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Occupying Democracy: Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco
Individually, journalists Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco have reported from some of the world's most chaotic war zones, including Bosnia, Gaza, and Iraq. In their first book-length collaboration, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (Nation Books, June), Hedges's words and Sacco's pictures form a mosaic portrait of the United States at a low point of economic dysfunction.
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Alias Benjamin Black: John Banville
The Dublin office of John Banville—novelist, screenwriter, critic—is where he writes the literary fiction he’s famed for, Booker Prize–winning The Sea and The Infinities, and more recently, under the pen name of Benjamin Black, the Dr. Quirk mysteries, which are becoming as popular in America as they are in Banville’s native Ireland.
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Religion Update Spring 2012: In Profile
Tracie Peterson: Inspired and Inspiring and more
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A Diamond in the Rough: Peter Lovesey
In 1969, Peter Lovesey’s mystery fan wife, Jax, pointed out a notice to her husband that read: “Macmillan and Panther Books announce a First Crime Novel Competition open to all nationals of the United Kingdom, Commonwealth and the Republics of Eire and South Africa.” Lovesey, a teacher at a technical college, was reluctant to respond although he did have some background in the genre.
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Book Criticizing 'Globe and Mail' Self-Published
When no Canadian publisher was willing to take on journalist Jan Wong’s book criticizing her former newspaper, she had to self-publish.
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Unfettered Imagination: Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones has taught creative writing at the University of Colorado in Boulder for four years, and while he can find his office, he’s not sure of the address. An apt metaphor for a writer who has created a narrator in his latest novel, Growing Up Dead in Texas (MP Publishing), who is ready to take you to a wrapped-up conclusion, but not quite sure how to get you there.
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North of the Border: Richard Ford
Richard Ford leaves Frank Bascombe -- and his longtime publishers -- behind for his highly anticipated new novel, "Canada."
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Materfamilias: Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel—creator of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and author of the lauded 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home and now the new biocomic Are You My Mother?—doesn’t know what to call herself. “I know I’m a cartoonist. The drawing is completely inextricable from my writing,”she says from her home in Vermont. “I do feel, since Fun Home came out, I’ve had to sort of reimagine myself a little bit.”
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Lucky Ticket: Alyson Hagy
“This was not the planned book,” Alyson Hagy says of her third novel and seventh book, Boleto (Graywolf, May). “I was working on another novel and sitting in a lecture and this book just came to me,” she says, about remembering an encounter she once had with a ranch hand.
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Poetry Profiled 2012
Some of this year’s best poets are the newest. PW talked to three poets publishing their debut volumes this year, and one whose highly anticipated second collection will appear.
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Inside Out: Anouk Markovits
Anouk Markovits never intended to write about the Satmar Hasidic community in which she grew up, but then came 9/11, and Markovits thought, “I’ve had personal experience with fundamentalist environments.” Still, writing about that world didn’t come easily. Whether fiction or memoir, most books set in these environments are written by and about those who, like Markovits, have left, and that wasn’t the story she wanted to tell. Which raised the question: “Could I possibly write a book about the people who stayed?”
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Emily St. John Mandel: Once a Dancer, Now a Noir Phenom
While The Lola Quartet, Emily St. John Mandel's third novel, has plenty of criminals, guns and double-crossings, there’s also love among characters who once bonded through jazz and now hover one step away from disaster.
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Of Reversals and Reunions: Deborah Copaken Kogan
The first piece of writing Deborah Copaken Kogan remembers being proud of appeared in the 1998 Red Book on the occasion of her 10th Harvard College reunion.
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Can Jon Klassen Top 'Hat'?
A lot of things astonished Jon Klassen about the reception given his first picture book, I Want My Hat Back: hearing Daniel Pinkwater read it aloud on NPR, being invited to talk about it with Martha Stewart on TV, learning it had become an Internet meme.
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Sacre Bleu!: Christopher Moore
Walking through San Francisco’s Legion of Honor Museum’s impressionist art collection and a special exhibit on Camille Pissarro with Christopher Moore, who’s as irrepressible in person as he is in his novels, the conversation ricochets from thoughtful comments about the paintings on the walls to laugh-out-loud anecdotes about the artists—including Pissarro—who populate Moore’s 13th novel, Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d’Art (Morrow).
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Firsts in Fiction
Debut novelists can be counted on to bring fresh voices, diverse story lines, and singular characters.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Vaddey Ratner: Holding onto Hope
Vaddey Ratner’s journey to writing In the Shadow of the Banyan (Simon & Schuster) begins with silence. When she was five years old, the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia. An estimated two million people died between 1975 and 1979 in the genocide—including all the members of Ratner’s family except her and her mother. They managed to get to a refugee camp over the Thai border when Ratner was nine. She was practicing a self-imposed silence when an immigration official forced her to tell her story or risk being sent back to Cambodia.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Shehan Karunatilaka: The Universal Language of Sports
Shehan Karunatilaka was born in Sri Lanka in 1975 and describes growing up in Colombo “amidst bombs and curfews,” the kind of language the colorful characters in his debut, The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (Graywolf, May), might use. The novel—which recently won the $50,000 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature—tells the story of an aging sportswriter with a bad liver who heads out with a friend to search Sri Lanka for the title’s legendary cricket bowler, uncovering secrets about the country and encountering a six-fingered coach and a Tamil Tiger warlord.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Brandon Jones: Exploring the Axis of Evil
The characters of All Woman and Springtime by Brandon Jones (Algonquin, May) are far from his direct experience. Young girls Gi and Il-sun become friends growing up in a North Korean forced-labor camp. Eventually they escape and make it to the U.S., but human traffickers intercede on their journey. Over the course of the novel, which Algonquin compares to Memoirs of a Geisha, the author gets in close not just to the North Korean girls but to those who sell them.
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Firsts in Fiction: Debut Fiction Spring 2012: Regina O'Melveny: A Poetic Renaissance
At first, poet Regina O’Melveny didn’t realize she’d started a novel. She began to write a series of prose poems chronicling strange maladies and gradually puzzled out that they were from a single character’s voice.
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