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The Nomad
In Ana Menéndez's The Last War, an American photojournalist in Istanbul awaits her husband in Iraq, when she receives a mysterious package that triggers memories she's suppressed. You're in Cairo right now. What are you doing there? I'm here on a Fulbright scholar grant for a year, teaching journalism at the American University in Cairo.
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Beginning with an Elegy: Interview with poet Noelle Kocot
The audience—mostly student poets at West Point—was enthusiastic, but Kocot was struck by the kinds of questions they asked after the reading. They were interested in a hierarchical idea of a poetic career: “they didn't have too many questions about the actual poetry. They asked about how to move up in the ranks,” said Kocot.
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Investigating the Strange
In The City & the City (Reviews, Apr. 13), British fantasy author Miéville gives an old-fashioned police procedural a makeover. Most of your novels have been set in secondary worlds like Un Lun Dun and Bas Lag. Why in The City & the City did you opt to use a real-world setting? I'd long been interested in writing a crime novel, and though there's a fair tradition of such novels set...
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Q & A with Margarita Engle
Margarita Engle’s The Surrender Tree marked the second time the Cuban-American poet won the Pura Belpré Award. Her novel tells of the brutality of slavery and war, and the compassion people share despite it. The Surrender Tree was also awarded a 2009 Newbery Honor, the first time the award had ever gone to a Latina author.
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Tasmanian Devil: Richard Flanagan
Richard Flanagan gets attention for his politics and his recent credit as the screenwriter for the Nicole Kidman movie Australia, but the Tasmanian native, whose Wanting is coming out from Atlantic Monthly Press, doesn't crave the limelight. He's much more comfortable speaking about his writing, with a humbleness that almost seems affected until you spend some time with him.
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On the Job
The pop philosopher and litterateur muses on the daily grind in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (Reviews, p. 41). Why the switch from philosophical rumination to reportage on the workplace? My inspiration was Richard Scarry's children's classic, What Do People Do All Day? I wanted to write an adult version, partly because I've enjoyed reading it to my son.
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The Woman Question
NBA finalist Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women (Reviews, Feb. 2) follows several generations of women from the British suffrage movement through 1970s consciousness-raising to the age of Facebook as they struggle against oppression. What inspired you to start the book with Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a woman who starves herself for suffrage? I often write from an image, but I never had that ...
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Twittergirls: Laurie Halse Anderson on Tour
Despite the serious subject matter of her newest novel—teenage anorexia—Wintergirls (Viking, Mar.), there was plenty of fun during National Book Award finalist Laurie Halse Anderson’s recent two-week U.S. book tour, which wrapped up this past weekend. During the tour, Anderson provided her fans with updates from the road via her Twitter stream.
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Universal Westerns: PW Talks with Author Craig Johnson
Craig Johnson’s The Dark Horse is his fifth contemporary mystery featuring Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire. What would you want everyone to know about Walt’s home state of Wyoming? It’s diverse, and even if there are only 535,000 of us, it’s not as square as it looks, culturally or physically.
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The Original Joy of Cooking: PW Talks with Author Richard Wrangham
In Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (Basic), Richard Wrangham dishes up an intriguing theory of human evolution. On behalf of sushi haters like me, tell our readers how nature has fitted humans to eat cooked food. Biologically, we are not well-adapted to raw foods. Our teeth and stomachs are small compared to those of chimpanzees or gorillas, because we don’t eat ...
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Q & A with Francisco X. Stork
Francisco X. Stork’s novel, Marcelo in the Real World (Scholastic/ Levine) is about a young man with Asperger’s syndrome who experiences “the real world” for the first time while working one summer at his father’s law firm. So far it has garnered five starred reviews, and foreign rights have been sold in nine languages.
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Paradise Lost: A Conversation with Justine Hardy
Veteran journalist Hardy (Bollywood Boy) follows the fluctuating fortunes of the Dar family living in war-torn Kashmir in In the Valley of Mist. You've been a journalist in South Asia for 20 years. How did you become interested in Kashmir specifically? I wanted to understand what had happened to this idyll of lakes and mountains and easy religious co-existence.
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Steal This Painting: A Conversation with Myles J. Connor
Master art thief Myles J. Connor Jr. reveals the tricks of his trade in The Art of the Heist. What is your most memorable heist? The Rembrandt [from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts], no question about it. Not only was the painting the most valuable piece I ever stole, but the heist itself—going into the MFA in broad daylight and taking the painting off the wall—was th...
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Soul of a Salesman: A Conversation with Clancy Martin
You may think twice about buying that Rolex after reading How to Sell, Clancy Martin's hilarious and devastating debut about an impressionable Canadian teenager who learns some hard lessons about life, love and diamonds in 1980s Ft. Worth, Tex. How much of the novel is taken from your experience in the jewelry business? An awful lot.
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Q & A with Brent Runyon
Author Brent Runyon talked to Children’s Bookshelf about his transition from autobiographer to novelist, and his new coming-of-age story, Surface Tension (Knopf).
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Finding What Matters: PW Talks to Author Binnie Kirshenbaum
Binnie Kirshenbaum's ninth book, The Scenic Route, a wistful love story played out among the cities and byways of Europe, has a digressive road map all its own What was the inspiration for Sylvia, who narrates your novel? There's a picture of my great-grandmother on the wall in my living room, and one day I realized I didn't know her name, and I had no family left who would t...
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A Thriller With a Conscience: A Profile of Greg Rucka
Greg Rucka doesn’t look like the kind of guy who could kill someone with his bare hands. But any of his characters—bodyguard-turned-fugitive Atticus Kodiak, ex-assassin Alena, British Special Intelligence Services spy Tara Chace—could take you out with one well-placed punch. “A few years ago, people would have said that I look like the people I write about,” laughs Rucka over coffee in Portland, Ore., where he lives with his wife and two children.
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Life After a Plane Crash: PW Talks to Author Robert Sabbag
In Down Around Midnight, Robert Sabbag revisits the plane crash—and the aftermath—he survived 30 years ago.
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The Monday Interview: Robert Goolrick
An interview with Robert Goolrick, whose novel, A Reliable Wife, will be published by Algonquin Books.
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A Cavafy Person: Daniel Mendelsohn
Critic and memoirist Daniel Mendelsohn undertook the Herculean task of translating and annotating all the poems written by the great Modern Greek poet C.P. Cavafy (1863—1933), including his last, unfinished poems, never before published in English. It was a labor of love, and Knopf is publishing the results this month in two volumes.
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