“My gaze meets the spine of a certain book,” explains the author of “The Memory Police.” “We exchange glances. … This book has chosen me.” Her latest novel to be translated from Japanese is “Mina’s Matchbox.”
Among her favorites: books by Pat Barker and Marguerite Yourcenar. Her own latest work of historical nonfiction is “Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation.”
‘By admitting that, I fear I will be drummed out of the Novelists’ Corps,’ she says. ‘The Black Bird Oracle,’ the latest in her best-selling ‘All Souls’ series, is just out.
“It’s nice to work with faculty without that inbuilt prejudice against genre,” says the author of “I Was a Teenage Slasher.” “Or, I’m a little bit tall, so it’s tricky to look down your nose at me.”
Alexander Lefebvre’s new book is a ‘call to action about what we are trying to defend, and why,’ says the head of PEN America, which has been pummeled with disputes about speech, activism and Israel.
Even after doing research in Montana, a draft of the book that became “The Heart in Winter” was “dead on the page,” he says. Back in Ireland, the runaway lovers now at its center “suddenly appeared to me.”
But “I’m averse to entertaining the thought that what I’m working on is a first draft,” she says, “which implies the necessity of a second, even a third.” Her new book is “Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael.”
“It doesn’t make me esteem Wharton less. If anything, I take comfort in it, as a novelist.” Her own smash book “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” is out in paperback.
“The material that he uses for the songs is powerfully moving, involving his own personal losses,” the 88-year-old poet says. Also name-checked in “So What”: an Italian motorcycle magnate.
To write “Exhibit,” the queer novelist says she had to pretend that no one would read it. “By writing things I’m afraid of saying, I might stand a chance of voicing what I, too, really need and long to see in words.”
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