Auf Wiedersehen, Deutschland
In my last post, I was about to leave for Germany to do some research for my novel. I had two precious days in Leipzig, my protagonist’s hometown. The city is less than two hours by train from Berlin. About…
Category: Historical Novel
An interview with Rebecca Makkai, Author of The Great Believers
I’ve been a Rebecca Makkai fan for a while. Her first two novels, The Borrower (Viking, 2011) and The Hundred Year House (Viking, 2014) had me. Then she read an early draft of my forthcoming novel, A Bend in the…
6 Things You Could Do to Get on America’s Top 100 Favorite Novels List
This fall, PBS is running a program called “The Great American Read.” Earlier this year, they asked 7,000 readers to name their favorite works of fiction. The alphabetical list of 100 (not ranked) was then culled by a panel of…
Interview with Jenna Blum, author of The Lost Family
Jenna Blum, a 20+ – year Grub Street teacher and New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Save Us (Harcourt, 2002) and The Stormchasers (Dutton, 2010), has just published her third novel, The Lost Family (Harper, 2018). Already it…
By the time you read this…
By the time you read this post, I’ll have visited my protagonist’s hometown, Leipzig, Germany. I expect the city will be strange to both of us—I’ve never been there and he, Viktor, left home in 1942 to join Hitler’s army….
DNA, Memory and Fiction as Magic: A True Story
Every fiction writer, it’s safe to say, has had the experience of writing something, then asking: “Where the hell did that come from?” Sometimes our next act is to delete it and try again, but on occasion we’re lucky, and…