of the junta, Prague, East Germany, and Yugoslavia under the

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Gerard Jones

Gerard Jones is the author of Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book.

From his Q & A with Randy Dotinga for the Christian Science Monitor:Q: How did comic books first come into being?

A: They came out of the newspaper comic strips, which were mostly humor along with things like Tarzan and Dick Tracy.

The first comic books were just reprints of the newspaper comics,

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Karen E. Bender

Karen E. Bender is the author of the novel Like Normal People, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.

A Town of Empty Rooms, her second novel, was published earlier this year.

From the author's Q & A with David Ulin for the Los Angeles Times:“A Town of Empty Rooms” takes place in 2002, a

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James Crumley

From Laura Lippman's interview with James Crumley for Crimespree, issue 15 November 2006:
LL: When did you discover a love of books, when did you first think about becoming a writer?

JC: I taught myself to read. I started my first novel when I was about twelve. It was a detective novel, written under the influence of Mickey Spillane books that my aunts who were my age had hidden under their

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Susan Bordo

Susan Bordo, Otis A. Singletary Professor in the Humanities at University of Kentucky, is the author of Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, a book that is still widely read and assigned in classes today. During speaking tours for that book, she encountered many young men who asked, "What about us?" The result was The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in

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Robert J. Sawyer

Robert J. Sawyer has been called “the dean of Canadian science fiction” by The Ottawa Citizen.

His latest novel is Red Planet Blues.

From Sawyer's Q & A with Michael A. Ventrella:VENTRELLA: The big news is that your 22nd novel RED PLANET BLUES has just been released. It’s a detective novel set on Mars done in the noir style, first person and everything. What made you want to write this?

ROBERT

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Mary Simses

Mary Simses grew up in Connecticut and spent much of her life in the Northeast, where she attended college and law school. As a child she loved to write stories, design covers for them, and staple them into books. Later, careers in journalism and law took priority and creative writing slipped away, until she enrolled in an evening fiction writing class at a local university and was hooked

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Jessica Brockmole

Jessica Brockmole's new novel is Letters from Skye.

From her Q & A with Sarah Johnson at Historical Novel Society:SJ: When I first read about the premise for Letters from Skye, about an American college student who sends a fan letter to a Scottish poet in 1912, I made the assumption that the student was female and the author male – and was actually very pleased to be wrong. How did you come up

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Adam Mitzner

Adam Mitzner is the author of A Conflict of Interest and A Case of Redemption.

From his Q & A at My Bookish Ways:Obviously, your experience as a lawyer gives you tons of inside info for your novels, but did you have to do any other research for A Case of Redemption?

I have handled criminal cases, but never a murder case. As a result, I consulted with a close friend (the same law school roommate

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Kim McLarin

Kim McLarin is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Taming It Down (1999), Meeting of the Waters (2001), and Jump at the Sun (2006), all published by William Morrow. McLarin is also co-author of the memoir Growing Up X with Ilyasah Shabazz. Jump at the Sun was chosen as a 2007 Fiction Honor Book by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. The novel was also nominated for a Hurston-Wright

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Ronlyn Domingue

Ronlyn Domingue is the author of the newly released The Mapmaker’s War. Its sequel, The Chronicle of Secret Riven, is forthcoming in 2014. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, The Mercy of Thin Air, was published in ten languages. Her writing has appeared in The Beautiful Anthology (TNB Books), New England Review, The Independent (UK), and Shambhala Sun, as well as on mindful.org and The Nervous

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Judith Flanders

From Lenny Picker's Publishers Weekly Q & A with Judith Flanders about her new book, The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime:
What prompted you to write this book?

I was interested in how the conditions of the 19th century led to the prolifer­ation of interest in murder and how it transformed crimes into entertain­ment. Britain was

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Virginia Morell

Virginia Morell's latest book is Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures.

From her Q & A with Aaron Scott at Portland Monthly:Culturephile: You take the reader on quite a voyage across the planet and through the animal kingdom. What of the findings you came across most surprised you?

Virginia Morell: It’s difficult to choose just one. The ants were surprising on many

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James Thompson

With his first internationally published novel, Snow Angels, James Thompson proved himself Finland’s best and most popular representative in the rise of Nordic noir. It was selected as one of Booklist’s Best Crime Novel Debuts of the Year and nominated for an Edgar Award, an Anthony Award, and a Strand Critics Award. His novel, Lucifer’s Tears, has received critical acclaim from all

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Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong grew up deep in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, then escaped to New York to live in a succession of very small apartments and write about pop culture. In the process, she became a feminist, a Buddhist, and the singer/guitarist in an amateur rock band. She also spent a decade on staff at Entertainment Weekly, cofounded SexyFeminist.com, and now writes for

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Matthew Goodman

Matthew Goodman's nonfiction books include The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York and Jewish Food: The World at Table. The recipient of two MacDowell fellowships and one Yaddo fellowship, he has taught creative writing at numerous universities and workshops. He lives in Brooklyn, New York

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Teddy Wayne

Teddy Wayne, the author of Kapitoil, is the winner of a 2011 Whiting Writers’ Award and a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He writes regularly for The New Yorker, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere.

About his latest novel, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine:Megastar Jonny Valentine, eleven-year-old icon of

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Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin is one of the world’s most accomplished and well-known adults with autism. She is a professor at Colorado State University and the author of several best-selling books, which have sold more than a million copies. The HBO movie based on her life, starring Claire Danes, received seven Emmy Awards. Her latest book is The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum.

From Grandin's Q

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Robert Kolker

Robert Kolker's new book is Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery.

From his Q & A at True Crime Diary:When did [Lost Girls] seem like a book to you?

I resisted thinking about that until the story came out. Then I looked at it, and it was a cover story. I write a lot about crime, but probably because of where I work, I’m encouraged to write about stories that have some sort of second issue

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Rosamund Lupton

Rosamund Lupton is the author of Sister.

From her Q & A about the novel with Mitzi Brunsdale for Publishers Weekly:How much did your own family relationships affect your writing of Sister?

My bond with my own sister certainly has been exceptional, and I consider it a gift, the kind you receive whether you deserve it or not. So I really, really wanted to explore this relationship, and when my

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Chris Kluwe

Chris Kluwe is a NFL punter and an active promoter of equal rights for all Americans.

His new book is Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities.

From his Q & A with Alexandra Alter for the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog:
This isn’t at all a typical book for a professional athlete to write. How did it come about?

I had a bunch of

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Lisa Brackmann

Lisa Brackmann has worked as a motion picture executive and an issues researcher in a presidential campaign. A southern California native, she currently lives in Venice, California. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Rock Paper Tiger, set on the fringes of the Chinese art world, made several “Best of 2010″ lists, including Amazon’s Top 100 Novels and Top 10 Mystery/Thrillers, and was

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Stephen Kiernan

Stephen Kiernan's new novel is The Curiosity.

From his Q & A with Tim Powers at Amazon.com:Tim Powers: Where did you get the initial idea for the book?

Stephen P. Kiernan: I heard a song by James Taylor and thought it would make a good novel. But I stewed on the idea for 18 years, because it had a missing ingredient I couldn’t identify. Then I was biking in Italy with two writer friends, and

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Lori Nelson Spielman

Lori Nelson Spielman's new, debut novel is The Life List.

From her Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:
CL: I read that the idea for your novel came from a life list you’d written at age 14. Can you tell us some of the things on your life list?

LNS: I wish I could say my list was comprised of noble pursuits and daring adventures. Truth is, most of my wishes were humble and conventional, like having

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Rebecca Lee

Rebecca Lee's new book is Bobcat and Other Stories.

From her Q & A with Matthew McAlister for Publishers Weekly:Many of these stories focus on the ways we settle our lives into the expectations of others. What is it about settling that interests you?

I love that question. I love even the word “settle.” I used the word “settlers” as the title for the last story in my collection because the word

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Lisa-ann Gershwin

From a Q & A at The Daily Beast with Lisa-ann Gershwin, author of Stung!:
What's your big idea?

Jellyfish, of all strange things, are turning out to be the unexpected and unwanted consequences of human impacts on our oceans. Jellyfish form large populations (called blooms) as a normal part of their life cycle, but our actions in the name of progress are giving them the perfect conditions to do

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Ted Kosmatka

Ted Kosmatka is the author of the novels The Games and the recently released Prophet of Bones.

From Kosmatka's Q & A with Dave Truesdale for The SF Site:Paul Carlsson [the protagonist in Prophet of Bones] is using science as a benign tool to reveal Truth. On the other hand, there is the wealthy but brilliant scientist Martial Johansson who figures darkly in the story in several ways I don't want

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Jennifer Zobair

Jennifer Zobair grew up in Iowa and attended Smith College and Georgetown Law School. She has practiced corporate and immigration law and as a convert to Islam, has been a strong advocate for Muslim women's rights. Zobair lives with her husband and three children outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

Her new novel is Painted Hands.

