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Shine a Little Light: PW Talks with M.L. Stedman
M.L. Stedman’s debut novel, The Light Between Oceans, puts a young couple on a remote island off the coast of Australia after WWI and tests the limits of motherhood.
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French Hearts and Minds: PW Talks with Marilyn Yalom
In How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance, scholar Marilyn Yalom analyzes matters of the heart in French literature from the 17th to the 21st century.
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Reaching Out to the Other: PW Talks with Kij Johnson
Kij Johnson’s collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees brings her trademark thoughtful, unsettling touch to a wide variety of speculative genres and unusual topics, from ethereal fantasy to hard SF.
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Starting from Behind: PW Talks with Jonathan Kozol
In Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America, Jonathan Kozol traces disadvantaged kids’ struggles as they make their way into adulthood.
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Action, Drama, ALS: PW Talks with Gregg Hurwitz
Nate Overbay, the hero of Gregg Hurwitz’s thriller The Survivor, is a regular guy with an irregular condition: Lou Gehrig’s disease.
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Q & A with Patrice Kindl
After the publication of her award-winning first novel, Owl in Love, in 1993, Patrice Kindl wrote three more well-received YA novels, but Keeping the Castle, a historical-fiction comedy of manners, is her first in a decade.
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Treating Books Badly: PW Talks with Donald Antrim
In Donald Antrim's hilarious debut novel, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, violence is everywhere. A dismembered body must be scatter-buried, books are thrown at Claymore mines in the local park, and a 1:32-scale "Portuguese interrogation chamber" is built in a residential basement. PW talked with Antrim about treating books badly and writing the old fashioned way.
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Jumping Genres, Changing Names: PW Talks to Scott Spencer
"You know, like a lot of guys, I’ve always wanted to live two lives.” So says Scott Spencer, author of 10 novels and a National Book Award nominee who, with his latest work, will finally get his wish. The latest, Breed (Mulholland Books), is a paranormal thriller/horror tale about a pair of wealthy Manhattan parents who, desperate to get pregnant, submit to a frightening procedure that leaves them with a set of healthy twins, but also unsettlingly changed. The book, by Chase Novak, will be Spencer’s 11th piece of fiction, and his first under a pseudonym. PW recently sat down to talk to him about genre tags, the writing life, and the joys of becoming someone else.
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Many Movements: PW Talks with Seth Rosenfeld
In Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power, award-winning investigative reporter Seth Rosenfeld transports readers to the fraught UC-Berkeley campus in the 1960s.
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Funny Girl: PW Talks with Maria Semple
In Maria Semple’s second novel, Where’d You Go Bernadette, once-renowned architect Bernadette Fox has become a recluse in her own home, conversing only with her Microsoft-guru husband, 15-year-old daughter Bee, and a virtual personal assistant in India. Semple talked to PW about the novel's structure and its inspiration.
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Veni, Vidi, Vichi: PW Talks with Marco Vichi
Set in 1963 Florence, Marco Vichi’s Death in August introduces Inspector Bordelli.
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Every Book a Grimoire: PW Talks with Jim C. Hines
In Jim C. Hines’s Libriomancer, librarian Isaac Vainio uses libriomancy to bring characters and items from books into the real world as he battles vampires, romances a dryad, and looks for missing mage Johannes Gutenberg.
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Life After War: PW Talks with Logan Mehl-Laituri
Returning from Iraq and starting seminary was a culture shock. Now Logan Mehl-Laituri is working to bridge the divide between evangelicals and pacifists.
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War Is Hell: PW Talks with John Boyne
Irish novelist John Boyne is best known as the author of the YA novel, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which takes place at Auschwitz during WWII. In his latest novel, The Absolutist, Boyne provides a graphic account of what life was like for British soldiers in the trenches during WWI.
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The Return of the Scorpion: PW Talks with Andrew Kaplan
Andrew Kaplan has followed 1986’s Scorpion with two sequels
this year, Scorpion Betrayal and Scorpion Winter. -
The Age of Exploration: PW Talks with G. Willow Wilson
In her memoir, The Butterfly Mosque, American journalist and graphic novelist G. Willow Wilson described her move to Cairo after college, meeting her future husband, converting to Islam, and learning to
acclimate to a Muslim culture very different from the secular one
she’d grown up in. She turns to fiction with Alif the Unseen, her debut novel. -
Worth the Wait: PW Talks with Michael Chabon
“It’s a family novel,” says Chabon, “revolving around two families that live in Oakland and Berkeley. The husbands are in business together in a used record store called Brokeland Records, and they also play in a band together. Their wives share a practice as midwives. One family is black and the other is white, and we meet them at the end of 2004 as their lives unravel and come together again over the course of about two weeks.” When a retired NFL quarterback, now a wealthy black media mogul, wants to open a mini-mall anchored by an enormous record store, the two families set out to protect their neighborhood from gentrification.
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Risky Business: PW Talks with Francesca Segal
As a book critic herself, she knows what can happen with reviews, but although she claims there is some trepidation, there is also understanding. “There is a human being at the other end who may have had a bad day, filed late, or simply doesn’t like the book very much,” she said. “In my experience as a critic, I know that books that came to me could have gone to someone else that would have loved it. Nevertheless, to be on the other side is humbling.”
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A Name for God to Unite All: PW Talks with Rabbi Wayne Dosick
In The Real Name of God: Embracing the Full Essence of the Divine, just published by Inner Traditions/Bear, Dosick tells how the many aspects of God—simultaneously vengeful and loving, angry and peaceful, militant and kind—are paradoxical and fail to capture the full essence of the being he describes as “perfect.”
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New Yorker Dreaming: PW Talks with Janet Groth
Groth, an Edmund Wilson scholar in her own right, said that she and her late collaborator, David Castronovo, had exhausted their academic subject and were both ready to move on to other things. She tells Show Daily, “I had been thinking about using materials that were in my long-stashed-away journals and diaries, and I thought, ‘Well, everyone who could be hurt by this is dead now, so I’ll do it.’ ”
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