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The Bank Robber's Son Makes Good: PW Talks with Deni Bechard
In 2007, Deni Béchard’s novel, Vandal Love, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book, but the Canadian-American author was missing from the U.S. scene until Milkweed Editions released Béchard’s novel (starred by PW) as well as a brand-new memoir called Cures for Hunger. In it, Béchard reveals his own novel-worthy tale: how the son of a French-Canadian bank robber grew up to be a globe-hopping journalist and award-winning author.
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A Tribute to His Mom and Books: PW Talks with Will Schwalbe
Mary Anne Schwalbe was an educator who worked at Harvard University and the Dalton School in New York City and spent 10 years building libraries in Afghanistan. She loved books, a passion shared by her son, Will, a former editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books and founder of Cookstr.com. When his mother was diagnosed with cancer, Schwalbe began accompanying her to chemotherapy treatments. During one of those trips, a casual conversation about what she was reading evolved into a book club with two enthusiastic members.
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PW Talks with Justin Cronin
Even though Justin Cronin writes about vampires wreaking havoc in a postapocalyptic world, what he’s really interested in, he says, is exploring human relationships. The Passage, a 2010 release that was one of the most talked-about books at that year’s BEA, is “very much a novel about people in a familial structure,” as groups of humans fleeing the vampires who’ve taken over band together into communities and attempt to recreate some semblance of normal life for their families. Cronin is particularly interested in how relationships between parents and their children evolve in such a setting because, he explains, “If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what’s worth saving about it.”
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PW Talks with Lee Woodruff
A chance phone call inspired Lee Woodruff, a contributor to CBS This Morning, to write her first novel. The author, with her journalist husband, Bob, had written the bestselling In an Instant, which chronicles the family’s path to recovery in the aftermath of Bob’s traumatic brain injury in Iraq. Since then, Lee has become the go-to person for brain injury information, which is why a friend called about an accident in which a 17-year-old drove a car into a young child riding his bike. The child subsequently recovered from a brain injury. “What struck me was the randomness of the act,” Woodruff tells Show Daily. “That one ‘in an instant’ moment is probably why it hit home, because my moment was when I picked up the phone and got the news about Bob. And as a mother I wound up thinking, ‘God, this could have so easily happened to my 17-year-old son.’ And look at all of those lives that were affected by that one moment.”
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PW Talks with Leonard Goldberg
After nearly a decade’s hiatus, Leonard Goldberg, known for his bestselling Joanna Blalock medical thrillers, is back in the writing saddle with Patient One, the first in a new series from Midnight Ink, featuring a trauma nurse and an emergency room physician. Inspired by the first Die Hard movie, in which actor Bruce Willis scurried around crawl spaces to thwart terrorists, the physician author tells Show Daily, “I wondered what would happen if terrorists took over a hospital where the president or some high-ranking dignitary was, and in the crawl space was a physician who had at one time been in the special forces.” He adds, “I wanted people to see that there are people in the civilian world—doctors and nurses—who sometimes are called upon to do things outside their realm, but they do it and function in a heroic capacity that equals in every way the heroics they do in medicine.”
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PW Talks with Joseph Holland
Joseph Holland, attorney, entrepreneur, and longtime Harlem community activist, is at BEA to promote his book on Harlem history, From Harlem with Love: An Ivy Leaguer’s Inner-City Odyssey (Lantern Books).
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PW Talks with Lynn Povich
If there’s one character in Mad Men that journalist Lynn Povich can relate to, it’s Peggy Olson, the secretary who is promoted to copywriter at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce just as the 1960s women’s movement is picking up steam. “There were a lot of us who were like Peggy,” Povich says. She started out as a secretary at Newsweek’s Paris bureau in 1965, before returning to New York City in 1967 to work at Newsweek’s headquarters. During the 25 years Povich worked at the magazine, she was a researcher and a reporter before being named Newsweek’s first female senior editor in 1975.
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PW Talks with Patrick McDonnell
Since 1994, Patrick McDonnell has created the Mutts comic strip, which has earned him numerous awards and now appears in more than 700 newspapers in 20 countries. The strip’s stars—Earl the dog and Mooch the cat—have also appeared in a handful of picture books. McDonnell has also written and illustrated other children’s books, among them Me... Jane, a portrait of a young Jane Goodall, which is a 2012 Caldecott Honor book.
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PW Talks with Courtney Sheinmel
Being a good aunt often brings sweet rewards. For Courtney Sheinmel, it unexpectedly brought a publishing contract from Sleeping Bear Press for her books starring eight-year-old Stella Batts, whose parents own a candy store in their California suburb. “I had a young niece who complained that I never wrote anything she could read,” Sheinmel explains. “The first Stella Batts book is dedicated to her. It was initially written for a very private reason, and I never thought it would become a book. But then I thought, ‘I may as well get paid for it!’ ”
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PW Talks with Jen Lancaster
One might assume that since she’s written several bestsellers (memoirs Such a Pretty Fat, Pretty in Plaid, My Fair Lazy, and her first novel, If You Were Here) and sold over a million books, Lancaster has been to BEA before. Yet this is her first time here: until now, her annual tour schedule (she writes one book per year!) always conflicted with BEA’s dates.