From the author's Q & A at Drey's Library:drey: Tell us about

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Alafair Burke

Alafair Burke's novels include “two power house series” (Sun-Sentinel) that have earned her a reputation for creating strong, believable, and eminently likable female characters, such as NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher and Portland Deputy District Attorney Samantha Kincaid.

Burke's new novel If You Were Here features former prosecutor turned journalist McKenna Jordan.

From the author's Q & A

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Cheryl Strayed

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Torch and the memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.

From Strayed's Q & A with Marjorie Kehe at the Christian Science Monitor:What was the best gift the trail gave you?

The greatest gift was a sense of my own resilience. By that I mean something deeper than what confidence is. When we feel confident I think

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Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker's 2011 book is The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

From his Q & A with Clint Witchalls at the Independent:Clint Witchalls: You say that, over the centuries, violence has been declining, yet most people would view the last century, with its pogroms, death camps and nuclear bombs, as the most violent century. Why was it not?

Steven Pinker: You can't say that

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Ru Freeman

Ru Freeman's new novel is On Sal Mal Lane.

From her Q & A with Tania James at Fiction Writers Review:Tania James: I suspect your family was a literary one. Was writing encouraged by your parents? What books were you drawn to in your youth?

Ru Freeman: I grew up with the idea that words—read, written, uttered aloud—were important. They were the meat, muscles, bones of persuasion. Everything

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Nan Marino

Nan Marino is the author of Neil Armstrong Is My Uncle & Other Lies Muscle Man McGinty Told Me, which received a SCBWI Golden Kite Honor and was featured on the Bank Street Best Books and the New York Public Library 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing.

Her latest book is Hiding Out at the Pancake Palace.

From Marino's Q & A with Brittney Breakey at Author Turf:How did you choose the genre you

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A. X. Ahmad

A.X. Ahmad was raised in India, educated at Vassar College and M.I.T., and has worked internationally as an architect. His short stories have been published in literary magazines, and he’s been listed in Best American Essays. The Caretaker is his first novel, to be followed by Bollywood Taxi next year. He lives in Washington, D.C.

From the author's conversation with Aarti Virani for

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Caroline Leavitt

Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You, which sold to six countries, went into five printings, and was a San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick, a Costco "Pennie's Pick" and a NAIBA bestseller. Pictures of You is also a USA Today ebook bestseller and is on the Best Books of 2011 List from the San Francisco Chronicle, Providence Journal, Kirkus Reviews and Bookmarks

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George R.R. Martin

George R.R. Martin's best-selling fantasy series "A Song of Ice and Fire" is the basis for the HBO series Game of Thrones.

From his Q & A with Charlie Jane Anders for io9:One of the things that strikes me in the recent books is, there'll be a major turning point for a character, and then you realize it's been building for hundreds of pages. Do you always plan these huge events and then find ways

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Matt Bell

Matt Bell’s new, debut novel is In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods.

From his Q & A with Andrew Ervin on the Tin House blog:Andrew Ervin: What impresses me the most about In the House is the immersive experience you’ve created. The first-person voice carries a mythic or timeless quality, and it’s sustained beautifully for hundreds of pages. Tell me how you found that and

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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 2012 memoir, Too Good to Be True.

From the author's Q & A with Kathy Sweeney for the Observer:Your

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Shohreh Aghdashloo

Shohreh Aghdashloo won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress for HBO's House of Saddam and was the first Iranian actress ever to be nominated for an Academy Award, for her role in House of Sand and Fog. She has starred in the Fox series 24 and has been featured in a number of television shows and films. Born and raised in Tehran, she now lives in Los Angeles. Her new memoir is The

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Patricia Bracewell

Patricia Bracewell grew up in California where she taught literature and composition before embarking upon a writing career.

Her recently released debut novel is Shadow on the Crown.

From the author's Q & A with Nancy Bilyeau at A Bloody Good Read:
NB: For you, what is the line between fiction and fact? Are there fictional characters in Shadow on the Crown?

PB: There are fictional characters

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Susan Bordo

Susan Bordo, Otis A. Singletary Professor in the Humanities at University of Kentucky, is the author of Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, a book that is still widely read and assigned in classes today. During speaking tours for that book, she encountered many young men who asked, "What about us?" The result was The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private

Read More

Emily Anthes

Emily Anthes is a science journalist and author. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Scientific American, Psychology Today, BBC Future, SEED, Discover, Popular Science, Slate, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere. Her new book, Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts, was published in March 2013 by Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She is also the

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Karen Brown

Karen Brown is the author of Little Sinners and Other Stories, which was named a Best Book of 2012 by Publishers Weekly, and Pins and Needles: Stories, which was the recipient of AWP’s Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. Her new novel is The Longings of Wayward Girls.

From Brown's Q & A  with writer Caroline Leavitt:
So much of The Longings of Wayward Girls (great title, by the way) is about

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Michael Pocalyko

Michael Pocalyko's new novel is The Navigator.

From his Q & A with J. N. Duncan at The Big Thrill:You touch on psychological, global-business, and political issues in your story. Which of these do you find most compelling as a writer?

No contest. The psychological issues are the most compelling. Without giving away any spoilers, there is an unusual literary convention that I’ve employed in

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Joanna Hershon

Joanna Hershon is the author of Swimming, The Outside of August, and The German Bride. Her writing has appeared in One Story, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Post Road, the literary anthology Brooklyn Was Mine, and was shortlisted for the 2007 O. Henry Prize Stories.

Her new novel is A Dual Inheritance.

From Hershon's Q & A with Jen Ortiz

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Claire Messud

Claire Messud's new novel is The Woman Upstairs.

From the author's Q & A with Annasue McCleave Wilson for Publishers Weekly:
Your characters struggle to figure out who they are in the face of their families and events over which they have no control. What are we to make of Nora Eldridge, the betrayed middle-aged woman of your new novel? Because she is angry, really angry.

As a writer, I

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A. X. Ahmad

A.X. Ahmad was raised in India, educated at Vassar College and M.I.T., and has worked internationally as an architect. His short stories have been published in literary magazines, and he’s been listed in Best American Essays. The Caretaker is his first novel, to be followed by Bollywood Taxi next year. He lives in Washington, D.C.

From the author's conversation with Shivani Vora for the

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Stephanie Hepburn

From a Q & A with Stephanie Hepburn about her new book, Human Trafficking Around the World: Hidden in Plain Sight:
Question: What made you interested in writing about the topic of human trafficking?

Stephanie Hepburn: I moved to New Orleans in February 2006, not long after Hurricane Katrina. Just like any place in any country that experiences a natural disaster, the infrastructure was disrupted,

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David Abrams

David Abrams, who spent 20 years as an Army journalist, is the author of the acclaimed debut novel Fobbit.

From his Q & A with Deborah Kalb:Q: You served in the U.S. military for 20 years as an Army journalist and the book focuses in part on the military-press relationship. How has that dynamic changed (or remained the same) over the years, especially looking at the period from the Vietnam era

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Roxana Robinson

Roxana Robinson's new novel is Sparta.

From her Q & A with Jane Ciabattari at The Daily Beast:Why did you choose to write your new novel from the perspective of Conrad, a 26-year-old Marine returning from tours of duty in Ramadi and Haditha?

Six or seven years ago I read an article about our troops in Iraq – how they were being sent out in unarmored vehicles, and being blown up by IEDs, and

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Matthew Specktor

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, as well as a nonfiction book about the motion picture The Sting. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, The Believer, Tin House, Black Clock, and Salon.com, among other publications. He is a senior editor and founding member of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

From a Q & A at

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Wenguang Huang

Wenguang Huang is a writer, journalist, and translator whose articles and translations have been published in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Paris Review, and the Christian Science Monitor. He is the author of the memoir The Little Red Guard and the translator for Liao Yiwu’s For a Song and One Hundred Songs, The Corpse Walker, and God Is Red.

His latest book, with Pin Ho, is A

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Bill Cheng

Bill Cheng's new novel is Southern Cross the Dog.

From Cheng's Q & A with Scott Cheshire at The Brooklyn Rail:
Scott Cheshire (Rail): Okay, first, tell me how you came to write this book, and I’m referring specifically to a Chinese-American, born and raised in Bayside, Queens, writing the experience of a young black male in the early 20th century South?

