Adam C. English

Adam C. English is Associate Professor of Religion at Campbell University where he teaches on the philosophy of religion, constructive theology, and the history of Christian thought. His new book is The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus: The True Life and Trials of Nicholas of Myra.

From his Q & A with Randy Dotinga at The Christian Science Monitor:
Q: Who was Saint Nicholas in real life?

A: The

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Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides's first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published in 1993.

From his 2009 interview with Guy Raz for NPR:RAZ: Where were you in life when you wrote "The Virgin Suicides"? What was going on?

Mr. EUGENIDES: I was working at the Academy of American Poets as an executive secretary and earning a very small salary and living out in distant Brooklyn. And I, you know, I decided to

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Ben Mattlin

Ben Mattlin is the author of Miracle Boy Grows Up: How the Disability Rights Revolution Saved My Sanity.

From his Q & A at The Daily Beast with Jay McInerney:
What’s the genesis of Miracle Boy? Didn’t you first try an autobiographical fiction approach?

You’re exactly right! I was afraid to tell my story directly, wanted to couch it in a fanciful (and imitative) yarn of sex and intrigue. That

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Ken Jennings

Ken Jennings broke game show records in 2004 with his unprecedented seventy-four game, $2.52 million victory streak on Jeopardy!. Jennings’s book Brainiac, about his Jeopardy! adventures, was a critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller, as was his follow-up, Maphead. He is also the author of Ken Jennings’s Trivia Almanac.

Jennings’s new book is Because I Said So!: The Truth Behind the Myths

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Richard Russo

Richard Russo's new memoir is Elsewhere.

From his Q & A with Irene Lacher at The Los Angeles Times:
Why your first memoir now?

In a sense I would have preferred that it be never. I'm a perfectly happy novelist. I love to invent things. But in the months after my mother's death, which was about five years ago, she was very much on my mind and also visiting my dreams as well, which made it feel

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Alexander Rose

Alexander Rose, a New York historian, is the author of American Rifle: A Biography (2008).

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

Q: When did the rifle first appear?

A: The rifle made its first appearance in Europe in the early-modern era, around the 16th century, but there were exceedingly few of them. German immigrants to Pennsylvania in the early 18th century

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Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon's latest novel is Telegraph Avenue.

From his Q & A with Irene Lacher at the Los Angeles Times:
I know that you always strive to entertain. Do you think "entertainment" has become a dirty word among purveyors of high culture?

Sure, and with good reason, in the sense that most of what gets labeled "entertainment" is really terrible. We get the entertainment we deserve. To me, being

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Caroline Kennedy

Caroline Kennedy, the only living child of JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy, wrote the foreword to Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy.

From her Q & A with Irene Lacher at the Los Angeles Times:
Why did your father start taping? He wasn't making tapes at the beginning of his administration.

Right. They don't really start until almost halfway through — July '62. So no

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Karen Thompson Walker

Karen Thompson Walker is author of the debut novel The Age of Miracles. In the novel, an 11-year-old girl wakes up one morning to the news that the earth’s rotation is slowing.

From her Q & A with Liesl Schwabe at Publishers Weekly:
Did you always know that Julia, an adolescent girl, would be your narrator?

I did. I always had a sense of her voice. She has an adult perspective on her childhood,

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Jonathan Odell

Jonathan Odell is the author of the acclaimed novel The View from Delphi, which deals with the struggle for equality in pre-civil rights Mississippi, his home state. His novel The Healing (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) explores the subversive role that story plays in the healing of an oppressed people.

From Odell's Q & A with Lois Alter Mark:

Lois Alter Mark: I loved everything about The Healing --

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Oliver Sacks

The famed neurologist and author Oliver Sacks's new book is Hallucinations.

From his Q & A with Noah Charney at The Daily Beast:
Please recommend a book that makes science accessible to trade readers, and that has influenced your own work.

One book that was very influential for me was published in English in 1968, and it’s called The Mind of a Mnemonist, by A. R. Luria. When I started to read

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Kim Barnes

Kim Barnes's books include two memoirs, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country—a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize—Hungry for the World, and the novels Finding Caruso and A Country Called Home.

Her latest novel is In the Kingdom of Men. It is the story of a young American woman who follows her husband to the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. In the American compound she meets women

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Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His debut story collection, Drown was a national bestseller and won numerous awards. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao “a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible

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James Lee Burke

In James Lee Burke’s Creole Belle, the New Iberia, La., deputy sheriff Dave Robicheaux and his best friend, Clete Purcel, take on corrupt politicians, oil men, and a possible Nazi war criminal.

From the author's Q & A with Patrick Millikin for Publishers Weekly:
Many of your books have had classical antecedents. Was there a particular classical model for Creole Belle?

I made use of some Greek

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Jessica Fellowes

Jessica Fellowes is the author of The World of Downton Abbey and The Chronicles of Downton Abbey: A New Era.

From her Q & A with Molly Driscoll at the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: During the process of writing the two books, how often were you on the set when the seasons were being filmed?

