Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel is the bestselling author of numerous novels, including Wolf Hall, which won the 2009 Man Booker Prize, and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.

From her Q & A with Alexandra Alter at the Wall Street Journal:

In developing Thomas Cromwell as a sympathetic and in many ways admirable and influential figure, you’re going against the grain of how he’s historically been portrayed by

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Edward O. Wilson

Edward O. Wilson, one of the world’s preeminent biologists, is the author of more than twenty-five books, including Sociobiology, the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Ants, and the best-selling novel Anthill. His latest book is The Social Conquest of Earth. A professor emeritus at Harvard University, he lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.

From Wilson's Q & A with Liz Else:
You've recently been involved

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Tiffany Baker

Tiffany Baker has a graduate degree in creative writing from UC Irvine and a PhD in Victorian literature.

Her latest novel is The Gilly Salt Sisters.

From her Q & A at The Debutante Ball:
Talk about one book that made an impact on you:

I first read Jane Eyre when I was nine years old, and at various points in my life, I’ve gone back to read it again. When I was kid, I was mesmerized by Jane’s

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Megan Mayhew Bergman

Megan Mayhew Bergman grew up in Rocky Mount, North Carolina and attended Wake Forest University. She has graduate degrees from Duke University and Bennington College. Her stories have appeared in the 2010 New Stories from the South anthology, Ploughshares, Oxford American, One Story, Narrative, PEN American, The Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, Greensboro Review, and elsewhere.

Her new

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Chad Harbach

Chad Harbach is the author of the novel The Art of Fielding.

From his Q & A with Noah Charney at The Daily Beast:
Do you follow a favorite baseball team, and any specific player?

I’ve been a Brewers fan since birth. My favorite player is the great Vinny Rottino.

What is your earliest baseball memory?

My earliest memory of playing (and maybe my earliest memory, period) is of my dad pitching me

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Alan Gilbert

Alan Gilbert is a John Evans Professor in the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. He is the author of Marx’s Politics: Communists and Citizens, Democratic Individuality, and Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy?

His new book is Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence.

From Gilbert's Q & A at 3:AM Magazine:
3:

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William Dietrich

William (Bill) Dietrich's historical and action thrillers have been translated into 28 languages. Dietrich is also a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, nonfiction author, and college professor of environmental journalism. He has won the Washington Governor Writer's Award and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award.

His Ethan Gage Adventures feature an imperfect American adventurer who is

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Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins is co-author (with the late Mickey Spillane) of Lady, Go Die!

From his Q & A with J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet:

J. Kingston Pierce: In an opening note in Lady, Go Die!, you explain that you didn’t immediately recognize this novel as Spillane’s second, unfinished book, but thought that it was an early version of his 1966 Hammer work, The Twisted Thing. How long did it

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Julianna Baggott

Critically acclaimed, bestselling author Julianna Baggott also writes under the pen names Bridget Asher and N.E. Bode. She has published seventeen books over the last ten years.

After receiving her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Baggott published her first novel, Girl Talk, which was a national bestseller and was quickly followed by Boston Globe bestseller The Miss

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Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde (a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize), and the New York Times bestsellers The Falls (winner of the 2005 Prix Femina

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John Irving

John Irving's latest novel is In One Person.

From his Q & A with Joy Shan at the Yale Daily News:
Q. You come from an academic background: college and then an MFA program at the University of Iowa. What made you decide to get an MFA instead of just jumping into writing?

A. I think the choice to go to an MFA program in creative writing was guided by the fact that I was a very young father. I

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Alex Grecian

After leaving a career in advertising, working on accounts that included Harley-Davidson and The Great American Smokeout, Alex Grecian returned to his first love: writing fiction. He created the long-running and critically acclaimed graphic novel series Proof, which NPR named one of the best books of 2009. The series stars John “Proof” Prufock, a special-agent-sasquatch.

One of the Proof

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Alex Gilvarry

Alex Gilvarry is a native of Staten Island, New York. He has been a Norman Mailer Fellow and has written for The Paris Review, among other publications. He is the founding editor of the website Tottenville Review, a book review collaborative.

From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant is his debut novel.

From Gilvarry's Q & A with Doretta Lau for the Asia Wall Street Journal:
What inspired you

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Adam Haslett

Adam Haslett is the author of You Are Not A Stranger Here, a short story collection, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and won the PEN/Winship Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Zoetrope, and Best American Short Stories as well as National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts.

His debut novel Union Atlantic was published in 2010.

From

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Hesh Kestin

Hesh Kestin is a recovering foreign correspondent who reported on local wars, global business and exotic mayhem in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for such publications as Forbes, Newsday and the Jerusalem Post, and wrote for US magazines as diverse as Playboy and Inc.

His novel The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats is Stephen King’s recommended read for World Book Night.