Bill Cheng: Blues, especially country

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Henriette Lazaridis Power

Henriette Lazaridis Power is a first-generation Greek-American who has degrees in English literature from Middlebury College; Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar; and the University of Pennsylvania. She taught at Harvard for ten years, serving as an academic dean for four of those. She is the founding editor of The Drum, a literary magazine publishing exclusively in audio

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Lauren Roedy Vaughn

Lauren Roedy Vaughn is an award-winning educator who has spent twenty years teaching English to high school students with language-based learning disabilities. Vaughn lives with her husband in Los Angeles, where she is an avid yogini and Big Lebowski nut.

Her new, debut novel is OCD, The Dude, and Me. From Vaughn's Q & A with Briana at Pages Unbound:
How has teaching high school English

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Julie Sarkissian

Julie Sarkissian is a graduate of Princeton University, where she won the Francis Leon Paige Award for creative writing, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. Her new novel is Dear Lucy.

From her Q & A with Jaime Boler at Bookmagnet's Blog:JB: Please describe Dear Lucy in ten words or less.

JS: Disabled girl, pregnant teenager and talking chicken vs. the world.

JB:

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Virginia Morell

Virginia Morell's latest book is Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures.

From her Q & A with Amy Sommer for Westside Today:WT: The description of your book says that “dolphins that rumble like rival street gangs”. Really? How? Also, is there a Michael Buffer-esque creature who serves as the ringmaster?

VM: In the wild, male bottle-nose dolphins form all-male partnerships

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George Saunders

George Saunders's fourth collection of stories is Tenth of December.

From his Q & A with Killian Fox for the Guardian:
I was intrigued to learn that you were once a fan of Ayn Rand. For a writer so alert to how capitalism can grind people down, that's unexpected.

It's kind of a sweet story. I was in high school in Chicago, not really doing any work. Neither of my parents had been to college so

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Darden Asbury Pyron

Darden Asbury Pyron is a history professor at Florida International University in Miami and author of a 2000 biography titled Liberace: An American Boy.

Spurred by the release of Behind the Candelabra, a new film about Liberace by director Steven Sodenbergh, Randy Dotinga of the Christian Science Monitor interviewed the biographer. Part of the Q & A:
Q: I'm sure some people think of Liberace as

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George Packer

George Packer's new book is The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.

From his Q & A at the publisher's website:
Alex Star: You’ve titled your book The Unwinding. What do you mean by that?

George Packer: It’s a word that a character in the book, Dean Price, once used. He was talking about the way that the economy in his part of the country — rural North Carolina, where tobacco and

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Dror Mishani

D. A. Mishani is an Israeli crime writer, editor and literary scholar, specializing in the history of detective fiction.

The Missing File is his first novel and the first in a series featuring the police inspector Avraham Avraham.

From his Q & A with Ayelett Shani in Haaretz:

Why do you think crime novels don’t do so well here [in Israel]?

Mishani: What I know for certain is that attempts to

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Sara Wheeler

Sara Wheeler is the author of six books of biography and travel, including Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey Through Chile, Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, and The Magnetic North.

From her Q & A at the Independent:
Choose a favourite author and say why you admire her/him

Willa Cather. She makes the black earth of a vanished Nebraska live again and the very best of her novels slip the

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Erika Robuck

Erika Robuck is the author of the novels Hemingway’s Girl and the newly released Call Me Zelda.

From Robuck's Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:Why Zelda? And why now? What do you think she has to say to modern readers?

Hemingway actually led me to Zelda. While I researched HEMINGWAY’S GIRL, I read over and over again how much Hemingway disliked Zelda. Knowing that Hemingway didn’t always have the

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Caroline Leavitt

Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You, which sold to six countries, went into five printings, and was a San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick, a Costco "Pennie's Pick" and a NAIBA bestseller. Pictures of You is also a USA Today ebook bestseller and is on the Best Books of 2011 List from the San Francisco Chronicle, Providence Journal, Kirkus Reviews and Bookmarks

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Gigi Amateau

Gigi Amateau is the author of A Certain Strain of Peculiar, Chancey of the Maury River, Claiming Georgia Tate, and 2012's Come August, Come Freedom: The Bellows, The Gallows, and The Black General Gabriel.

From her Q & A with A. B. Westrick:A. B. Westrick: Come August, Come Freedom is the story of Gabriel, the enslaved blacksmith who organized a massive but ultimately unsuccessful rebellion in

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Ayana Mathis

Ayana Mathis's debut novel is The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. From Mathis's Q & A with Jonathan Lee for Guernica:
Guernica: I don’t think it’s a secret that you’re gay, but I haven’t seen you labelled as a gay writer. Why is that, I wonder? People might say it’s because your novel is about race, and therefore the fact you’re a writer of color comes up. But actually it’s a book about sexuality, too.

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Dan Brown

Dan Brown's new novel is Inferno.

From his Q & A with Alexandra Alter for the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog:
This is your darkest book to date. It deals with some very grim themes, like the imminent collapse of the human species.

You can’t write about Dante without writing about darkness. Inferno is the most fascinating of the three canticles. As a thriller writer, it was the one I was

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Tricia Fields

Tricia Fields lives in a log cabin on a small farm with her husband and two daughters. She was born in Hawaii but has spent most of her life in small town Indiana, where her husband is an investigator with the state police. A lifelong love of Mexico and the desert southwest lead to her first book, The Territory, which won the Tony Hillerman Award for Best Mystery. Scratchgravel Road, the

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J. Sydney Jones

J. Sydney Jones's 2009 novel The Empty Mirror introduced Karl Werthen, a well-off Viennese lawyer and aspiring author who, with real-life criminologist Doktor Hanns Gross, sought to prove that the painter Gustav Klimt was innocent in a series of gruesome local slayings. In the fourth and latest novel in the series, The Keeper of Hands, Werthen, Gross and Werthen’s resourceful spouse, Berthe

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Glenn Frankel

Glenn Frankel is director of the School of Journalism and G.B. Dealey Regents Professor in Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

His new book is The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend.

From the author's Q & A with Deborah Kalb:Q: What first intrigued you about The Searchers, and why did you decide it would make a good subject for a book?

A: I was always intrigued by The

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Carter Malkasian

Carter Malkasian spent nearly two years in the Afghan district of Garmser, in war torn Helmand province as a political officer for the US Department of State. For the last decade, he has studied war, and written about it, and worked in war zones, including long stints in Iraq's Al Anbar province. The author of Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare (named by Foreign Affairs as one of the ten books

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Reed Farrel Coleman

Reed Farrel Coleman's new Moe Prager novel is Onion Street.

From his Q & A with Thomas Pluck at The Big Thrill:
Hi, Reed. For readers who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Moe Prager, give us the lowdown on him, and what he’s up against in ONION STREET.

Moe is both what you’d expect from a hard-boiled ex-cop turned PI and nothing you would expect from one. He’s a deep thinker and has a

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Joanna Hershon

Joanna Hershon is the author of Swimming, The Outside of August, and The German Bride. Her writing has appeared in One Story, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Post Road, the literary anthology Brooklyn Was Mine, and was shortlisted for the 2007 O. Henry Prize Stories.

Her new novel is A Dual Inheritance.

From Hershon's Q & A at Details:

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Julie Klausner

Julie Klausner's new book--her first for young adults--is Art Girls Are Easy.

From her Q & A with Claire Zulkey for WBEZ:How hard or easy was it to switch gears into YA writing? What challenges did it pose?

It's completely tough to write a book, period. But switching gears into fiction was absolutely challenging, if only because I had to make sure I wasn't using my own voice the whole time when

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Charles McCarry

Charles McCarry's new novel is The Shanghai Factor.

From his Q & A with Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg for the Wall Street Journal's book blog:
Speakeasy: How did you decide on the plot for this novel?

Charles McCarry: The idea of a dangle—an asset that you dangle in front of the enemy in the hope that he will bite thinking he is doubling somebody when in fact he is being doubled— has been wandering

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Douglas Brunt

Until 2011, Douglas Brunt was CEO of Authentium, Inc., an Internet security company. He now writes full time and is currently working on his second novel. A Philadelphia native, he lives in New York with his wife Megyn Kelly and their two children.

From a Q & A with the author about his debut novel, Ghosts of Manhattan:
Q: This is your debut novel. Can you describe this experience? What was the

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Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid's latest novel is See Now Then.

From her 2012 Q & A with Liesl Schwabe for Publishers Weekly:
In the book, the phrase See Now Then repeats, both gaining and shifting meaning as it does. How much of that reprise comes through revision?

