Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley is the author of many novels, including A Thousand Acres, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Horse Heaven.

From her questionnaire at the Los Angeles Review of Books:
Lunch with any three people who ever lived; who do you invite?

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Marguerite of Navarre, Emile Zola
* * *

Which classic author would you like to see kicked out of the pantheon?

Vladimir Nabokov
* *

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Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin earned her Ph.D. in animal science from the University of Illinois, went on to become an associate professor at Colorado State University, and wrote two books on autism, including the seminal Thinking in Pictures. One of the most celebrated — and effective — animal advocates on the planet, Grandin revolutionized animal movement systems and spearheaded reform of the quality of life

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Wiley Cash

Wiley Cash is from western North Carolina. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and teaches English at Bethany College.

His stories have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Roanoke Review and The Carolina Quarterly.

Cash's first novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, is now out from William Morrow.

From his Fiction Writers Review Q & A with Brad Wetherell:
Brad

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Mario Beauregard

Mario Beauregard, Ph.D., is associate research professor at the Departments of Psychology and Radiology and the Neuroscience Research Center at the University of Montreal. He is the coauthor of The Spiritual Brain and more than one hundred publications in neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry. His new book is Brain Wars: The Scientific Battle Over the Existence of the Mind and the Proof That

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Stuart Firestein

Stuart Firestein is Professor and Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where his highly popular course on ignorance invites working scientists to come talk to students each week about what they don't know. Dedicated to promoting science to a public audience, he serves as an advisor for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's program for the Public Understanding of

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Marion Nestle & Malden Nesheim

Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim are the authors of Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics.

From their Q & A with Nanci Hellmich at USA Today:
Q: Are all calories created equal when it comes to weight loss?

A: If you lock people in a metabolic ward and feed them the same number of calories in reduced-calorie diets that vary in fat and carbohydrates (all measured), you can show that they

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Gabrielle Hamilton

Gabrielle Hamilton is the chef/owner of Prune restaurant in New York’s East Village and the author of Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. She received an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, GQ, Bon Appétit, Saveur, and Food & Wine.

From her Q & A at the Guardian:
How did you

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Roger Smith

Roger Smith's thrillers Dust Devils, Wake Up Dead and Mixed Blood are published in seven languages and two are in development as movies in the U.S. His books have won the Deutscher Krimi Preis (German Crime Fiction Award) and been nominated for Spinetingler Magazine Best Novel awards. His novella, Ishmael Toffee, is available and a fourth novel, Capture, will be out in mid-2012.

From his Q & A

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Hugh Brewster

Hugh Brewster's latest book is Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World.

From his Q & A with J. Kingston Pierce at January Magazine:
J. Kingston Pierce: When did you first become interested in the Titanic, and why?

Hugh Brewster: When I was 6 my family emigrated to Canada from Scotland and crossing the Atlantic aboard the Canadian Pacific liner, Empress

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Liza Mundy

Liza Mundy is the bestselling author of Michelle: A Biography and Everything Conceivable and is a staff writer at the Washington Post.

Her new book is The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love and Family.

From her Q & A with Marc Schultz at Publishers Weekly:
How did you hit upon this trend?

I’ve covered gender issues for a long time, 20 years

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Lauren Myracle

Lauren Myracle is a New York Times bestselling author of a series of her young-adult novels that has topped this year’s annual list of “Most Challenged Books,” released by the American Library Association.

From her Q & A with Abigail Pesta at The Daily Beast:

The Internet Girls series is about three high-school girls who like to text each other about their troubles. What’s so controversial?

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Pearl S. Buck

Pearl Buck's novel The Good Earth was the best-selling fiction book in the U.S. in 1931 and 1932, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces."

From her 1958 Q & A with Mike Wallace on ABC's The Mike Wallace Interview:
WALLACE: If you're curious

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Simon Reynolds

Simon Reynolds is a music critic whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Village Voice, Spin, Rolling Stone, and Artforum.

His latest book is Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past.From the author's Q & A at the Guardian:How did you come to write Retromania?

One day I realised that there was something strange going on in terms of rock and its relationship to its own

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Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard's latest novel is Raylan.

From the author's Q & A with Allen Barra at The Daily Beast:
Most critics call you things like “the dean of American crime writers.” But I’m wondering if you consider that pigeonholing. Do you mind being called a crime writer?

“Crime writer” is fine. There’s always a crime in my books.

It’s been written that you are a descendant of—I’ll just pick two

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James Sallis

James Sallis is the author of, among others, Drive and its sequel, Driven.

From his Q & A with Alex Dueben at The Daily Beast:
How did you end up writing a sequel to Drive?

One day my agent Vicky Bijur called. The producers were asking if there’d be a sequel to Drive. Of course not, I harrumphed—being an artiste and all. I hung up the phone and sat there with the image of a woman leaning

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Suzanne Collins

Suzanne Collins is the author of the dystopian Hunger Games trilogy.

