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Paradise Regained
"Nothing is better to me than the unmediated meeting with the natural world. But I also know that writing about it, having to make something coherent and real for a reader who isn't there, is a powerful lens turned onto what you think you already know."
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Why I Write: Tina Chang
When I began writing poems, I was struck by how much a poem looked like the physical structure of a house. Each word seemed like a window, each comma a blade of grass, each line was a slow locomotive passing through a quiet town.
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A Classical Poet, Redux: PW Profiles Anne Carson
"I just really have no idea what I'm writing most of the time," she says, claiming, "I still feel most at home making things into blocks of prose"; "there are all these kinds of fun available in poetic forms, and I experiment with them from time to time, but I never feel very adept at any of that." Her legions of fans would disagree.
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Zombies on Steroids
Former soap opera actor Brown pits zombies against a high school football team of drug-addicted hooligans in his explosive debut, Play Dead (Reviews, Mar. 1). Do you have a background in football? I went to a very football-heavy school in Texas. I wasn't a player, but I shot video for the booster club and the coaches, so I mostly observed it through a viewfinder.
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Q & A with Carrie Ryan
Carrie Ryan is the author of The Forest of Hands and Teeth (2009) and The Dead-Tossed Waves (Mar.), both from Delacorte. Ryan is currently crossing the country on tour to celebrate the publication of her new novel. PW caught up with her via phone on her Lansing, Mich., stop.
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Make Mine Yours
At last week's Copyright Clearance Center “OnCopyright 2010” seminar at the Union League Club in Manhattan, a roomful of lawyers, publishers, artists, and creators gathered for a discussion, aptly titled “The Collision of Ideas.” Over the course of the day, panelists hit all the high notes of a media business struggling with rapid, disintermediating, technology-fueled ch...
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A Girl Gets Off a Boat...
Jean Kwok, once a Girl in Translation herself, relives her arrival in America with her debut novel.
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Q & A with Ally Carter
In Ally Carter's Heist Society, a crew of teenage thieves—led by Kat, youngest in a clan of accomplished heistmasters—gets down to the sticky business of retrieving valuable paintings stolen from an Italian mobster. Kat has strong incentive for recovering the masterpieces: to clear the name of her father, prime suspect in the theft, and to return the paintings, plundered by the Nazis decades before, to their rightful place. Launching a series, this latest work by the author of I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You and subsequent Gallagher Girls novels was published by Disney-Hyperion with a 200,000-copy printing. Carter talked to Bookshelf about why—and how—she dunnit.
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Why I Write: Mark Kurlansky
To answer the question of why I wrote my newest book, The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macorís, I first have to ask why I write at all. I have thought a great deal about why I spend usually more than 50 hours a week alone in a room having a conversation with myself.
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Jennifer Gilmore: A PW Profile
If you work in publishing, you probably know Jennifer Gilmore as the former publicity director at Harcourt. She left that job not long after her first novel, Golden Country (Scribner, 2005), was published. Shortly after that, the publishing industry underwent a series of changes, in some ways making it almost unrecognizable to someone who hasn't been paying attention.
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Watching the “Detectives”
In Kira Henehan's debut, Orion, You Came and You Took All My Marbles, a group of detectives may or may not be detectives, and what they may or may not be after is a mystery.
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Q & A with Elisha Cooper
Author of such picture books as Ballpark, Dance!, and Beach, Elisha Cooper has transported young readers to numerous child-pleasing locales. His latest book takes them to yet another. Due from Orchard, Farm follows the workings of a Midwestern farm over the course of a year.
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Howard Cruse Returns with a New Edition of 'Stuck Rubber Baby'
When Howard Cruse's first and only original graphic novel, Stuck Rubber Baby, was published by DC Comics' Paradox Press imprint in 1995, it garnered great reviews, where it could get them, before it silently slipped away from a world that wasn't quite ready for it.
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Rediscovering One's Self
"I was used to taking care of writers. I've worked with writers my entire life, and I thought I knew how hard it was, but I didn't really know!"
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From Underground to Random House
"I wanted to work with something really organic, the whole way through. I wanted to make that art my own."
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Why I Write
Why do I write? Because nothing makes me feel more alive than when I’m in the field doing research—in this case for a book called Planet Barbecue.
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Q & A with Ricky Gervais
British comedian, actor, and writer Ricky Gervais's Flanimals and More Flanimals, illustrated by Rob Steen, introduced a cast of absurd creatures, which are now taking on additional zany dimension in Flanimals Pop-Up, due from Candlewick. Gervais spoke with Bookshelf about this and his earlier book projects.
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Silver Linings
God of War (Atria, 2008), Silver's breakout novel, was nominated for an L.A. Times Book Award in fiction. Why did she return to the short form for her latest, Alone with You? "I love dealing with the issue of compression in stories, and how to tell a story with as few moves as possible."
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Second City Sins
"Chicago is going to inflict its pain, take its pound of flesh, and tell you about it all day. If you substitute politicians and politics for 'da Bears' and football, you'll have an idea of how the power brokers in this city operate."
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