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A Saw and A Screw Gun: PW Talks with Barb Johnson
Hurricane Katrina shut down Barb Johnson's carpentry shop, so she went back to school for her M.F.A. at the University of New Orleans. Her debut collection, More of This World or Maybe Another, deftly chronicles the lives of characters most people would pass on the street with a tinge of wariness.
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Q & A with Richard Peck
Q: When you wrote the short story 'Shotgun Cheatham’s Last Night Above Ground' years ago, did you have any inkling that it would grow into three entire novels?
A: No, I didn’t. I was asked by Harry Mazer to contribute something to a collection of stories about guns and I thought, "He’s going to get too many guy stories, so I’m going to think up a female character." That’s how Grandma Dowdel was born. -
PW Talks With Maggie Anton: Romance Meets Talmudic Scholarship
Maggie Anton is the author of the Rashi’s Daughters trilogy (Penguin/Plume), which includes Book I: Joheved (2007), Book II: Miriam (2007) and, most recently, Book III: Rachel. RBL caught up with Anton at her California home, just before she was headed to the airport to go on tour and just in time for the Jewish High Holidays.
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PW talks with Dennis Lehane
"For this anthology, I wanted authors who are writing noir who don't think it's about a fedora or some ham-fisted tough guy."
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PW talks with Martin Jacques
"The West thinks... that China's rise should be viewed narrowly, as an economic phenomenon—not as something operating according to a different political, cultural, philosophical template."
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Q & A with Julia Donaldson
Q: In 'Stick Man,' you introduce a humble stick that is taken far from home and almost becomes kindling. How did you invent this unusual hero? A: It was two things coming together. In my book 'The Gruffalo’s Child,' the child drags a stick doll everywhere, and that must have sparked it. And I fully remember my own children, 20-odd years ago, loving sticks. When we would go out for a walk, they would find a stick, and it wouldn’t always become a weapon. A stick could be anything to anyone.
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Cooking the Books with Holly Hughes
When Holly Hughes began editing the Best Food Writing series 10 years ago, the term “locavore” wasn’t a part of the foodie vocabulary and no one knew what the omnivore’s dilemma was. As Da Capo prepares to publish Best Food Writing 2009, Hughes spoke with PW about how food writing has changed over the past decade, why food writers are wonderful people, and why Marshmallow Fluff deserves a serious essay.
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PW Talks with Gunter Grass
Fifty years ago, Nobel Prize laureate Günter Grass wrote what's become a classic novel of the 20th century, The Tin Drum. He shares his thoughts on the new translation by Breon Mitchell, German fiction, politics and that famous eel.
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Q & A with Shannon Hale
Q: What made you decide to write Forest Born? A: I really just go where the story takes me. It’s funny—with every one of the Bayern books, I thought each one was a stand-alone. The character of Enna was so different from Ani in Goose Girl, and after writing about Ani who was so quiet, the idea of writing about a character so fiery, so outspoken and dangerous was what attracted me to Enna Burning.
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The PW Interview: Kathy Griffin
PW talked to comedian and self-proclaimed D-lister Kathy Griffin, whose new book, Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin (Ballantine) is about botched plastic surgery, the brilliance of Kitty Kelley tell-alls and outselling "that hack” Dan Brown.
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PW Talks with Charles Cumming
Cumming's latest spy thriller, Typhoon, considers a clandestine CIA plot to destabilize China on the eve of the Beijing Olympics, but the story starts in Hong Kong in 1997.
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Why I Write: Gary Giddins
How can a nation produce a musical tradition as fecund and flowing as the one erected on the genius of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker and treat it as though it doesn't exist or exists only in the past or only for those “in the know”?
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Cooking the Books with Ari Weinzweig
In Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon, Ari Weinzweig sings the praises of cured pork belly. Weinzeig says “pretty much everybody connected to the food world has got the bacon bug,” and the author, business owner and bacon lover tries to explain why bacon seems to have such a hold on eaters, and also offers some advice for booksellers on surviving the recession.
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PW talks with Jess Walter
National Book Award—finalist Jess Walter (for The Zero) takes on the financial meltdown in his blazing new satire, The Financial Lives of Poets, about an out-of-work journalist's illegal plan to get out of debt.
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PW Talks with Nevada Barr
In 13½, Barr’s stand-alone thriller, two formerly abused children meet and fall in love 40 years later, only to discover that “[t]he things that terrorize you are those you don’t see coming.”
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PW Talks with Michael Sandel
"Figuring out the meaning of justice, freedom, equality and democracy took longer than I anticipated."
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A Crowning Achievement
Florence Parry Heide published her first picture book in 1967. At the time, she was looking for a creative outlet as the youngest of her five children headed off to school. To date, Heide has more than 80 titles for children to her credit. One of her best-known works, The Shrinking of Treehorn, illustrated by Edward Gorey, struck a chord with both readers and critics. But Treehorn also found a huge fan in one young illustrator, Lane Smith.
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AUTHOR Q&A: David Jeremiah: Live Confidently
As the founder of Turning Point, a global broadcast and print ministry, David Jeremiah has made it his business to tie the Bible into what’s happening in the world. His new book is Living with Confidence in a Chaotic World.
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PW Profiles Jeannette Walls: Truth in Nonfiction... and Fiction
Jeannette Walls says the first time she read the finished version of her bestselling memoir, The Glass Castle (Scribner, 2006), “I was like, 'Dang, I got a weird life! Nobody's going to be able to relate to this! Everybody's going to think I'm just a poor white trash loser.' But the shocking—and gratifying—thing was how many people have understood what I was trying to say.”
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PW talks with A.S. Byatt
"I wrote to the great fairy story expert, Jack Zipes, and asked him if he could see a connection between fairy stories and socialism, and he wrote back that the fairy story was a form that attracted socialists—it was connected to utopias."
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