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Amiri Baraka: Fierce Fictions, Radical Truths
As the car carrying PW's interviewer proceeds through Newark, N.J.'s black neighborhoods, one recognizes many of the street names--Hillside, Central Avenue, Newark Street--that crop up in Amiri Baraka's fiction.
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Fall 1999 Flying Starts: Karen English: A Testament to Perseverance
The inspiration for Karen English's historical novel, Francie (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), came, ironically, from a rejection letter. English had originally written it as a picture book about an African-American girl helping her mother with the laundry in a boarding house in the pre-Civil Rights South. But a thoughtful rejection letter from an editor suggested that the story read more like the beginning of a novel.
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Fall 1999 Flying Starts: Kristen Balouch: Music and Computers Help Tell a Story
There's no denying that computers are increasingly becoming a bigger part of everyday life. It's no surprise then, that a new generation of talented artists has adopted these machines as a medium for creative expression.
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Fall 1999 Flying Starts: Lynne Rae Perkins: Writing from Experience
When Lynne Rae Perkins signs copies of her first novel, All Alone in the Universe (Greenwillow), she inscribes "Eat pie and be kind," and draws a piece of pie. This is inspired by one of the final scenes of her book, in which her main character, Debbie, tries to imagine her perfect life and sees herself eating pie. "It's just a nice thing to do," Perkins says. So is being kind, she says. Perkins wants children who read this inscription--and her book--to realize that "there are a lot of people out there who are willing to care about you, but that you have to be willing to care about people, too."
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Fall 1999 Flying Starts: Warren Linn: A Book Born of a Friendship
Sarah and I met in kindergarten," answers artist Warren Linn when asked how he hooked up with author Sarah Weeks to create Happy Birthday, Frankie, which HarperCollins published under its Laura Geringer imprint.
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Fall 1999 Flying Starts: Laurie Halse Anderson: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
One night, Laurie Halse Anderson awoke to the sound of a child crying. After checking on her own two children and finding them asleep, she realized that what she had heard was a nightmare in her own head.
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Fall 1999 Flying Starts: Rebecca Bond: A Combination of Talents
I was wrapped up in stories from as far back as I can remember," says Rebecca Bond, author-illustrator of Just Like a Baby (Little, Brown).
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Michael Lewis: Seeking the Soul of Silicon Valley
"I was looking for the Valley's Gatsby, someone who really represented the values of the place."
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Nikki Giovanni: Three Decades on the Edge
Nikki Giovanni: "I don't answer to the bestseller Gods...I answer to the ancestral Gods."
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Spring 1999 Flying Starts: Amy Walrod
To hear Amy Walrod tell it, her "flying start" as a children's illustrator has been a long time coming. "I had a difficult couple of years there," says the 1995 Rhode Island School of Design graduate, whose quirky paint-and-paper collages animate James Howe's Horace and Morris but Mostly Dolores (Atheneum, Mar.).
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Spring 1999 Flying Starts: Jennifer Holm
The idea for Jennifer Holm's novel Our Only May Amelia (HarperCollins) emerged from a Christmas present. Six years ago, while unpacking an old suitcase in her grandmother's house, Holm's Aunt Elizabeth found a diary kept by Holm's grand-aunt Alice Amelia Holm when she was a teenager in the early 1900s, living in what is now the state of Washington. Elizabeth typed and circulated the diary as a present to family members a few months later at Christmastime. To Holm's surprise, the diary "wasn't any different from what I would have written when I was that age. It got me thinking what it would be like to grow up as I did with brothers but out in the middle of nowhere in a wilderness at a very exciting time."
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Spring 1999 Flying Starts: Jonathan Frost
Jonathan Frost was in junior high when he made up his mind to be an artist. It wasn't until over two decades later, however, that he turned his hand to children's books, with the publication of Gowanus Dogs (FSG/Foster).
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Spring 1999 Flying Starts: Karen Romano Young
Like the illustrious vehicle in Karen Romano Young's fresh and funny novel, the framework for The Beetle and Me (Greenwillow) had been around for awhile and just needed some tuning up. While in high school, Young had written and illustrated a picture book called The Blue Volkswagen, starring a boy named Daniel and his father, who traveled to another planet littered with broken down cars that needed fixing. The father-son pair will sound familiar to those who've read The Beetle and Me. The titular VW's color may have changed from blue to purple, the setting may be on this planet, and Daniel and his father may have moved from leading to supporting roles, but the author's love of the vintage Beetle remains constant.
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Spring 1999 Flying Starts: David Almond
When David Almond's novel Skellig (Delacorte, May) appeared last year in the author's native England, his publisher, Hodder Children's Books, had to go back to press after only four days. And when Skellig won the Whitbread Award, it looked like an overnight sensation--but Almond's success as a novelist was almost 20 years in the making.
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Spring 1999 Flying Starts
Five first-time children's authors and illustrators talk about their spring debuts.
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David Foster Wallace: In the Company of Creeps
Sunday evening in Normal, Ill., David Foster Wallace and PW are lost somewhere near the Lingerie department of the local K mart, on the lookout for audiocassettes.
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Albert Murray: Conditioned to Deal with the Blues
Random House is publishing a bumper crop of new and backlist works by novelist and critic Albert Murray, Harlem's pre-eminent man of letters.
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An Irish National Treasure: PW Talks With Maeve Binchy
Maeve Binchy is a beguiling and irrepressible storyteller. Her focus is acute and her smile is genuine. Conversation is an enthusiastic, generous flow of anecdotes and observations, punctuated by quips, queries and conspiratorial asides. Not only is Binchy one to suffer fools gladly -- she would do so graciously.
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When People Really Got Dumb: PW Talks with Gore Vidal
"Talking about books is the last thing I would think to do in real life," Gore Vidal announces near the end of a visit with PW at New York's Plaza Hotel, though he has already offered his opinions about books – his own, including his novel Lincoln (Random House), and others. "That's one of the reasons I don't see many writers," he adds. "They bore me."
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The Making of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club
In a look back at a classic issue of PW, we offer the story of the making of Amy Tan's classic The Joy Luck Club from our July 7, 1989 issue: In Chinese, you don't tell a story, you say it. Recently, 36-year-old Chinese-American Amy Tan said a story to a group of listeners about how she came to chronicle the mothers and daughters of The Joy Luck Club, published by Putnam on March 22.
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