I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It’s not spontaneous and it doesn’t have a schedule. You know how some people write

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Nathaniel Philbrick

From a Q & A with author Nathaniel Philbrick about his new book, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution:Q: You are the author of In the Heart of the Sea and Mayflower, among other books. Each takes a piece of history we all think we know about and brings to life aspects that aren’t part of common lore. In BUNKER HILL you do the same. What piqued your interest in Bunker Hill?

By writing

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James Thompson

With his first internationally published novel, Snow Angels, James Thompson proved himself Finland’s best and most popular representative in the rise of Nordic noir. It was selected as one of Booklist’s Best Crime Novel Debuts of the Year and nominated for an Edgar Award, an Anthony Award, and a Strand Critics Award. His novel, Lucifer’s Tears, has received critical acclaim from all quarters,

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Mary Roach

Mary Roach's new book is Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.

From her Q & A with Molly Driscoll at The Christian Science Monitor:Q: You warn readers in your book when things are coming that are a little unpleasant. If you're discussing these topics at events or book signings, do people get grossed out, or do they know what they're in for?

A: I was at the San Francisco Jewish Community

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Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry is the author of over twenty-five novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. His other works include two collections of essays, three memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, including the coauthorship of Brokeback Mountain, for which he received an Academy Award.

From his Q & A with Noah Charney for The Daily Beast:
You’ve long been considered the leading

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Lisa Black

Lisa Black spent the five happiest years of her life in a morgue. As a forensic scientist in the Cleveland coroner’s office she analyzed gunshot residue on hands and clothing, hairs, fibers, paint, glass, DNA, blood and many other forms of trace evidence, as well as crime scenes. Now she’s a certified latent print examiner and CSI for the Cape Coral Police Department. Her latest

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Peter Rock

Peter Rock was born and raised in Salt Lake City. His most recent book is The Shelter Cycle, which concerns the end of the world in Montana in 1990, among other things.  His previous novel, My Abandonment, has won an Alex Award, the Utah Book Award, and been published in Germany, Turkey and France. He is also the author of the novels The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, This Is the Place,

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Nathaniel Rich

Nathaniel Rich's new novel is Odds Against Tomorrow.

From his Q & A with Noah Charney at The Daily Beast:
Your new novel, Odds Against Tomorrow, involves probability and mathematics as a driver for the plot. How did you choose that plot mechanism?

“Numbers people” turn to math for the same reasons that readers turn to literature or poetry: for consolation, beauty, mystery, and affirmation. I

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Tara Conklin

Tara Conklin is a writer and lawyer currently living with her family in Seattle, WA. Most recently, she worked as a litigator in the New York and London offices of a corporate law firm but now devotes herself full-time to writing fiction.

Her recently released debut novel is The House Girl.

From Conklin's interview with NPR's Rachel Martin:

On the 19th-century character Josephine Bell

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Adrian Raine

Adrian Raine is the Richard Perry University Professor of Criminology, Psychiatry, and Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and a leading authority on the biology of violence. After leaving secondary school to become an airline accountant, he abandoned his financial career and spent four years as a prison psychologist to understand why some individuals become violent psychopaths while

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Karen Russell

Karen Russell’s latest book is Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories.

From her Q & A with Powells:What fictional character would you like to date, and why?

I'd like to date Bone from Russell Banks's Rule of the Bone. Provided that I, too, were 14 years old — it would be a little Mary Kay Letourneau to date him now, at age 31. Maybe Russell Banks will write a sequel where Bone is an adult man on

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Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is also Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University, and a fellow of the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

He

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Jessica Soffer

Liz Moore interviewed Jessica Soffer for Tottenville Review about Soffer's new novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots. The start of the Q & A:INTERVIEWER

In your novel you write about food with a sense of nostalgia and warmth and fondness. It seems like the antidote to suffering. Do you have your own fond, familial memories of food? If so, what are they?

JESSICA SOFFER

I come from a long line

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Christina Baker Kline

From Christina Baker Kline's interview with Roxana Robinson about Kline's new novel, Orphan Train:
RR: Could you talk about how this book started – what gave you the idea for it?

CBK: About a decade ago, visiting my in-laws in North Dakota, I came across a nonfiction book printed by the Fort Seward Historical Society called Century of Stories, 1883-1983: Jamestown and Stutsman County. In it

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Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan's books include In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, and the newly released Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.

From Pollan's Q & A with Rachel Khong in The Daily Beast:
Is the way we’re eating going to bring about end of the world?

The way we eat now is having a profound effect on climate change, which

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Marian Keyes

Marian Keyes's latest novel is The Mystery of Mercy Close.

From her Q & A with at the Guardian:
You wrote your latest book, The Mystery of Mercy Close, in the grip of what you have previously described as a nervous breakdown. Does it feel miraculous that it got written at all?

It does. I'm amazed. I really, really thought I'd never be able to write again. I had long months of catatonic,

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Michael Suk-Young Chwe

From an interview with UCLA political science professor Michael Suk-Young Chwe about his new book, Jane Austen, Game Theorist:How did you get interested in Jane Austen?

I saw the movie Clueless (with Alicia Silverstone) with my kids a while ago (incidentally, the film includes a scene nearby our house), and Clueless was based on Austen's Emma. When I read Emma, I was surprised to see how much

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Katharine Weber

Katharine Weber’s novels include Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, The Music Lesson, The Little Women, Triangle, and True Confections.

From a Q & A about her memoir, The Memory Of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family's Legacy of Infidelities, with Caroline Leavitt:[The Memory Of All That] defies labeling--though it's the story of your family, it's also the story of so

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Megan Marshall

Megan Marshall's latest book is Margaret Fuller: A New American Life.

From a Q & A about the book at the author's website:What’s new in Margaret Fuller: A New American Life?

Margaret Fuller’s life story is as dramatic and inspiring as any I can think of–she was a brilliant thinker and writer, the comrade of Emerson and Thoreau, a pioneering journalist and daring feminist who lived out her

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Matthew Specktor

From a Q & A with Matthew Specktor about his new novel, American Dream Machine:Tin House Books: American Dream Machine is set strongly in Los Angeles. It portrays the city in a way that’s incredibly vivid–it looks like LA, it feels like LA, a city that is famously hostile to writers. What role does place play in your writing?

Matthew Specktor: LA seems to have suffered over the years as the

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Beverly Gage

Beverly Gage is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded.

From her Q & A with Randy Dotinga about how the Boston Marathon bombing compares to the 1920 Wall Street attack:Q: What struck you as you learned about this week's bombing in Boston?

A: We think of these kinds of mass bombings as being symptomatic of the terrible things about our own contemporary world, at least since Oklahoma City.

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Emily Raboteau

Emily Raboteau's new book is Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora.

From her Q & A with Clarence V. Reynolds at Mosaic:CVR: You stated that among the things that inspired you to write Searching for Zion was the fact that you were interested in what the metaphor for Zion means in the African Diaspora and, on a more personal level, you were searching for a way of finding

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Robert M. Neer

Robert M. Neer is an attorney and Core Lecturer in the History Department at Columbia University.

His new book is Napalm: An American Biography.

From Neer's Q & A with Mark Thompson for Time:
What is the bottom line in your new book, Napalm: An American Biography?

Napalm was born a hero but lives a pariah.

Its story shows how defeat on the battlefield, grassroots protest, vilification in

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Jessica Brody

Jessica Brody's latest novel is Unremembered.

From her Q & A at RT BOOK REVIEWS:At the beginning of Unremembered Violet doesn’t remember anything. But it is not only her past, she has to relearn everything from the type of food she likes to how to use a cell phone. Violet’s mind is like a clean slate. How did you put yourself in her position while you were writing her story?

This was probably

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Meg Wolitzer

Meg Wolitzer's latest novel is The Interestings.

From her Q & A with Edra Ziesk at Salon:
EZ: I’ve heard you talk about how your books don’t start with the picture of a character, but with an idea. What was the genesis of this book?

MW: In The Interestings I wanted to write about what happens to talent over time. In some people talent blooms, in others it falls away. And, relatedly, there are

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's new novel is Americanah.

From her Q & A with Kate Kellaway for the Observer:You write brilliantly about love. What do you think makes a love last?

I wish I knew… if I did, I would market it. Lasting love has to be built on mutual regard and respect. It is about seeing the other person. I am very interested in relationships and, when I watch couples, sometimes I can

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Ronlyn Domingue

Ronlyn Domingue is the author of the newly released The Mapmaker’s War. Its sequel, The Chronicle of Secret Riven, is forthcoming in 2014. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, The Mercy of Thin Air, was published in ten languages. Her writing has appeared in The Beautiful Anthology (TNB Books), New England Review, The Independent (UK), and Shambhala Sun, as well as on mindful.org and The Nervous

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Carl Rollyson

Carl Rollyson, Professor of Journalism at Baruch College, has published more than forty books ranging in subject matter from biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag, and Jill Craigie to studies of American culture, genealogy, children’s biography, film, and literary criticism. He has authored more than 500 articles on

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Mary Roach

Mary Roach's new book is Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.

