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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