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When Worlds Collide
In The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, Parag Khanna explores emerging world economies.
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'On Both Sides': Elizabeth Strout's 'Olive Kitteridge'
“I have such an ambivalent relationship to Maine,” Elizabeth Strout says, although her novels are all about life in her home state.
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Not a Moment Too Earley
Four years after being prematurely tapped for Granta's Best of the Young American Novelists club, Tony Earley finally released his debut novel, Jim the Boy (2000), a Depression-era pastoral about a 10-year-old and his North Carolina family. Eight years on, Little, Brown is releasing the sequel, The Blue Star (Reviews, Dec.
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Szechuan and the City
In The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (Reviews, Dec. 3, 2007), Jennifer 8. Lee takes readers on a culinary journey into Chinese-American cuisine. How did your search for the fortune cookie’s origins evolve into this broader social and cultural history? Cookies weren’t the main story in the beginning.
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Less Mainstream, More Significant
A major presence in British science fiction since 1987, Iain M. Banks is best known in the U.S. for his novels of the posthuman interstellar civilization called the Culture. The eighth Culture novel is the blood-spattered and intrigue-laden Matter (Reviews, Jan. 21). You've been publishing Culture novels for 20 years now.
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Children's Bookshelf Talks with Lois Lowry
A Q&A with Newbery Medalist Lois Lowry, for her new novel The Willoughbys.
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Count of Monte Cristo Redux
While serving time in prison, bestselling author Jeffrey Archer reread Alexander Dumas’s classic novel of revenge, The Count of Monte Cristo, which became the springboard for A Prisoner of Birth (Reviews, Jan. 14). What new impressions did you gain from rereading The Count of Monte Cristo? Many years ago, I wrote a novel called Kane and Abel, and a critic was kind enough to compare it to ...
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A Life of Comic Disappointment
In her first book, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, Crosley, a publicist at Vintage, explores urban life in a collection of essays (Reviews, Nov. 26). Did your position in the book world make you think differently about publishing your first book? It's daunting, knowing how the burger gets made. Of course I secretly hope my book will transcend everything I know about how rough the publishing industr...
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Children's Bookshelf Talks with Meg Cabot
The YA author talks about Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls, her first book for middle-grade readers.
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Anything But Nice:PW Talks with Arnon Grunberg
Dutch literary wunderkind Arnon Grunberg’s bio reads like a gonzo Horatio Alger story: dropped out of school at 17, wrote a prize winning novel by age 23, followed that with a couple more prize-winners and rocked the Dutch literary establishment with a pseudonym scandal. His newest novel, The Jewish Messiah, is out from Penguin Press. It’s about the good-intentioned if deranged quest of young Xavier Radek, the grandson of a dead SS officer, who takes it upon himself to save the Jews. What could go wrong?
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Talk to the Animals
Nim Chimpsky is Elizabeth Hess's recounting of the ill-fated attempt to teach a chimp American Sign Language—and the issues it raises about our treatment of animals. This experiment took place in the 1970s. Why has it taken so long for Nim's story to be told? This story was really swept under the rug.
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Loving and Leaving L.A.
Like her first two books, Nina Revoyr's new novel, The Age of Dreaming, takes place in Los Angeles. This time she goes back to the riotous early years of film.
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The Force of Literature
The Lebanese novelist follows the acclaimed Gate of the Sun with Yalo, tracking a soldier’s descent into criminality.
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Running to Freedom
James McBride’s memoir, The Color of Water, has become a modern classic, and an adaptation of his WWII novel, The Miracle at St. Anna, is being filmed by Spike Lee. McBride’s latest novel, Song Yet Sung, takes readers back to America’s dark history.
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Hajdu's Comic Turn
Growing up in Phillipsburg, N.J., David Hajdu (pronounced HAY-doo) drew a comic strip for his high school newspaper and soon began contributing illustrations to the newspaper in nearby Easton, Pa. His interest in cartooning continued in college during the 70s, and he entered New York University's film school with an eye toward animation.
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Stage, Screen and now the Story
Filmmaker and performance and Web artist Miranda July conquers yet another genre—the short story. In your stories and in your film Me and You and Everyone We Know, many of your characters are sad, lonely, awkward and somewhat ill-prepared for the world. Why are you drawn to these kinds of characters? That's how I feel a lot of the time.
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Doo Wop, the Music of the Streets
DJ Bruce Morrow—Cousin Brucie to listeners—sits in his decidedly 1950s West Village townhouse, a curvy, lighted jukebox in one corner, and a wax replica of a retro malt shop meal—fries, hamburger and milkshake—on a table. Morrow is tall and welcoming, and his voice resonates as if he's on the radio as he talks about his new book, Doo Wop: The Music, the Times, the Era.
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The End of Easy?
On October 10, Little, Brown published Blonde Faith, Walter Mosley’s 10th and possibly final novel to feature Los Angeles investigator Easy Rawlins. Did you once say that the Easy Rawlins series would run five or perhaps seven books? I messed around with that—sometimes I said nine. What changed? There were more books to write—there was more to say.
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PW talks with Dennis Kucinich
Presidential Candidate Dennis Kucinich added "author" to his list of credentials (senator, congressman, mayor, reporter, et al.) with the Phoenix Books release of The Courage to Survive, a stirring, lyrical memoir that details his working-class childhood in a large, struggling Cleveland family.
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Real Life Is (Not) Boring
D’Souza’s Whiteman won the 2007 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His second novel, The Konkans, explores a contemporary Indian-American family struggling with the pride and pain of their Goan heritage. This feels like a very personal book.
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