Annie Bostrom, Adult Books Associate Editor at Booklist, recently interviewed Sarah Smarsh about her book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (2018), the sixth Sarah Jessica Parker Pick for Book Club Central. In Heartland, Smarsh recalls her Kansas youth while compiling her families’ histories and turning a journalist’s eye on socioeconomic inequality in contemporary […]
Rick Ollerman remembers the spinning racks of paperback novels and their vivid painted covers. Men with chins like fists and fists like bludgeons, and always a gun in somebody’s hand. And the titles! Time Enough to Die; Devil on Two Sticks; One for Hell. “I was drawn to them because they were colorful,” Ollerman says […]
Middle-grade and young adult readers know and love S. A. Bodeen for her imaginative stories of adventure and survival—shipwrecks, doomsday bunkers, and dystopian human experiments abound. The Tomb, her tenth novel, follows 13-year-old Kiva after she emerges from virtual reality and finds herself aboard a spaceship. Earth is gone, and she traverses space with some […]
Early in her writing career, which began with the publication of The Diabolical Baron in 1987, Mary Jo Putney began testing the traditional boundaries of historical romance. She tackled topics like alcoholism and domestic abuse, set her stories in a wide range of locales from China to Indonesia, and even added a dollop of magic […]
Minnesota-based mystery writer William Kent Krueger is the bestselling author of the Cork O’Connor mystery series, as well as the conspiracy thriller The Devil’s Bed and the historical coming-of-age mystery Ordinary Grace. His work has earned five Minnesota Book Awards, back-to-back Anthony Awards, as well as Dilys, Edgar, Barry, and Macavity awards for Best Novel, and his last […]
The ominous disappearance of a 13-year-old girl from an English village is the catalyst for Jon McGregor’s remarkable novel in linked stories, The Reservoir Tapes, originally broadcast on the BBC and out this week in the U. S. from Catapult. I talked with him about writing for radio, village life, and fascination. MICHAEL CART: Would you describe […]
Spill Zone, the first volume in a series of the same name that began last year, marked Scott Westerfeld’s first foray into comics and was resoundingly well-received. The series takes place in a near-future Poughkeepsie, New York, which has been taken over by an otherworldly presence. Inside the zone, corpses float ominously, detritus suspended in […]
Born in Texas, New York Times best-selling author Carolyn Brown currently lives with her husband in a small town in Oklahoma, the state where she was raised. In other words, she’s a dyed -in-the-wool Westerner, a status reflected in the vividly rendered settings of her humorous and heartfelt contemporary love stories, historical romances, historical novels, and […]
San Francisco, 1947. Bartender Sammy Tiffin falls head-over-heels in love with a beautiful girl named Stilton. Sammy’s boss, the revolting Sal Gabelli, is working on a special project for an Air Force muckety-muck that involves Sammy rounding up wholesome girls and hooking them up with members of the powerful Bohemian Club. Through no fault of […]
Lisa Jewell’s bestselling books combine page-turning, what-happens-next excitement with nuanced characters—especially female characters—who are mostly likable. Her narrative voice has a keen sense of humor that might fool some readers into thinking the story is fluffy, or that the suspense isn’t real, neither of which is in any way true. In fact, Jewell’s latest novel, […]
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