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: Genre
An Interview with Stephanie Gayle, Author of Idyll Hands
Stephanie Gayle is a writing machine. Her third book in four years, Idyll Hands, hits the stands in early September. It is the most recent in her celebrated Thomas Lynch mystery series, following Idyll Threats and Idyll Fears. The Strand…
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…
An Interview with Julia Fine, Author of What Should Be Wild
Julia Fine’s debut novel What Should Be Wild, (Harper, 2018) is a modern gothic fairy tale, animated with toppled tropes and dark, unexpected secrets. The novel follows Maisie, a young girl cursed with the power to give and take life…
Beyond the Closet: Writing Gay Characters
As an out writer in a large writing community, I sometimes get questions from fellow writers about writing gay characters. Typically, there’s some low-level anxiety about “getting it right.” I love these questions. It means that the writer has or is…