From her Q & A with Mindy Farabee at The Daily Beast:In Gulp, you write, “People who know anatomy are often cowed by the feats of the lowly anus.” The book as a whole ends on a note of awe and respect reminiscent of your feelings for space travel at the close of Packing for Mars.

Yeah, very much so. I think this is a losing

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Steph Cha

Steph Cha is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School. She lives in her native city of Los Angeles, California.

Follow Her Home is her first novel.

From the author's Q & A with Michael Haskins for The Big Thrill:Philip Marlowe is mentioned in the book’s synopsis and a few of its reviews; are you a big reader of Marlowe and other noir books?

I first read THE BIG SLEEP for a class

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Marlene Zuk

Evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk's new book is Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live.

From her Q & A with Alison George for New Scientist, reprinted in Slate:
What is driving the tendency to idealize the way ancient humans lived?

There is this caricature that organisms evolve until they get to a point when they're perfectly adapted to their environment,

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James Salter

James Salter's new book is All That Is, his first novel since the late 1970s. The book details the life, loves, and losses of a naval veteran who served in WWII and who became a book editor after the war, when publishing was a more genteel pursuit.

From his Q & A with Laurie Gold at Publishers Weekly:What was the impetus for this book?

It was a period I wanted to write about—after the war.

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Hanna Pylvainen

Cafe Americain staff member K. Tyler Christensen interviewed Hanna Pylvainen about her novel, We Sinners.

Part of the Q & A:CA: You said that when you were writing the novel that you didn’t think you were writing anything that anyone would ever read. Was that something you told yourself to get the writing done, or did you really believe that?

HP: During my time at Michigan, I didn’t submit a

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Jennifer Gilmore

Jennifer Gilmore's new novel is The Mothers:

From her Q & A with Sybil Steinberg for Publishers Weekly:
You and your husband have embarked on a similar quest to Jesse [the narrator of The Mothers, who desperately wants a child] via open adoption. How close are the events you describe to your own life?

It’s obviously true that we’ve made a protracted adoption journey. But a lot of it is

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Keith O’Brien

Keith O’Brien's new book is Outside Shot: Big Dreams, Hard Times, and One County's Quest for Basketball Greatness. From his Q & A with Jeff Duncan for nola.com:Where did the inspiration for this story come from for you? How did a reporter from Boston stumble upon a high school basketball team from Scott County, Ky.?

The most interesting stories are within subcultures. And there is no doubt that

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Gail Carriger

New York Times bestselling author Gail Carriger writes to cope with being raised in obscurity by an expatriate Brit and an incurable curmudgeon. She escaped small town life and inadvertently acquired several degrees in Higher Learning. Carriger then traveled the historic cities of Europe, subsisting entirely on biscuits secreted in her handbag. She resides in the Colonies, surrounded by

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Ronlyn Domingue

Ronlyn Domingue is the author of the newly released The Mapmaker’s War. Its sequel, The Chronicle of Secret Riven, is forthcoming in 2014. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, The Mercy of Thin Air, was published in ten languages. Her writing has appeared in The Beautiful Anthology (TNB Books), New England Review, The Independent (UK), and Shambhala Sun, as well as on mindful.org and The Nervous

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Mike Rose

Mike Rose is a professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and the author of many books, including Lives on the Boundary, The Mind at Work, and Possible Lives. His latest book is Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education.

From Rose's Q &A with Hector Tobar for the Los Angeles Times:
You're the author of several books about working people

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Robert J. Sawyer

Robert J. Sawyer has been called “the dean of Canadian science fiction” by The Ottawa Citizen.

His new novel is Red Planet Blues.

From Sawyer's Q & A  with Shawn Speakman:
Speakman: [Red Planet Blues] is a fun combination of science fiction and crime/mystery noir. What made you want to meld those two sub-genres together?

Sawyer: All the things that have fascinated me in life involve picking up

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Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond's latest book is The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?.

From his Q & A with JP O'Malley for The Spectator:You describe in the book how deplorable acts of cruelty — such as the strangling of widows, and leaving old people to die — are part of the circumstances people in traditional societies have to deal with?

Yes, traditional societies do things

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Hilary Davidson

Hilary Davidson's novels include The Damage Done, The Next One to Fall, and the newly released Evil In All Its Disguises.

From her Q & A with MysteryPeople:MysteryPeople: How did you come to choose Acapulco for the setting [of Evil In All Its Disguises]?

Hilary Davidson: It was a long, strange process to find the right setting for Evil in All Its Disguises. That’s partly because the premise — a

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Kishore Mahbubani

Kishore Mahbubani's new book is The Great Convergence: Asia, the West and the Logic of One World.

From his Q & A with Robert W. Merry for The National Interest:
RWM: Kishore Mahbubani, an underlying thesis of your book is that globalization and technology are transforming the world—the nation-state is in decline, the one world sensibility is on the rise, a kind of new global civilization, as you

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Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor at Brown University and critic. He was best known for his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), which is the most widely read book in modern African literature.

From his 1994 Q & A with Jerome Brooks in The Paris Review:
INTERVIEWER

Would you tell us something about the Achebe family and growing up in an Igbo village, your

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Rawi Hage

Rawi Hage is the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award–winning author of Cockroach and De Niro’s Game.

His new novel is Carnival.

Ray Taras was Willy Brandt Professor at Sweden's Malmö University for 2010–11. He was director of Tulane University's world literature program before Hurricane Katrina forced its closure. He is the author of numerous scholarly books on nationalism and identities in

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Peggy Hesketh

Peggy Hesketh's debut novel is Telling the Bees.

From her Q & A with Jasmine Elist for the Los Angeles Times:
The bees play a huge role in the novel, almost serving as a character on their own. But I read that you are actually highly allergic to bees!

A long time ago, somebody said to me, "The things you’re most afraid of is where you need to be." I’m also terrified of heights, so the book I’m

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Michael Hainey

Michael Hainey is the deputy editor of GQ and author of the 2013 memoir, After Visiting Friends: A Son's Story, about his father's mysterious death with the author as six years old.

From Hainey's Q & A with Randy Dotinga for the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: Why is it so important to understand the lives of our parents?

A: We forget that our identities, our narrative stories that we used to

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Tim Lott

Under the Same Stars is Tim Lott's sixth novel. His memoir, The Scent of Dried Roses won the PEN/J.R. Ackerley award and White City Blue won the Whitbread First Novel award. His YA novel Fearless was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Book award.

From Lott's Q & A at the Independent:
Choose a favourite author and say why you admire her/him

George Orwell, because he was a truth teller.

* *

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David Nasaw

David Nasaw's latest book is The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy.

From the transcript of the author's Q & A with Dave Davies on Fresh Air:DAVIES: Now, of course, the other thing that was happening in the late '30s here in addition to Hitler's aggression and territorial demands was the increasingly well-known persecution of Jews in Germany and other areas

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Robert Crais

Robert Crais' latest novel is Suspect.

From his Q & A with Irene Lacher for the Los Angeles Times:
"Suspect" is about an LAPD officer and an ex-military dog who both have PTSD, which makes them suspect. What inspired your latest buddy mystery?

It probably grew out of grief that I felt about losing my dog. I've always had dogs, ever since I was a boy, and my last dog we got as a puppy. In fact,

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Herman Koch

Herman Koch is the author of The Dinner.

From his interview with Steve Inskeep:STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Congratulations on the novel.

HERMAN KOCH: Thank you.

INSKEEP: Let me say, in the best possible way, it made me sick.

(LAUGHTER)

KOCH: Really? OK.

INSKEEP: Well, I'm a parent, so, you know, you get into these issues. I assume that's what you intended, right? I mean, this is - you're going

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Mary Robinson

Mary Robinson served as the seventh, and first female, president of Ireland from 1990-1997, and as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997-2002. Her memoir is Everybody Matters: My Life Giving Voice.

From her Q & A with J.P. O'Malley for the Christian Science Monitor:
Was it your awareness of middle class privilege from an early age that inspired you to peruse a career that

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Charles Fernyhough

Charles Fernyhough's new book is Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts.

From his Q & A with Heather Drucker:Q.: As you explain in the book, as a psychology undergrad in the late 1980s, memory was too immeasurable and too subjective to interest you. Can you explain how your perspective has changed since then?

I think I’ve come to realize

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Kim Boykin

Kim Boykin's new, debut novel is The Wisdom of Hair.