From Kestin's Q & A with

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Gary Krist

Gary Krist's new book is City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago.

From his Q & A with Julie Zarlenga of the Gapers Block Book Club:

In the early 1900's things were changing across America as a whole. Why did you choose Chicago as a focus for this change?

I'm really interested in big cities and how they change over time, how they evolve, because it's always

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Anne Enright

Anne Enright's novels include The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, and The Forgotten Waltz. She lives in Dublin, Ireland.

From her Q & A at the Independent:

Choose a favourite author, and say why you admire her/him

Alice Munro. It's difficult to sum up why in one sentence. She's the kind of writer who lasts for a lifetime. I've been reading her for 30 years and she is as

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Edward Humes

From a Q & A with Edward Humes, author of Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, at Frugalista:
You always hear people talk about recycling, but that has its own set of issues. Is recycling a sham? Tell us more about “refusing” trend.

Recycling is no sham — it’s an important piece of the war on waste. It’s just not the best piece. Recycling itself creates waste — it’s a kind of last resort

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Lyndsay Faye

The beginnings of the New York City Police Department in 1845 are at the heart of Lyndsay Faye’s series debut, The Gods of Gotham.

From her Q & A with Lenny Picker at Publishers Weekly:

Where did this book come from?

I began with the concept of day one, cop one—the very first New York City police officer on his first day on the job. I knew nothing about the topic, and thus rolled up my sleeves

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Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick is the author of the novel Foreign Bodies and numerous other acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Man Booker International Prize. Her stories have won four O. Henry first prizes.

From her April 2012 Q & A at the Guardian:

How did you come to write Foreign Bodies?

A

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Jassy Mackenzie

Jassy Mackenzie's third South African crime thriller featuring P.I. Jade de Jong is The Fallen.

From her Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:

Q: For people who haven't read your books, what can you tell us about your main character, private investigator Jade de Jong?

A: Although she'd been away for 10 years in the first book, she is quintessentially a South African. She

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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 Q & A with Julianna Baggott:
What kind of child were you,

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Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel is the bestselling author of numerous novels, including Wolf Hall, which won the 2009 Man Booker Prize, and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.

From her Q & A with Foyles:
What is it about this period of history, and Thomas Cromwell in particular, that fascinates you?

The reign of Henry VII is so gruesomely fascinating that it's irresistible material for novelists and dramatists,

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Alan Ehrenhalt

Alan Ehrenhalt was the executive editor of Governing magazine from 1990 to 2009. His new book is The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City.

From Ehrenhalt's Q &A with Will Doig at Salon:
The revitalization of cities seemed to come out of nowhere, but you write that it was actually the result of deliberate efforts and policies. For instance, Chicago laid the groundwork for a

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Jerrold Seigel

From a Q & A with Jerrold Seigel, author of Modernity and Bourgeois Life: Society, Politics, and Culture in England, France and Germany since 1750:
What inspired you to research this subject?

I've long thought that making sense of the relationship between modernity and bourgeois life is crucial to understanding how the world we live in came about, how it differs from the past forms of life out

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Madeline Miller

Madeline Miller grew up in Philadelphia, has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Latin and Ancient Greek from Brown University, and has been teaching both languages for the past nine years. She has also studied at the Yale School of Drama, specializing in adapting classical tales for a modern audience. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Miller's first novel is The Song of Achilles.

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Beatriz Williams

Beatriz Williams is the author of the new novel, Overseas.

From her Q & A with Martha Schulman at Publishers Weekly:
You say the novel combines the two worlds you know best, Wall Street and the British experience in WWI. How did you come to know early 20th-century Britain?

I’ve been studying it all my adult life, starting from when I read Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. The war was such an

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Dan Barden

Dan Barden is the author of the novels John Wayne and The Next Right Thing.

From his Q & A with Jennifer Haupt:
Jennifer Haupt: I love how you wove in the themes of recovery in your novel. How did you go about your research?

Dan Barden: I am an alcoholic who doesn’t drink. I’m an alcoholic in recovery. I hate the way that sounds, but there’s no better way to describe it. I drank way too much

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Peter Behrens

Peter Behrens is the author of The O'Briens and The Law of Dreams (which received Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and was published around the world to wide acclaim) and Night Driving, a collection of short stories. His stories and essays have appeared in many publications, including The Atlantic and Tin House. Honors he has received include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship

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Gary Krist

Gary Krist's new book is City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago.

From his Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:

Q: What happened in Chicago in 1919?

A: You had a city going from a state of high optimism about the future to the brink of civil collapse and martial law.

The war was over, the influenza epidemic was tapering off, the

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Aimee Bender

Aimee Bender is the author of four books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a New York Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was a Los Angeles Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, and the newly released The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010).

From her interview at

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