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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