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PW Talks with Vaddey Ratner
How does a person make sense of the brutalities of genocide? Can unspeakable atrocities be transformed into something redemptive?
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PW Talks with Walter Mosley
Acclaimed and prolific writer Walter Mosley believes science fiction writers are a cut above the rest: “That’s my experience—the people I know who are science fiction writers are the smartest of all the writers I know in general. And I think that science fiction readers are the freest.”
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PW Talks with Gordon Korman
Gordon Korman has written more than 70 middle-grade and YA novels over the past 25 years, and with total sales of more than seven million copies, he has obviously accumulated quite a hefty fan base. His latest novel, Ungifted, will be released by HarperCollins’s Balzer + Bray imprint with a 75,000-copy first printing. The story centers on Donovan, a middle-school student who accidentally gets placed in the gifted and talented program and shares his own distinctive gifts with the other kids in the program.
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PW Talks with Molly Ringwald
Actress Molly Ringwald has been writing fiction for as long as she can remember. Best known for her coming-of-age movies, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and The Breakfast Club, she tells Show Daily she is looking forward to her fiction debut, When It Happens to You: A Novel in Stories, due in August from It Books, an imprint of HarperCollins (3339, 3340).
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PW Talks with Joe Kanon
That Istanbul was a magnet for spies in the 1940s made it a perfect location for Joe Kanon’s latest thriller, Istanbul Passage (Atria Books), not to mention that Kanon fell in love with the place as a tourist because of its physical beauty and many layers of history: “More than 2,000 years of being at the center of events,” notes Kanon. He tells Show Daily, “Where you set a book is really important in what happens to people’s lives. It also begins to suggest part of the story—things that would happen there and not happen somewhere else.”
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PW Talks with Marla Frazee
Marla Frazee, who won Caldecott Honors for her own A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever and for All the World by Liz Garton Scanlon, received accolades for her book illustration early on—as a fourth-grader, in fact. Her best friend announced that she wanted Frazee to draw pictures for a story she’d written. “She was very precocious and told me that if I wanted to illustrate children’s books, I should start with hers, ” recalls Frazee. “So I did. And someone at our school sent it to the California State Fair, and we won an award. We were asked to make a duplicate copy for the school library, and every time I saw it on the shelf, I was so happy that I was a published author!”
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PW Talks with Junot Diaz
One might assume that Junot Díaz, who burst onto the literary scene with his short story collection, Drown, and followed that up with the Pulitzer Prize–winning conquest that was The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, would be an old hand at negotiating the madness that is BEA. In fact, this year will be his maiden voyage to the convention about which he has heard only rumors, and not even salacious ones at that. With the eagerness and enthusiasm of a boy about to ride a bike for the first time, Díaz tells Show Daily, “I heard that everyone wanders out with a huge pile of books.... It’s like finding a library that is giving all their books away.”
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PW Talks with Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver, of Poisonwood Bible and Lacuna fame, requested her publisher not to be too explicit about a major plot point of her new novel, Flight Behavior (HarperCollins), in which a fearsome and unexplained vision is revealed in the opening chapter to the book’s protagonist, Dellarobia Turnbow. “Requested” is too weak a word for Kingsolver. “I begged them not to put it on flap copy or the cover,” she says. The result of some environmental catastrophe caused by climate change, Dellarobia’s vision fuels the events of the novel, as people in her small Southern town try to make sense of what she witnessed, offering up explanations religious, secular, scientific, and magical.
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PW Talks with Stephen Colbert
Attendees at today’s Adult Book and Author Breakfast can expect a heaping helping of truthiness alongside the traditional morning fare. When emcee Stephen Colbert takes the microphone, he’ll likely have witty things to say about the other speakers—Junot Díaz, Barbara Kingsolver, and Jo Nesbø. But he’ll also be plugging two new books of his own from Grand Central Publishing: his latest for adults, America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t, and his children’s title, I Am a Pole (And So Can You!).
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Sleep Tight: PW Talks with David K. Randall
In Dreamland, David K. Randall takes us on a magical mystery tour of sleep.
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Lagos, Mississippi: PW Talks with Sefi Atta
In her new novel, A Bit of Difference, Nigerian-born author Sefi Atta, now a resident of Mississippi, puts
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Every Sort of Mischief: PW Talks with Toni Blake
In Willow Springs, the fifth contemporary romance set in charming Destiny, Ohio, Blake finds a perfect—and perfectly improbable—match for the small town’s lonely matchmaker.
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Footnoting the American Revolution: PW Talks with Robert Sullivan
In My American Revolution, Robert Sullivan offers a nostalgic, witty, and always informative topographic retrospective of the sites pertinent to the Revolutionary War.
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Quixote in Louisiana: PW Talks with James Lee Burke
In James Lee Burke’s Creole Belle, the New Iberia, La., deputy sheriff and his best friend, Clete Purcel, take on corrupt politicians, oil men, and a possible Nazi war criminal.
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Q & A with Susane Colasanti
In YA novelist Susane Colasanti’s new book, Keep Holding On, protagonist Noelle is neglected at home and bullied at school. She endures a lot of abuse before she finds the strength to “start shaping my life into the one I want.” Here, Colasanti talks about her own difficult teen years, how her book fits into the current conversation about bullying, and what she’s doing to support today’s teens.
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The FBomb--from Blog to Book: PW Talks with Julie Zeilinger
Julie Zeilinger -- creator and editor of FBomb, a feminist blog aimed at teens and young adults -- is currently an undergraduate at Barnard College. But term papers and finals haven’t stopped her from penning A Little F’d Up: Why Feminism Is Not a Dirty Word, a readable and informative pop culture guide to feminism for a new generation.
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"Content Is King, but Platform Is Queen’: PW Talks with Michael Hyatt
In Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World (Thomas Nelson), Michael Hyatt offers advice not only on developing influence via social media but on monetizing that influence and turning it into a sustainable, long-term career. Hyatt was CEO of Thomas Nelson for six years and now serves as its chairman. He blogs at www.MichaelHyatt.com.
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Double-crossing the Nazis: PW Talks with Ben Macintyre
The D-Day landings might not have succeeded without the espionage affair related by bestseller Ben Macintyre in Double Cross.
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Bringing People Together: PW Talks with Beth Harbison
Bestselling author Beth Harbison tells the story of adorably flawed private chef Gemma Craig and her rocky path to true love in When in Doubt, Add Butter.
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A Finn in a Strange Land: PW Talks with Lars Kepler
The pseudonymous Swedish couple who write as Lars Kepler pit their independent-minded detective, Joona Linna, against weapons dealers in The Nightmare.
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