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Exploring Alternate Paths: David Nasaw
David Nasaw didn’t plan to write biographies, he says, sitting in his office in the history department at the City University of New York Graduate Center. By the time he began his book on William Randolph Hearst in the mid-1990s, he had already written histories of American public amusements and public schools, as well as a book called Children of the City.
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After 'The Shack,' a Crossroads: William Paul Young
The author of the sleeper mega-hit The Shack has an intense yet self-deprecating manner for someone whose debut book sold 18 million copies. “I didn’t need a next book,” he says, in a sit-down chat this summer. “I have everything that matters to me.” Young has written a new novel, though; Cross Roads, with an announced first printing of one million, will be published by FaithWords on November 13.
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Rhinemaiden: Mary Sharratt
“At first I wrote about completely invented characters. Then I started writing about real-life historical figures—some of this stuff, you can’t make up if you tried.” Mary Sharratt’s fifth novel, Illuminations (Houghton Mifflin, Oct.), weaves fiction into the historical record to flesh out the life and times of the 12th-century mystic and philosopher, Hildegard von Bingen who, this year, 833 years after her death, was declared a saint in the Roman Catholic Church.
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The Ultimate Culinary Tour of Latin America
Maricel Presilla's "Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean" is a major coup in the crowded cookbook category, with authentic recipes and Presilla's personal interpretations of traditional recipes.
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Monsters, Myths, and Music: Seanan McGuire
Three days into the annual World Science Fiction Convention, at 9:30 on Sunday morning, when most attendees are drooping with exhaustion, Seanan McGuire is almost unforgivably perky, even though the Hugo Awards ceremony is less than 12 hours away.
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Taking on the Vote
Armed with sarcasm and independence, journalist Greg Palast pounds the pavements of America—however ugly they are—like the hard-boiled PIs of pulp novels, searching for truth and justice. His practices are unconventional in today’s journalism, not to mention in investigative reporting. His newest book is Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps (Seven Stories) with a 50-page comics section by Ted Rall.
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A Bootlegger's Story: Dennis Lehane Takes on Prohibition-Era Boston
The epic new novel from Boston crime master Dennis Lehane spans from Prohibition-era Boston to Batista's Cuba.
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From South-Central to Noir Cool: Gary Phillips
Gary Phillips, 57, is the epitome of the noir cool he writes about in his mysteries, looking like a linebacker with an attitude—until something makes him laugh, and the big grin on his face reveals the genial guy inside.
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Religion Update Fall 2012: In Profile
Conversations with four religious authors.
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'We the People' and Beyond: Akhil Reed Amar
“I think scholars often end up just writing for other specialists,” says Akhil Reed Amar, “and I think that’s particularly unfortunate when we’re talking about scholars of the American Constitution.” He produces a well-thumbed, pocket-sized copy from his jacket.
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Sleuthing in Feudal Japan: Laura Joh Rowland
A criminal investigator of unswerving integrity, tackling crimes that often have implications for the stability of his government, set in feudal Japan—this is the premise, and unusual time and setting, that Laura Joh Rowland has chosen for her long-running Sano Ichiro series, which began with 1994’s Shinju (Random House). In September, Minotaur will publish the 16th entry, The Incense Game, probing the poisoning of three women in the aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake.
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Taking Care of Business: Jonathan Evison
Jonathan Evison’s new novel, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (Algonquin, Aug. 28), is as much a cathartic exercise in healing as it is an intimate story of the unusual bond between Ben, a charmingly pathetic character who’s lost his wife, children, and home, and Trev, a “tyrannical” teenager with the debilitating disease of Duchenne muscular dystrophy, for whom Ben works as a caretaker.
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Guns and Roses: Junot Diaz
“I like human endings,” says Junot Díaz. “For me, human endings are ones that represent the full complexity of what I consider human experience. For me, the consequences of surviving sometimes give you great pause.”
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First Fiction 2012: Lisa Lang: Unusual Utopian
Lisa Lang’s debut novel, Utopian Man (Allen & Unwin, dist. by Trafalgar Sq.), is a fictionalized biography of the real-life Edward William Cole, who in Melbourne, Australia, in the 1880s established Cole’s Book Arcade, a wacky institution with more than one million books, a Chinese tea room, wall-to-wall mirrors, monkeys, and more.
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First Fiction 2012: Richard Kramer: A Talent for Writing Teens
“Except for a stint scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins while in high school and a job right after college as a singles director on a cruise ship, my day job for nearly 40 years has been the same as my night job,” says Richard Kramer, “which is writing in one form or another.”
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First Fiction 2012: Scott Hutchins: A Literary Turing Test
The Turing test of artificial intelligence, invented by Alan Turing and introduced in 1950, is meant to determine whether machines can “think.” Neill Bassett, the briefly married and recently divorced hero of Scott Hutchins’s debut novel, A Working Theory of Love (Penguin Press) is battling the Turing test and trying to create the world’s first sentient computer.
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First Fiction 2012: Eduardo Halfon: A Grandfather's Inspiration
Eduardo Halfon’s English-language debut, The Polish Boxer (Bellevue Literary Press, Oct.), about a grandson investigating his grandfather’s past, was translated from the Spanish by a team of five literary translators who split the book’s 10 chapters among themselves. Halfon also had input—although he was born in Guatemala, he left the country when he was 10 years old and now, at 40, divides his time between Nebraska and Guatemala. “English is my second and perhaps stronger language,” he says, “but I write only in Spanish.”
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First Fiction 2012: David Abrams: War as a Laughing Matter
Debut war novel Fobbit (slang for a U.S. Army employee stationed at a Forward Operating Base) has won accolades from Matterhorn (Atlantic Monthly, 2010) author Karl Marlantes and Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone (Putnam/Amy Einhorn, 2011) and a starred review in PW. The book will be published by Black Cat. Assistant editor Peter Blackstock, who acquired the title from Nat Sobel at Sobel Weber Associates, says, “Fobbit exposes the banalities of daily life during the war in Iraq and the aggressive bureaucracy at the heart of the American war machine.”
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First Fiction 2012: Kevin Powers: Bonds of War
Two young soldiers tightly bonded since their days in basic training hang on through a battle in Iraq in Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds (Little, Brown)
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First Fiction 2012: Amanda Coplin: Sitting Under The Apple Tree
Amanda Coplin didn’t live through the experiences of the two sisters in her debut novel, The Orchardist (Harper). After all, Coplin is only 31 years old, and the events take place at the turn of the 20th century. But the setting is autobiographical. Coplin explains, “The novel is set in and around Wenatchee, Washington, where I was born. I spent a lot of time in my grandparents’ apple, cherry, and pear orchards growing up, and this landscape affected my imagination in a major way. The novel is sort of a love letter to that place, and an homage to my grandfather, who was my best friend when I was a child.”
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