From her Q & A with Sarah at Smart Bitches Trashy Books:
So your inspiration of sorts was seeing customers in your mom's beauty salon? That's very cool. What did you learn about changing hair to change lives? I agree that when you feel like you look your best, you are more confident, and a lot of that is tied up (heh) with hair.

Kim: Last

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Katherine Bouton

Katherine Bouton's new book is Shouting Won't Help: Why I--and 50 Million Other Americans--Can't Hear You.

From her Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:
I loved that you wrote about “talking back to your impairment,” and owning it. Can you talk a bit about that please?

When you lose one of your senses, or the use of a limb, or if you have a mental illness, you tend to identify yourself in terms of that

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Therese Anne Fowler

Therese Anne Fowler's new novel is Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald.

From her Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:What is it about Zelda that captures us so much today?

That’s a great question, because really, Zelda is a kind of pop culture Rorschach test. People who think they know who she is have decidedly specific views—and those views vary considerably. She is said to be: the glamorous jazz princess;

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Michael Koryta

Michael Koryta's latest novel is The Prophet.

From his Q & A with Ali Karim for The Rap Sheet:
AK: But on to your own work ... I devoured The Prophet like a crystal meth addict discovering one of Breaking Bad’s Heisenberg stashes. But I thought it would have been perfect had it contained a supernatural undercurrent, like some of your previous yarns.

MK: I go book-by-book with it. I don’t

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Ian Roulstone & John Norbury

Ian Roulstone is professor of mathematics at the University of Surrey. John Norbury is a fellow in applied mathematics at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. They are the coeditors of Large-Scale Atmosphere-Ocean Dynamics.

Their new book is Invisible in the Storm: The Role of Mathematics in Understanding Weather.

From their February 2013 Q & A with Jessica Pellien at the Princeton University

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Shereen El Feki

Shereen El Feki is the author of the new book Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World.

From her Q & A with Jasmine Elist for the Los Angeles Times:
While "Sex and the Citadel" takes a look at the sexual lives of men and women across the Middle East, there is a stronger focus specifically on Egypt.

My book is centered on Egypt, and in particular Cairo, in part for personal

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Elizabeth Graver

Elizabeth Graver's new novel is The End of the Point.

From a Q & A at her publisher's website:How did The End of the Point originate?

My novel The End of the Point took me a long time to write, both because of the particular challenges and pleasures that went into it and because over the past decade, my non-writing life has been very full—with the birth of two children, the illness and death of

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Stephan Talty

Stephan Talty is a widely published journalist who has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Men’s Journal, Time Out New York, Details, and many other publications. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Blue Water and Mulatto America: At the Crossroads of Black and White Culture.

Talty's newly released debut novel is Black Irish.

From his Q & A with Declan Burke:

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Rebecca Skloot

Rebecca Skloot is the author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

From her Q & A with Noah Charney for The Daily Beast:
It took you about a decade to research and write The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. A long time for any project (but certainly worth the wait). Can you describe that decade, walking us through the process?

Ha, no chance! To break that down into any coherent timeline

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Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett is the author of six novels: State of Wonder; the New York Times bestselling Run; The Patron Saint of Liars, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Taft, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize; The Magician’s Assistant; and Bel Canto, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Orange Prize, the BookSense Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics

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Roger Hobbs

Roger Hobbs is the author of Ghostman.

From his Q & A with Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg for the Wall Street Journal:
What exactly is a ghostman?

Roger Hobbs: A ghostman is an identity thief geared for criminal organizations. He helps people disappear. No, ghostmen don’t really exist. I created them, as well as the term. But the other criminal terms in I use in the book, such as box man and wheelman,

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Lucinda Rosenfeld

Lucinda Rosenfeld's new book is The Pretty One: A Novel about Sisters.

From her Q & A with Erinn Connor:Q. "The Pretty One" revolves around the varying relationships among three sisters. Did any of it come from your own relationships with your sisters?

There were definitely emotions and anxiety that I drew on from real life. But the characters are not my sisters. I went out of my way to make

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Tom Folsom

Tom Folsom's new book is Hopper: A Journey into the American Dream.

From his Q & A with Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg for the Wall Street Journal:
What attracted you to Dennis Hopper, who seemed to specialize in artistic maniacs?

Tom Folsom: I thought his story had a terrific literary quality to it. I saw him as a modern Don Quixote who spent his life in search of his American dream. I always wanted

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Janice Steinberg

Janice Steinberg is an award-winning arts journalist who has published more than four hundred articles in The San Diego Union-Tribune, Dance Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. She is also the author of five mystery novels, including the Shamus Award–nominated Death in a City of Mystics. She has taught novel writing at the University of California, San Diego extension, and dance

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Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly's latest novel is The Black Box.

From his February 2013 Q & A with Nathan Rostron at Bookish:
Bookish: Which are your favorite characters that you've created? Is there a character by a different writer that you wish you had created yourself?

Connelly: I think it's pretty apparent who my favorites are because I keep coming back to them. At the top of that list would be Harry

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Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich's The Round House, her 14th novel, won the coveted 2012 National Book Award for Fiction.

From her Q & A with Noah Charney at The Daily Beast:
If you could bring back to life one deceased person, who would it be and why?

What a terrifying question, but OK … I’d bring back Columbus, Pizarro, Coronado, Andrew Jackson, Hitler, Pol Pot, and an assortment of contemporary dictators and

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Nancy Bilyeau

Nancy Bilyeau's new novel is The Chalice.

From her Q & A with Mathew Lyons:Mathew: What do you think are the relative strengths and weaknesses of the fictional and non-fictional approaches to the same historical material?

Nancy: I love research. For me, during the writing of The Chalice, when I would take a “research day”, that was giving myself a reward. I don’t know if other historical

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Rebecca Miller

Writer and filmmaker Rebecca Miller’s most recent book is Jacob’s Folly.

From her Q & A with Annasue McCleave Wilson at Publishers Weekly:
Is your writing influenced by the work of your father, Arthur Miller?

You can’t escape being influenced by your parents, whoever they are. I don’t know if he’s my literary father as much as my biological father, but I do think his natural economy... There’s

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Megan Abbott

Megan Abbott's latest novel is Dare Me.

From her Q & A at BOLO Books:BOLO Books: Your two most recent novels, The End of Everything and Dare Me, feature more contemporary settings, smaller towns, and younger protagonists and yet I would be very hesitant to call them Young Adult novels. What is it about the girls in these stories that make them suitable characters for your brand of story, which

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Emily Bazelon

Emily Bazelon's new book is Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy.

From her Q & A with Emily Yoffe at Slate:Emily Yoffe: What was the most surprising thing your reporting turned up?

Emily Bazelon: One piece of research in particular helped me understand why kids bully—how that can be a rational, if unfortunate, choice. Robert

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Andrew Solomon

Andrew Solomon is the author of The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost, A Stone Boat, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, winner of fourteen national awards, including the 2001 National Book Award, and Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity.

From his Q & A with Jeremy Adam Smith of the Greater Good Science Center:
Jeremy Adam Smith: Why did you

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Glenn Frankel

Glenn Frankel is director of the School of Journalism and G.B. Dealey Regents Professor in Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

His new book is The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend.

From the author's Q & A at DirectedByJohnFord.com:DxJF: What prompted you to write the book?

GF: I’d loved The Searchers since I first saw it as a child and for perhaps 20 years I thought I’

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Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia's latest book is Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars.

From her Q & A at Powell's Book Blog:
Who are your favorite characters in history?

I was obsessed with Napoleon during my childhood in the suffocatingly chirpy Doris Day 1950s. I was entranced by Napoleon's fabulous form-fitting military uniforms, which I saw in paintings vividly reproduced in

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A.J. Jacobs

A.J. Jacobs is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, including The Year of Living Biblically (about his quest to follow all the rules of the Bible); The Know-It-All (about his adventure reading the encyclopedia); and Drop Dead Healthy (about his attempt to become the healthiest person alive).

From his Q & A with Alicia Oltuski for Beyond The Margins:AO: You’ve posed nude for Esquire,

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Julianna Baggott

Julianna Baggott's new novel is Fuse, the sequel to Pure.

From her Q & A at Powell's Books Blog:If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?

Oh, poor biographer, weedy and pale. I wish you'd latched onto someone greater, who heaved around more literary weight, drank too much, caused scenes in restaurants, and slept with movie stars. Alas, sweetheart,

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Roger Hobbs

From Sam Coggeshall's Portland Monthly Q & A with Roger Hobbs, author of Ghostman:
What was your inspiration for this novel? Why crime fiction?