A: When I was doing the first book, I wasn't writing it until after the first series wrapped, because

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Ben H. Winters

Ben H. Winters is the author of several novels, including the New York Times bestseller Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and the middle-grade novel The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman, an Edgar Award nominee and a Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of 2011. Winters’ other books include the science-fiction Tolstoy parody Android Karenina, the Finkleman sequel The Mystery of the

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Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey

Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey are the authors of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America.

From their Q & A at the University of North Carolina Press website:
Q: Why does Jesus's race matter in America?

A: Race matters in every facet of American life. And religion matters deeply in American life, as well. The two collide when we think about Jesus's race. There, race

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Eric Jay Dolin

Eric Jay Dolin is the author of Leviathan: The History of Whaling In America, which was chosen as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe, and also won the 2007 John Lyman Award for U. S. Maritime History; and Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. A graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, where he received his Ph.D. in

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Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich's The Round House, her 14th novel, won the coveted National Book Award for Fiction.

From her Q & A with Sara Nelson:
What is the most important book you never read?

There are so many but one would be Ulysses. I've never been able to forge all the way through it. It's one of those that I've got on a shelf and it stares at me. It says, "You're going to pick me up." Maybe someday.

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David Nasaw

David Nasaw's new book is The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy.

From the author's Q & A with Randy Dotinga at The Christian Science Monitor:Q: What drew to you to the story of this man whose children include a president, an attorney general, an ambassador and one of the most storied senators of all time?

The family asked me to do it.

I met with Senator

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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 David Daley at Salon:
Each chapter in [Far From the Tree] presents a very unique kind of

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Marc Myers

Marc Myers is the author of Why Jazz Happened.

From his Q & A with Scott Timberg:Part of me wonders why it took so long for someone to do this. But: What made you want to write this kind of atypical, outside-in musical history? Did you have a specific historian or historical school in mind as a model?

Most jazz histories have been written from the inside out—meaning the writer’s perspective and

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Ayana Mathis

Ayana Mathis's debut novel is The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. From Mathis's Q & A with Miwa Messer of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program:
What was your inspiration for the novel, why did you want to write about these people?

I grew up in unusual family circumstances: I had lots of aunts and uncles, but my mother and I had very little contact with them after I was ten or so. My

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Timothy Ferriss

Tim Ferriss' latest book is The 4-Hour Workweek.

From his Q & A with Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog:Speakeasy: Why is there is a chapter on guns in what is essentially a cooking skills cookbook?

Mr. Ferriss: ‘The Wild’ section of the book is about reconnecting with ingredients, including foraging and hunting. I wanted a clean kill for my first deer, which

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Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. His latest novel is Silent House.

From the author's Q & A with Anna Metcalfe at the Financial Times:
Who would you most like to sit next to at a dinner party?

García Márquez or Borges or Dostoevsky – and the most charming or intellectual woman in the world.

* * *

What keeps you awake at night?

I have the legacy of my father and his

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Debra Dean

From a Q & A with Debra Dean about her latest novel, The Mirrored World:
Q: Your new novel, The Mirrored World, involves the story of St. Xenia, a Russian holy figure. How did you learn about her, and why did you decide to write a novel based on her life?

A: When I finished The Madonnas of Leningrad I thought I was going to follow it with a novel set in my hometown of Seattle. Best laid plans.

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John and Colleen Marzluff

John M. Marzluff is a highly regarded scientist known for his work on the ecology and behavioral biology of jays, crows, ravens, and their relatives. He is professor of wildlife science, College of the Environment, University of Washington, and the author of four books, including In the Company of Crows and Ravens and Gifts of the Crow. Colleen Marzluff trained in wildlife biology, worked as a

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Linda Geddes interviewed Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Antifragile: How To Live in a World We Don't Understand, for Slate. Part of their dialogue:Linda Geddes: In your new book you talk about things being "antifragile." What do you mean exactly?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: When you ask people what is the opposite of fragile, they mostly answer something that is resilient or unbreakable—an

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Matthew Quick

Matthew Quick is the author of The Silver Linings Playbook, now a major feayure film starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. From Quick's Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:
The Silver Linings Playbook is that rare bird that is not only an extraordinary book but a fabulous movie as well. Were you anxious about how they were going to transform the book?

Thank you! So glad you enjoyed both.

I

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Jenny White

Jenny White's new book is Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks. From her Q & A with Today's Zaman:What does Islam mean in Turkey?

There are so many different ways of expressing that. There is a female sheikh [Cemalnur Sargut] on Bağdat Caddesi in İstanbul who does not cover her head and attracts a lot of professional women who are secular. The question is why? I think it's because if you don't

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Christine Schutt

Christine Schutt's new novel is Prosperous Friends.

From her Q & A with Michelle Y. Burke at HTMLGiant:
Burke: One of the things I admire most about your writing is how it sounds. Your sentences are so rich and lyrical. To what extent are you thinking about sound when you’re writing?

Schutt: I do think about sound. What I want to do is wed sound to scene. What comes first is a picture. I’m

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