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Kate Atkinson's Gumshoe Develops a Taste for Poetry
"Yorkshiremen don't do emotional problems. They don't get ill. They don't have breakdowns," says British author Kate Atkinson. She had to explain this to the TV production company adapting her series featuring Yorkshireman Jackson Brodie, an ex-cop turned PI, when they were trying to give Jackson a "problem."
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A Man and His Island: Jonathan Evison
On Bainbridge Island, across Elliot Bay from Seattle, novelist Jonathan Evison, 42, is sitting back with a beer in the restaurant his brother-in-law recently opened, contemplating his good fortune: a happy marriage, a healthy son, and a second book.
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Reality, Really: A Profile of Novelist Andrew Foster Altschul
Novelist Andrew Foster Altschul sums up all the Hobbesian viciousness of reality TV in two words: Sarah Palin. "She just embodies that personal ethic of ‘do whatever it takes,' " he says. It's no surprise, then, that the former Alaska governor and would-be veep makes a key cameo in Altschul's second novel, Deus Ex Machina (Counterpoint), a taut meditation on the savagery behind popular shows like Fear Factor and I Love Money.
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Go East, Young Man
It's been a truth universally acknowledged that a young man in pursuit of his fortune travels West. So in 2008, when a New York Times columnist, Anand Giridharadas, observed that not only were India's best and brightest increasingly likely to stay put, but the children of immigrants were being lured back to Chennai and Chandigarh—it caused a small splash (and an e-mail forwarding frenzy) among South Asians.
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The Hit Man: A Profile of Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard is the coolest man in America. He just turned 85, still smokes, likes Mad Men, thinks Stieg Larsson's books are boring, and couldn't care less about social networking. Ask him about e-books and you can't finish the question before he answers: don't know, don't care.
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The Art of Cancer
For Siddhartha Mukherjee, science is an art and art is a science, the two cultures married, literally and figuratively, in his life.
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Fathers and Sons
Unwanted celebrity, dysfunctional family, famous children's books, and coming-of-age are all part of the mix that propelled Charles Elton's debut novel, Mr. Toppit, onto the bestseller list in the U.K., where it was published by Penguin.
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A Literary Imagination Goes Graphic
After publishing Voodoo Hearts, a critically acclaimed short story collection from 2006, Scott Snyder has teamed up with horror master Stephen King and artist Rafael Albuquerque to create American Vampire, a hardcover graphic novel collection of this unusual collaboration that will published by DC/Vertigo in October.
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A Poet for Obama
Imagine getting this impossible assignment: write a poem that hundreds of millions of people will hear and read; make sure all of them can understand it; make it hopeful, but acknowledge the hardship America's undergone in recent years, and in not-so-recent ones; make it reasonably short. You've got, like, a month to work on it: go!
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Tony Hiss Finds the Everyday Extraordinary
Tony Hiss was raised knowing the importance of public service and taught to look at the prices on the menu. Both lessons have served him well: he's a man who uses his position and intelligence, hopefully, to guide the rest of us to an appreciation of the everyday world around us.
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Good Fortune Leads to Great Crime: Louise Penny
In her 2006 debut crime novel from Minotaur, Still Life, Louise Penny's acknowledgments pluck at the heartstrings: "I went through a period in my life when I had no friends, when the phone never rang, when I thought I would die from loneliness. I know that the real blessing here isn't that I have had a book published, but that I have so many people to thank."
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Loaded Questions
After years of professional banishment, controversial historian Michael Bellesiles is back this month with a new book—1877: America's Year of Living Violently (New Press), his first since the scandal over his 2000 effort, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture.
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Prose to Graphic Novel: Audrey Niffenegger & Diana Gabaldon Make the Leap
Novelists known for their time-traveling abilities (or at least their characters') are making a different move in the fall--to graphic novels. Audrey Niffenegger's The Night Bookmobile will be published by Abrams, while Ballantine will release Diana Gabaldon's The Exile: An Outlander Graphic Novel.
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From Addis Ababa to Paris, via Peoria: Dinaw Mengestu
Born in Addis Ababa in 1978, Dinaw Mengestu moved with his mother two years later to Peoria, Ill., to join his father, who had escaped Ethiopia's Communist regime just before his son was born. Mengestu calls his childhood "quintessentially American. Riding my bike, going to Sunday school. Ronald Reagan and solid American values."
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Scott Spencer Turns Up the Heat
Writers are often hesitant to reveal the real people upon whom they model characters, but Scott Spencer enthusiastically, unabashedly, identifies Shep, the rescue dog at the heart of his 10th novel, Man in the Woods (Ecco).
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In Praise of 'Chaos': A Profile of Patrick Ness
Many people who now consider themselves evangelists for Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy initially resisted the first book, The Knife of Never Letting Go, which is narrated by the illiterate but lovable Todd Hewitt, the last boy in a frontier town on a colonized planet, and features a talking dog...
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The Wild West of Benjamin Percy
Benjamin Percy confides that he never dreamed he'd become a writer—much less receive a Whiting Award in 2008.
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Richard Rhodes, the Atom Bomb, and Hedy Lamarr
The Twilight of the Bombs (Knopf) is the fourth and final volume of Richard Rhodes's seminal work chronicling the world's nuclear history, a three-decade journey that began with his 1988 Pulitzer and National Book Award winner, The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
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Spring 2010 Flying Starts: Morgan Matson
Writing YA fiction was a goal from the very beginning for Morgan Matson. "I took a year off from college to work in the children's department at an amazing independent bookstore [Vroman's]," Matson recalls. "That was my introduction to YA. I loved it. I read everything I could. When I graduated I got a job as an editor, then saw that the New School had a Writing for Children's M.F.A. and knew right away it was what I wanted to do."
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Spring 2010 Flying Starts: Jandy Nelson
When Jandy Nelson started working toward her M.F.A. in children's and young adult book writing at Vermont College, her intention was to write picture books. But that changed the very first night of the program.
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