I got the idea for Ghostman the summer after my sophomore year at Reed. I was walking home late after a movie when I came across an armored car depot. It was a plain white unmarked building with rows and rows of armored cars parked out front. I sneaked

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Melanie Benjamin

Melanie Benjamin is the author of Alice I Have Been (2010), The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb (2011), and the newly released The Aviator's Wife.

From her Q & A with Molly Driscoll at the Christian Science Monitor:Q: What about historical figures makes you want to focus a novel around them?

A: Now that I've got three under my belt, I can sense a pattern. The first one, "Alice I Have Been,"

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Chloe Hooper

Chloe Hooper's new novel is The Engagement.

From her Q & A with Anna Metcalfe for the Financial Times:
Who are your literary influences?

Are influences the same as writers I like? They are Graham Greene, Janet Malcolm, Charlotte Brontë and JM Coetzee.
* * *

If you could own any painting, what would it be?

They’re not paintings but I love Alexander Calder’s studies of the circus, full of dash

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Domenica Ruta

Domenica Ruta's new book is With or Without You: A Memoir.

From a Q & A at her website:In With or Without You, you focus heavily on your mother’s influence on your life. What important lessons have you learned from her?

I feel so lucky to have had a mother who could laugh so deeply. For her, and for us, comedy was a rich psycho-spiritual experience. As a genetic gift, I can’t think of anything

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Dean Koontz

When Odd Apocalypse, bestselling suspense author Dean Koontz's fifth novel in his Odd Thomas series about a fry cook with paranormal abilities, came out in the summer of 2012, the author submitted to a Q & A with Irene Lacher for the Los Angeles Times.

Part of the Q & A:I gather Odd Thomas is your most popular character. Why do you think that is?

I think it's because he's unique to the genre

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Ann Cleeves

Ann Cleeves's latest book (now out in the UK) is Dead Water, her fifth Shetland novel.

From her Q & A at the Independent:
Choose a favourite author and say why you admire her/him

This is impossible and changes every time I'm asked. At the moment it's Christopher Fowler. I love the wit and playfulness of his Bryant and May books. As I get older I'm drawn by old people behaving outrageously.

* *

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Lachlan Smith

Lachlan Smith is an attorney and the author of Bear is Broken.

From his Q & A with Lenny Picker at Publishers Weekly:
What attracted you to the practice of law?

The law drew me from a young age, because of my mother, who went to law school when I was a kid, commuting a hundred miles each way to St. Paul from our home in western Minnesota. I was immensely proud of and inspired by her

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Lee Child

Lee Child is the author of the Jack Reacher thrillers.

From his June 2012 Q & A with J. Kingston Pierce of The Rap Sheet:
JKP: You’ve been good about not criticizing the casting of 5-foot-7-inch actor Tom Cruise to portray 6-foot-5-inch Jack Reacher in a movie version of One Shot. But if you had been asked to cast the role instead, would you have gone in a different direction?

LC: Don’t forget

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Cathy Marie Buchanan

Cathy Marie Buchanan's new novel is The Painted Girls.

From her Q & A with NPR's Scott Simon:

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Just who is the "Little Dancer, Aged 14" - the actual girl, cast in two-thirds of her life size, in Edgar Degas' sculpture? That little dancer was Marie Van Goethem, one of three sisters left to fend for themselves after their father dies and their mother devotes much of what she

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Sara J. Henry

Sara J. Henry is the author of the Troy Chance series of mysteries: Learning to Swim and A Cold and Lonely Place.

From her Q & A at BOLO Books:BOLO Books: One of the hallmarks of a great series is its characters. In both of your novels you have populated the fictional world with a whole group of fascinating characters beyond your main character of Troy Chance. How did you go about coming up

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Michael Northrop

Michael Northrop is the author of three YA novels—Gentlemen, an American Library Association/YALSA Best Book for Young Adults, Trapped, an ALA/YALSA Readers’ Choice List selection and an Indie Next List pick, and Rotten, which comes out on April 1, 2013—and the middle grade novel Plunked.

From his Q & A with Brittney Breakey at Author Turf:What’s your favorite sport?

This question ... makes

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Gil Reavill

Gil Reavill's new book is Mafia Summit: J. Edgar Hoover, the Kennedy Brothers, and the Meeting That Unmasked the Mob.

Mafia Summit is the true story of how a small-town lawman in upstate New York busted a Cosa Nostra conference in 1957, exposing the Mafia to America.

From Reavill's Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: This was a summit meeting of Mafia types. Was it a

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Andrew Wilson

Andrew Wilson's new book is Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted.

From his Q & A with Callie Beusman at Interview magazine:
CALLIE BEUSMAN: Plath mythologized herself, was mythologized by her lovers, and continues to be mythologized by casual readers and academics. I'm interested in how much of this is through Plath's doing and how much happened after she became a literary

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Karen Russell

Karen Russell’s new book is Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories.

From her Q & A with Noah Charney at The Daily Beast:
Is there one short story in your new collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, that you’d consider your “first single,” if your collection were an album? If a reader is going to read one of the stories, which would you recommend and why?

Wow, let me think for a second. I think

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Tabish Khair

Author of The Thing about Thugs, 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.

From his Q & A with Sparsh Sharma at the Aarhus Culture Blog:
Q: How was the journey from Gaya, a small town in Bihar, to Aarhus, Denmark, of a prodigious Indian, now a global literary figure?

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Erin Kelly

Erin Kelly is the author of two acclaimed psychological thrillers, The Poison Tree and The Sick Rose. Her new novel of psychological suspense is The Burning Air.

From the author's Q & A at the Independent:
Choose a favourite author and say why you admire her/him

I like any writer who marries strong narrative with high style, like William Boyd, Maggie O'Farrell and Lesley Glaister.

* * *

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Matt Hilton

Matt Hilton is the Cumbrian author of the Joe Hunter thriller series. He is a high ranking martial artist and has been a police officer and private security specialist, all of which lend an authenticity to the action scenes in his books.

From his Q & A with Sandra Parshall at The Big Thrill:
One reviewer described Joe as “a cold-blooded killer with a heart of gold.” Is that how you see him

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Rainbow Rowell

Rainbow Rowell's YA debut novel is Eleanor & Park.

From her Q & A with Martha Schulman for Publishers Weekly:
Eleanor & Park covers a lot of ground, from difficult family situations to the way music can open up a new world. But most of all, it’s about first love. Is that what you set out to write about?

My motivation was to make people actually feel love, to give them a realistic view of it. If

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Peter Hook

Peter Hook was a founding member of Joy Division and New Order. His new book is Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division.

From his Q & A with David Chiu at Rolling Stone:
There's the perception that Joy Division was a band that had a somber, melancholic aura. But your book shows that the band had a very humorous side as well.

That was one of my problems reading books about Joy Division – that

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Ismail Kadare

Ismail Kadare's new book is The Fall of the Stone City.

From his Q & A with Noah Charney for The Daily Beast:
What is guaranteed to make you laugh?

The recent situation in my country [Albania], its problems, its grotesque aspects, its misunderstandings.

What is guaranteed to make you cry?

The same thing.

If you could bring back to life one deceased person, whom would it be and why?

I am

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Sam Thomas

Sam Thomas has a PhD in history with a focus on Reformation England and recently leaped from the tenure track into a teaching position at a secondary school near Cleveland, Ohio.

His new novel is The Midwife's Tale.

From his Q & A at The Fiction Reboot:
On your webpage you say The Midwife’s Tale was inspired by a real midwife named Bridget Hodgson. What made you decide to take on this

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Holly Goddard Jones

Holly Goddard Jones's new novel is The Next Time You See Me.

Form her Q & A at the Mourning Goats blog:

Your first book was a short story book, back in 2009; in February, your first novel, The Next Time You See Me will be published, how was writing and publishing the books different?

I was a grad student when I was working on the stories in Girl Trouble, and the book went through a few

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Emily Raboteau

Emily Raboteau's new book is Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora.

From her Q & A with Mindy Farabee for The Daily Beast:You write a lot about the historical link African-Americans felt with Jews of the biblical exodus. How does this concept of Zion resonate today?

Barack Obama used the Zion metaphor in the 2008 election, in particular when speaking to faith-based

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George Saunders

George Saunders's fourth collection of stories is Tenth of December.

From the transcript of his dialogue with Jacki Lyden for NPR:
LYDEN: Let's go to a story that I think is really accessible, George, and that would be the title story of this collection, "Tenth of December." I quite loved it, and I thought, you know, there's almost a '50s feeling in here. This is about a boy who goes into the

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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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Ali Smith

Ali Smith's latest book is Artful.

