Best-Selling Author Interviews & Features

If you’ve read Ann Patchett’s collection of nonfiction essays, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, you may find some vague familiarities in her new, masterful seventh novel Commonwealth—divorce and its exponential aftermath, cops and writers, Catholicism, caretaking, commuting between California and the South. Loosely based on her own family lore, Commonwealth is the closest to home Patchett’s globe-trotting fiction has ever come, which is a big departure for the acclaimed bestselling author of Bel Canto and ...

It’s been attracting strong reviews, including a starred one here in the pages of Kirkus, and many enthusiastic readers as well. That’s all to the good, though the will of the universe seems to have been thwarted in what appears to be a happy outcome—for, to hear him tell it, Nathan Hill’s debut novel, The Nix, almost didn’t happen. At least not the way he intended it.

A dozen years ago, fresh out of grad school, Hill moved to New ...

The structure of Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, is all wide sweep and ambition, covering three centuries and a host of characters between Ghana and the United States to depict the long and harrowing reach of slavery. But even while the novel’s scope expanded, Gyasi’s chief concern was keeping the story on an individual level.

“We have a tendency to look upon our ancestors as though they were less smart or less moral than us,” Gyasi says. “Were we ...

The wind blows cold in North Dakota, the skies filling with a steely gray that casts a pall over a land that, if sullen, is not without its beauty. In these broken fields, among these small lakes and patches of forest, there are time-honored ways of marking the seasons. One is hunting deer, a fact from which Louise Erdrich’s 15th novel, LaRose departs, as the opening line has it, “where the reservation boundary invisibly bisected a stand of deep brush ...

Nicola Yoon is a self-described “romantic goober.” She loves (and writes) young-adult romances, and she really, really loves her husband, David. The two—she’s a reformed electrical engineer from Jamaica, and he’s a Korean-American English major—met in grad school. Despite their differences, they fell in love, got married, and eventually had a daughter. Yoon’s anxious love for her child gave her the idea for her first novel, Everything, Everything, which tells the story of Maddy, a girl who is allergic ...

The pull of the characters and drama at Upper Room Chapel, a black church in a California beach ...

Reader, you don’t owe Maria Semple anything.

“You don’t owe it to me to read my book,” Semple says over lunch at Tilikum Place Café in downtown Seattle one sunny September day. “I owe it to you to get you to the end of my book. You don’t owe me not to just go, ‘Oh fuck,’ and throw my book across the room if it’s boring—if it’s like taking your medicine.

“I have students,” she continues, “and ...

Books are mysterious things. They can make you feel emotions you weren’t expecting to feel; they can change your mind. Some books have the power to make people do strange, even hateful, things. The book at the heart of teen writer Traci Chee’s “cleverly layered” and “enchanting” fantasy YA novel The Reader is more mysterious than most books, though. Sefia, the teen who possesses the book, learns that the book may be the key to solving the murder of her ...