From her Q & A with Hannah Trierweiler Hudson at the Scholastic website:
The Hunger Games is hugely popular with both boys and girls. Why do you think that is?

Whenever I write a story, I hope it appeals to both boys and girls. But maybe in its simplest form, it's having a female protagonist in a gladiator story, which

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James Patterson

James Patterson has published over 90 books— including Guilty Wives. From his Q & A with Lauren A.E. Schuker at the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog:
Do you think that the literary community dislikes you?

There’s kind of a misunderstanding. I get a lot of questions like, ‘how do you feel about keeping up-and-coming writers off the bestseller list?’ But I don’t think I’m really doing that. I

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Howard Shrier

Howard Shrier's first crime novel, Buffalo Jump, won him the Arthur Ellis Debut Fiction award. The following year, his second book in the Jonah Geller series, High Chicago won the Arthur Ellis best book award. Boston Cream, his third book in the series, finds detective Jonah Geller back in Boston to find a missing transplant surgeon.

From Shrier's Q & A with Jonathan Mendelsohn at the Indigo

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Esther Freud

Esther Freud trained as an actress before writing her first novel, Hideous Kinky, which was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and made into a feature film starring Kate Winslet. Her other novels include The Sea House, Summer at Gaglow, The Wild, Peerless Flats, Love Falls, and Lucky Break.

From her Q & A with the Guardian:
How did you come to write Lucky Break?

I started writing a

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RJ Smith

RJ Smith has been a senior editor at Los Angeles magazine, a contributor to Blender, a columnist for The Village Voice, a staff writer for Spin, and has written for GQ, the New York Times Magazine, and Men's Vogue. His first book, The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Lost African-American Renaissance, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and recipient of a California Book Award.

Smith's

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Donna Leon

Internationally bestselling mystery writer Donna Leon masterfully blends the intrigue and passion of the ancient city of Venice (also her beloved adopted home) with cutting-edge detective work in her popular series featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti.

Donna Leon's love affair with Italy began in the mid-1960s when she visited for the first time. She returned frequently over the course of the

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Paul French

Paul French's new novel is Midnight in Peking.

From a Q & A with the author at the book's website:
You have written a number of books before this, but Midnight in Peking is your first foray into a more literary style. Why did you choose to write this book in this way, and how does it affect the story?

I’m story led – the story dictates the style as far as I’m concerned. In the past the stories

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Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read woman writer in Turkey. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages.

From a Q & A at her publisher's website:
You have a reputation for being a very outspoken writer. When you write a novel, do you approach it as a vehicle for making a particular statement, or is this a secondary concern?

I do not approach

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Kevin Barry

Kevin Barry is the author of City of Bohane.

From his March 2012 Q & A at the Guardian:
Who's your favourite writer?

There are dozens but I have always felt a special affinity with VS Pritchett. He worked from the ear, primarily, as I do, and he was an all-rounder, writing short stories, novels, memoir, travelogue, critical biography. He lived to be almost 100, and he never stopped, and his

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Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard's latest novel, his 45th, is Raylan.

From the author's Q & A with Megan Abbott at the Los Angeles Times Magazine:
Who did you read when you were starting out?

Hemingway, [but] I never cared for the man. I used to read a lot of him till I learned he had no sense of humor.

Did you read many of the hard-boiled masters?

Never read Chandler. Not much Hammett. James M. Cain was an

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Barry Forshaw

Barry Forshaw is the author of, most recently, Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction.

From his Q & A with Ali Karim for The Rap Sheet:
Ali Karim: Tell us how you came to write Death in a Cold Climate.

Barry Forshaw: I was keen to write about the amazing explosion of interest in Scandinavian crime fiction (both on the page and on the screen) and the fact that the

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Jessie Klein

Adelphi University professor of sociology and criminal justice Jessie Klein is the author of The Bully Society: School Shootings and the Crisis of Bullying in America's Schools.

From her Publishers Weekly Q & A with Marc Schultz :
How did your research into bullying and school shootings begin?

I started this research back in 1997 when I heard Luke Woodham in Mississippi explain why he committed

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Edward Humes

From a Q & A with Edward Humes, author of Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash:
Why did you decide to write about garbage?

Everybody knows waste is a problem. But did you know trash is now America’s biggest export? That one of the tallest structures in Los Angeles is a mountain of garbage? That the average American is on track to make 102 tons of trash in a lifetime, twice what we were

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Catherine Chung

Catherine Chung's debut novel is Forgotten Country.

From the author's Q & A with Granta’s Patrick Ryan:
PR: What is the ‘forgotten country’ in the book? Is there more than one possible meaning in the title?

CC: I came up with this title around the time when I was doing a lot of research into the Korean War, which is also sometimes called the Forgotten War. The idea of that blew my mind – just

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Graham Swift

Graham Swift was born in 1949 and is the author of nine acclaimed novels including Waterland and Wish You were Here, a collection of short stories, and Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. He has won many awards for his work including the 1996 Booker Prize.

From his Q & A at the Guardian:
How did you come to write Wish You Were Here?

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