From her Q & A with Noah Charney for The Daily Beast:
Do you have a writer friend who helps and inspires you?

I'm blessed in my good friends, and some of them happen to be writers, though that's almost never what our friendships are about. And every writer I've ever read, living or dead, has in one way or another helped and inspired. I have a feeling it’s

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Lawrence Wright

Lawrence Wright's new book is Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief.

From his Q & A with Mark Guarino for Printers Row Journal:
Q: The church contradicts most of your reporting, and in one moment of the book, its attorneys show up at The New Yorker with 48 binders of material stretching about 7 linear feet, a tactic you suggest was intended to intimidate you into

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Ben Schrank

Ben Schrank published his first novel, Miracle Man, in 1999. The New Yorker selected it as one of six debut novels in that year’s fiction issue, saying “As the ethical lines blur, Schrank makes New York seem sharp and new.” Time Magazine called it a “brilliantly observed story about the desire to live in an egalitarian world.” In 2002 Schrank published his second novel, Consent. Leonard

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Amber Dermont

Amber Dermont is the author of the novel, The Starboard Sea, and the short story collection, Damage Control. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Dermont received her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston.

From her Q & A with Lucy Walton at Female First:Which writers can you credit as being an influence to your own work?

In terms of the great dead, the

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Laurie Lynn Drummond

From a Q & A with Laurie Lynn Drummond, author of Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You:
Q: There seems to be a rather striking spiritual/mystical element in some of the stories, when the officers feel the presence of a victim. Katherine wonders "how dead we ever really are." How should a reader understand these encounters in the larger context of the collection? Does constant

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Rebecca Wells

From a Q & A with Rebecca Wells, author of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Ya-Yas in Bloom:
You grew up in Louisiana, and ... your books have dealt with that state and the Walker family and friends. What first prompted you to create the Ya-Yas? Are they based on real women you knew or your own childhood?

I grew up in a tiny kingdom of bayous and cotton fields, a big extended family,

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Mark Harrison

Mark Harrison is professor of the history of medicine and director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford. His books include Medicine and Victory: British Military Medicine in the Second World War, The Medical War: British Military Medicine in the First World War, and the newly released Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease.

From his Q & A at The Daily Beast:

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Julie Powell

Julie Powell was on the verge of turning 30, trapped in a series of unfulfilling temp jobs, and living in a dreadful apartment in Queens, New York. That’s when she decided to break the monotony by attempting to make all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. One year later, Powell had achieved her goal, documented her experiences on one of the most popular blogs on the

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Marilyn Yalom

Marilyn Yalom was educated at Wellesley College, the Sorbonne, Harvard and Johns Hopkins. She has been a professor of French and comparative literature, director of an institute for research on women, a popular speaker on the lecture circuit, and the author of numerous books and articles on literature and women's history. In 1991 she was decorated as an Officier des Palmes Académiques by the

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Joan Didion

Joan Didion's many books includes such nonfiction as The Year of Magical Thinking (2006) and Blue Nights (2011). From her interview by Hilton Als for The Paris Review:INTERVIEWER

By now you’ve written at least as much nonfiction as you have fiction. How would you describe the difference between writing the one or the other?

JOAN DIDION

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion

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Lesley Hazleton

Lesley Hazleton's new book is The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad.

From a Q & A at her website:What inspired you to write The First Muslim?

Basically, frustration! I’d read several biographies of Muhammad as background for my previous book, After the Prophet, but though they seemed to tell me a lot about him, they left me with little real sense of the man himself. There was a certain

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Rosie Schaap

Rosie Schaap is the author of Drinking with Men: A Memoir.

From her Q & A with Leah at Drinking Diaries:
Drinking Diaries: How old were you when you had your first drink and what was it?

Rosie Schaap: I couldn’t have been more than six. My parents had thrown a party on Christmas Eve, and I was first to rise on Christmas morning. They hadn’t cleaned up after the party, and there were snifters on

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Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson is the author of Watching the Dark, the 20th novel to feature Robinson’s popular series sleuth, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, along with Banks’ colleague and former lover, Annie Cabbot.

From his Q & A with J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet:
JKP: Unlike some other series, your 20 books about Alan Banks have allowed the character to change and evolve in significant ways

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Beth Raymer

From Vivian Chum's interview with Beth Raymer, author of Lay the Favorite: A Memoir of Gambling:
To place a bet, you can either lay the favorite or take the underdog. Of all the gambling phrases out there, why did you choose to title your memoir Lay the Favorite?

There’s something ironic about the title. What it’s saying is bet on the team most likely to win and invest yourself in the outcome

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Doris Kearns Goodwin

Doris Kearns Goodwin's books include Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, which served as the basis of Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln.

From her Q & A with Erik Spanberg for the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: How does it feel to have “Team of Rivals” back in the headlines?

It’s been a wild ride.... I finished the book in 2005 and [Steven] Spielberg got the rights to it in

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Melanie Challenger

Poet Melanie Challenger's nonfiction debut is On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature.

From her Q & A with Bridget Potter at Publishers Weekly:
How did you come to believe that we have become "estranged from nature"?

I had a clamoring love of nature, but when I immersed myself in the natural world, I realized how much of my life and knowledge was derived solely from the manufactured

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Eric Jay Dolin

Eric Jay Dolin is the author of Leviathan: The History of Whaling In America, which was chosen as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe, and also won the 2007 John Lyman Award for U. S. Maritime History; and Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America.

His latest book is When America First Met China: An Exotic History

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Jennifer McMahon

Jennifer McMahon's new novel is The One I Left Behind.

From her Q & A with Pam Lambert at Publishers Weekly:
What inspired this novel?

I was looking at a milk carton one morning and—my mind goes funny places sometimes—I’m like, “Wow, wouldn’t it be really creepy if you just found a milk carton and opened it and there was a hand inside?” And then my mind continued to work, and I thought maybe it

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Melanie Benjamin

Melanie Benjamin is the author of Alice I Have Been, Mrs. Tom Thumb, and her latest, The Aviator's Wife, about Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

From her Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:You’ve focused on some of the most startling and original women in history, including Alice of Alice in Wonderland Fame, and Mrs. Tom Thumb. What drew you to Anne Morrow Lindbergh?

I'm always interested in finding women whom

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Sara Gran

Sara Gran's latest novel is Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead.

From her Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: For people who haven't read the book, who's Claire DeWitt?

A: Claire DeWitt is in her mid-30s and from Brooklyn. She's "the world's greatest detective," but no one believes her. We'll find out if it's true as the series goes on.

She's been been through a

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Vanessa Veselka

Vanessa Veselka is the author of the novel Zazen.

From her Q & A with Melissa Seley at Guernica:
Guernica: When you accepted your PEN debut fiction award, you thanked the translators in the room for allowing you to read some of the books that have most influenced you. What books are those?

Vanessa Veselka: I have seven bookshelves, but only half of one of those shelves is dedicated to American

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Jeremy Dean

Jeremy Dean's new book is Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don't, and How to Make Any Change Stick.

From his Q & A with Jasmine Elist for the Jacket Copy blog:

What inspired your book "Making Habits, Breaking Habits"?

It's got to be one of the oldest questions we ask about ourselves: why is it so difficult to change? Say you want to change your diet, start practicing

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Andy McNab

Andy McNab joined the infantry as a boy soldier. In 1984 he was 'badged' as a member of 22 SAS Regiment and was involved in both covert and overt special operations worldwide. During the Gulf War he commanded Bravo Two Zero, a patrol that, in the words of his commanding officer, 'will remain in regimental history for ever'. Awarded both the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) and Military Medal (MM

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Susanna Sonnenberg

Susanna Sonnenberg's new book is She Matters: A Life in Friendships.

From her Q & A with Jasmine Elist at the Jacket Copy blog:
This is the second memoir you have written -- what drives your impulse toward memoir?

Memoir requires a rugged honesty of the self, which I feel is the only thing I have completely within my power — the truth of the self. Memoir appeals to me because it forces us to

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Cathy Marie Buchanan

Cathy Marie Buchanan's new novel is The Painted Girls.

From a Q & A with the author:
Question: Did you always intend The Painted Girls as a tribute to sisterhood?

Cathy Marie Buchanan: I once heard the great Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod comment that he did not so much buy into the old adage “write what you know” as a broader notion of writing about one’s obsessions. I’d take it a step

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Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart's latest novel is Super Sad True Love Story.

From his Q & A with Noah Charney at The Daily Beast:
Describe your routine when conceiving of a book and its plot, before the writing begins.

I’ll read something by a better writer, and I’ll be, like, “Hmm, what if I made this, you know, more Russian?”

Do you have any unusual rituals when you write?

I write in bed while blasting

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