-
War and Politics by Proxy
More Than It Hurts You, the latest from the author of Chang & Eng, uses a child’s helplessness to examine adult horrors.
-
Genocide, Through Children’s Eyes: PW Talks With Uwem Akpan
Uwem Akpan’s debut, Say You’re One of Them, is a rich collection of short stories set in different African nations and narrated by children who suffer the brutality of genocide, religious conflict, poverty and street life.
-
Questions of Travel
After setting her first four books in and around the city, consummate New Yorker Joan Silber changed course. Ideas of Heaven (2004, Norton), her fifth book, introduced variations in time and place, which Silber reprises for her latest, The Size of the World, also from Norton.
-
Anjali Singh
Anjali Singh isn't a baseball player, but it can be said that she hit a home run in her first big league at bat. In 2003, before she'd settled into her first editorial job at Vintage Books, Singh managed to acquire an unusual autobiography by a young Iranian woman living in France. Even more unusual the book, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, was a work of comics and told the story of Satrapi's childhood--a young Iranian girl attracted to Western culture growing up under conservative Islamic strictures during the Iranian revolution.
-
Master of Crisis and Crime
Thomas H. Cook, the prolific crime writer, says that he’s always believed that crime writing “can be meditative. It’s all about resonance.” Cook’s work—from his breakthrough 13th novel, Edgar-winning The Chatham School Affair (Bantam, 1996), to his 22nd, and latest, Master of the Delta (Harcourt)—explores moral dimensions that reach far beyond the crime.
-
Master of Alternate History
A brief profile of Harry Turtledove, hailed as a master of alternate history fantasy novels, to accompany our print feature on the alternate history genre.
-
The Fun of Making It Up: PW Talks With Mohammed Hanif
In A Case of Exploding Mangoes, his sardonic, satirical debut novel, a BBC World Service journalist fabricates several solutions—some plausible, some not—to the real-life mystery of who assassinated Pakistani dictator Mohammad Zia ul-Haq in 1988.
-
Keeping Your Enemies Closer: PW Talks With Bill Emmott
In Rivals, the former editor-in-chief of the Economist takes on Asia’s giants and examines the historical roots and global implications of China, India and Japan competing for resources and influence.
-
Lists, Wishes and a Little Help from a Reader
Recently I had the great pleasure of reading an advance copy of Twenty Wishes by Debbie Macomber. She agreed to join me for a chat about her work, her life and her own wishes. I wondered how a magnolia writer from the Lowcountry of South Carolina would find common ground with a Seattle-based coffee-bean author.
-
Karen Thomas
When Karen Thomas, executive editor at Grand Central Publishing, started in the book industry 16 years ago as an editorial assistant at Berkley, publishing was very different. “Editors had a lot more time to sit and edit, work with authors, shape and formulate ideas,” she admits. “When you used to see an editor with a door closed, it meant they were editing.
-
Odd Job
In the United Kingdom, Sebastian Faulks is a household name. His novel Birdsong, a WWI saga of combat and love, has sold more than two million copies in the U.K. and Commonwealth alone, and in Great Britain it's the kind of must read most writers would kill for.
-
Q&A with Philip Pullman
Children's Bookshelf spoke with Philip Pullman about his new novel, Once Upon a Time in the North (Knopf).
-
Positively Fortune Street
Like London’s streets, there are no straight lines in Livesey’s latest novel, The House on Fortune Street (reviewed Jan. 7). How did you come up with the book’s fractured form, where Dara MacLeod comes into focus from others’ limited perspectives? Hers was a story I wanted to tell, but no one character was in a position to tell it.
-
Not Writing What You Know
Elizabeth George, who stunned followers of her Thomas Lynley series by killing off the Scotland Yard inspector’s wife in With No One as Witness (2005), shows Lynley struggling to carry on in Careless in Red (Reviews, Mar. 10). Why did you choose to give Lynley an aristocratic background? This was entirely for my own amusement.
-
Q&A with R.L. Stine
R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series debuted in 1992 and went on to sell more than 350 million copies in 32 languages. Stine returns to this chilling landscape in Goosebumps HorrorLand, a 12-book series launching with Revenge of the Living Dummy and Creep from the Deep, due from Scholastic with a 100,000-copy first printing each.
-
Leap of Faith
Carlos Acosta has traveled from poverty in Cuba to international stardom as a dancer. In No Way Home, he tells how he did it.
-
A Clergyman's Daughter
The decor of the restaurant Honor Moore has selected for our meeting near her apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side is tasteful, understated, warm—adjectives that readily apply to the author herself. “By nature I'm a discreet person,” says Moore, but in her new book, The Bishop's Daughter (Norton), a memoir of her father, the late Episcopal bishop Paul Moore, she explores a highly personal topic—her father's hidden homosexual life—and the often painful impact on her and others close to him that resulted from his bisexuality.
-
A Weird Social Ecosystem
Chris Knopf’s third novel set in the Hamptons, Head Wounds, continues the adventures of his hard-drinking, existentialist hero, Sam Acquillo.
-
Leap of Faith
Carlos Acosta has traveled from poverty in Cuba to international stardom as a dancer. In No Way Home (Reviews, Feb. 18), he tells how he did it. How did your father motivate your dance career? He wanted me to have a better future, so he enrolled me in ballet school. I was into street activities and wasting time with my mates.
-
The Last McCourt: A PW St. Patrick's Day Web Exclusive Q&A with Alphie McCourt
Come November, Alphie McCourt, brother of Frank and Malachy, will have his own memoir, A Long Stone’s Throw [published by Sterling and Ross]
Browse archive by date:
