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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