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PW Talks with Kevin Anderson
Little did bestselling sci-fi writer Kevin Anderson know that when he acknowledged the popular rock band Rush for inspiring his first novel, Resurrection, Inc., back in 1988, he’d be collaborating with the group’s percussionist and lyricist, Neil Peart, in a novelization of one of their CDs. The author sent copies of his first book to Mercury Records, and a year later, a seven-page letter from the group’s drummer showed up in his mailbox. They’ve been friends ever since.
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PW Talks with James Meek
He’s an award-winning, internationally bestselling author, but this is his first visit to BEA. So do make James Meek feel welcome when he signs his forthcoming novel, The Heart Broke In, for Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the Macmillan booth.
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PW Talks with Heather Gudenkauf
For New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Heather Gudenkauf, writing her latest novel, One Breath Away (Harlequin Mira), required a journey to her past. During her senior year at the University of Iowa, a former student who had been passed over for an award entered a classroom and killed five people before turning the gun on himself. “That shooting was an event that has always stayed with me,” says Gudenkauf, who would graduate with a degree in education and spend the next 20 years as a teacher.
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PW Talks with Selden Edwards
As difficult as it was for Selden Edwards to write his first novel, The Little Book, which had a 30-year trajectory of multiple rejections, being put away, and then rewritten, his second novel, The Lost Prince (Dutton) presented different kinds of challenges. Edwards tells Show Daily, “The first one is built on unfulfilled promise—there’s a lot of yearning and ambition—but no expectations. The second one is the opposite because everybody is saying, ‘Okay, now what are you going to do?’ And there’s the nagging fear that when it comes out, people are going to say, ‘Well, it’s certainly not as good as the first one,’ and of course there’s the accusation of being a one-trick pony.”
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PW Talks with Frank Deford
Award-winning journalist Frank Deford has been covering the wide world of sports since the 1960s, most consistently for Sports Illustrated but also for NPR, HBO, Newsweek, the National Sports Daily (which he headed for its short but legendary run), and the book-reading public, in titles like The Old Ball Game and Big Bill Tilden. His newest, Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter (Atlantic Monthly Press), is more than a memoir—it’s a gold mine for sports fans, including more than 50 years of insider stories, as well as a thumbnail history of sportswriting perfect for those dreaming of a career like his. What it isn’t, Deford tells Show Daily, is an exercise in self-scrutiny: “I’m a writer. A writer’s memoir is not so much about himself as about the people he has known.”
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PW Talks with Melissa Francis
Melissa Francis is no stranger to the spotlight. As a successful child actor in the 1980s, she appeared in many commercials and television shows, becoming best known for her stint as Cassandra Cooper Ingalls on the beloved hit Little House on the Prairie. Cut to adulthood, where a variety of roles in TV journalism have led to Francis’s current spot as an anchor for the Fox Business Network. But despite all that time spent under the lights and in the public eye, only now, in her new memoir, Diary of a Stage Mother’s Daughter (Weinstein Books), is Francis telling the very private story of the less-than-perfect side of her childhood.
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PW Talks with Joy Bauer
For four years, NBC’s Today nutritionist, Joy Bauer, has produced a series on the show featuring weight-loss success stories about individuals who lost 100 pounds or more and have kept the weight off. They are members of her Joy Fit Club, and her latest book—appropriately titled The Joy Fit Club—showcases 30 of those individuals (who now number close to 150) from all walks of life. “I picked a sampling of people from around the country—males, females, different ages, different backgrounds—so that whoever was reading would be able to relate to at least three or four stories,” Bauer tells Show Daily. “It shows you people who have overcome every obstacle, from financial constraints to serious medical scares and conditions, from time restraints to juggling multiple jobs, as well as problematic family abuse and dysfunction.”
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PW Talks with R.L. Stine
After giving kids goose bumps for two decades—and continuing to do so—R.L. Stine taps into grown-up fears in Red Rain, his second adult hardcover horror novel (after 1995’s Superstitious). In the novel, which Simon & Schuster’s Touchstone imprint will publish with an announced first printing of 150,000 copies, a travel writer impulsively adopts two orphaned boys—with horrific results.
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PW Talks with Warren Adler
Warren Adler has achieved more than most writers could dream of—he has sold 12 of his books to the movies, including the blockbuster hit The War of the Roses. But at 84, he’s still hungry for more. “I have a tremendous need to keep writing. I’m not going to go into the wilderness without a fight,” he declares in a firm and steady voice that belies his octogenarian status. “A lot of guys that started out with me in publishing novels have disappeared from the scene,” he adds. “I’m like a long distance runner—I just keep at it.”
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PW Talks with Maggie Stiefvater
Maggie Stiefvater’s fans got a first peek at the launch installment of her four-book series, the Raven Cycle, at BEA on Tuesday, when Stiefvater signed ARCs of The Raven Boys, due from Scholastic Press with a 150,000-copy first printing. Mystery, romance, and the supernatural come together in the novel, which introduces a boy on the hunt for a vanished Welsh king and a girl who has been told that if she ever kisses her true love, he will die.
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