PowellsBooks.Blog

Note: Augusten Burroughs will present his new book at Powell's City of Books on Sunday, April 28, at 2 p.m.

Describe your latest book.
This Is How is a guide of sorts for showing people how they can survive, overcome, achieve, or free themselves of things they think they can't. The book arose from the single question I have been asked more than any other: "How did you survive...?" Because as readers of my six nonfiction works know, I've been knocked around the block a few times and survived pretty well. This Is How isn't a step-by-step, process-oriented book. Rather, it's conceptual and broad so that the approaches in the book can be applied to any issue, even those not mentioned.

This Is How speaks to what I believe is the most essential component of survival or achievement: seeing the actual, rock-bottom, elemental truth and accepting it. But because truth can often be cloaked in what we assume or believe or have been told is "true," being truthful with respect to our circumstances isn't as easy or as obvious as it may appear.

As just one example, I was ...

Describe your latest book.
My new book, Woke Up Lonely, is about a cult leader, his ex-wife, and the four people he takes hostage. It's about loneliness in America. North Korea. A city underneath the city of Cincinnati. Cloud seeding. Espionage. Eavesdropping. It's also, you know, a big-old love story. Does that describe it adequately? Probably not. How about: The novel takes place over a four-day Waco-style siege. It follows six people on their paths toward or away from estrangement. I'm told it's droll and maybe a little wild, though it doesn't seem so wild to me.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
I once sold knock-off perfumes in parking lots all over Los Angeles. I'd seen an ad in the paper. I showed up for an interview, which consisted of myself and 40 other people jammed into a room and shown wads of money that could be ours if we just broke the law a few hours a day. We were told not to worry if we got arrested, that the company would bail us out. We were given a script that was ...

Describe your latest book/project/work.
My most recent nonfiction book, The End of Sex, is most definitely not about how sex is "over" — though I keep getting questions about why I'm saying this is the case. My academic background is in philosophy, theology, and gender, and when we talk about "ends" in those fields, we are generally talking about something as an "end in itself" and trying to get at its meaning and purpose. I thought titling this book The End of Sex would be a provocative way of signaling that, here, I want to ask about the meaning and purpose of sex — given the rise of hookup culture on college campuses. If I could redo the subtitle to better fit what this book is about, it would go something like this: The End of Sex: Putting the Meaning Back into Sexual Intimacy for the Hookup Generation.

For the last eight years, I've been investigating (among other things) the role of hookup culture and how it's affecting the college experience today. I got into this conversation after launching a nationwide study on college student attitudes about sexuality and ...

Describe your latest book/project/work.
I write the Avengers Assemble and Captain Marvel comic books at Marvel and Ghost at Dark Horse. My first creator-owned book — a gothic western called Pretty Deadly — is coming out from Image Comics later this year.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
I've done everything from special effects makeup to event clowning to post-operative wound care.

Writers are better liars than other people: true or false? Why or why not?
False. The best writers are adept at telling truths. Sounds pretentious as all hell, but I believe it to my core.

Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
"Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs." – Ernest Hemingway.

How do you relax?
With great effort.

How did the last good book you read end up in your hands, and why did you read it?
Warren Ellis sent me a proof copy of Gun Machine. So now I'm just bragging.

Describe your latest works.
I have two Forgotten Realms novels coming out this year, along with a graphic novel about a relevant side story. The first book, The Last Threshold, was just released in March to wind up the four-book Neverwinter Saga. In this series, I explored the issue of my hero, Drizzt, falling in with a group of shady companions, with the main conflict centering around whether he would lift them up or they would bring him down. The new book resolves that — but, of course, it also opens up a ton of new possibilities.

The comic, beginning in April from IDW, will add a bit of flavor on the outside of those conflicts.

The heart of all of this comes out in August with The Companions. The only thing I can say about that book is that, for me, it's the payoff of 25 years with this character I hold so dear.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
I paid my way through college as a bouncer in a nightclub. Every night was an adventure — ...

In celebration of Geek Week, Powells.com presents a special Dungeons and Dragons–themed Q&A with Patton Oswalt.

What's the most epic character you've ever created?
A half-orc assassin named Ulvaak through which I channeled all of my frustrations about being a fat eighth grader. Apparently I wanted to split everything in half with a sword.

What alignment do you most closely identify with: Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic?
Lawful, but only because of my OCD. There's no good or evil to it.

Describe your longest campaign.
Oh man. Probably this epic, Béla Tarr–style slog through a continent called Gamotia, where the fabric of reality was ripping open and different demons were vying for dominance of the material plane. You know, everyday stuff like that.

Personal question: Did you let anyone touch your lucky d20?
Not only did no one touch it, but I would use an El Marko to color the 10-and-up numbers black, then I'd scrape away the permanent marker ink but leave the indented numbers still filled in with ink. OCD is a hell of a thing.

Eberron, Vanadorn, or a campaign of your own creation?
I'd want to create ...

Describe your latest game/project/work.
Right now, we're in the middle of playtesting Munchkin Pathfinder. The Pathfinder RPG, from Paizo, is one of the most popular fantasy role-playing games on the market, and its rules and setting provide a rich background to draw from for the next Munchkin card game. "Playtesting," for those who don't know, is the process of trying a version of a game to see what works and what doesn't. It involves playing a game over and over, with small (or not-so-small) tweaks each time, ultimately leading to a game that's much better than it could have been otherwise.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
Other than this one, which is both the strangest and most interesting, I'd have to go with my first-ever summer job: cleaning industrial ice cream machines at the main manufacturing plant for a Texas-based grocery chain. It taught me a lot about the dignity of doing a necessary job well, even when that job is not what most people would consider glamorous or exciting. It also taught me that I did ...

Describe your latest book.
News from Heaven is a collection of 10 short stories set in and around Bakerton, the western Pennsylvania coal town that was the setting for my second novel, Baker Towers.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
Cleaning office buildings at night.

Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
Two come immediately to mind, both by Don DeLillo. The first is from Underworld: "Longing on a large scale is what makes history."

The second is from Libra: "There is a world inside the world."

Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
When I landed in Iowa City in 2000, I couldn't stop thinking of Denis Johnson's story collection Jesus' Son. It wasn't exactly a pilgrimage, since I had other reasons for being there, but I saw his stories everywhere.

What is your favorite indulgence, either wicked or benign?
My boyfriend's homemade bread, straight out of the oven, with copious butter.

Name the best television series of all time.
HBO's The Wire. It's the best novel I've ever seen.

Who's wilder on tour, rock bands or authors?
Rock bands. (Good Lord, let's hope so.)

Dogs, cats, budgies, or ...

Describe your latest book.
Fuse is the second installment in the Pure Trilogy, which follows a group of characters in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian world. In the first novel, Pressia, a 16-year-old girl with a doll head fused to her fist, is surviving in this detonated, ash-choked world, and Partridge has survived inside of a protective dome; their lives are set on a collision course when he escapes the dome to try to find his mother. In the second novel, I got to return to the psychological viciousness of the dome and also to take on new landscapes and terrains, new beasts and creatures. I remain haunted by the questions posed in the first novel – what endures the apocalypse. The novels are brutal, but that allows me to push the characters to ultimate resilience as well as human failures.

If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
Oh, poor biographer, weedy and pale. I wish you'd latched onto someone greater, who heaved around more literary weight, drank too much, caused scenes in restaurants, and slept with movie stars. Alas, sweetheart, lowest-ranking PhD candidate ...

Describe your latest book.
My latest book is a short story collection called Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Many of the stories are about monstrous metamorphoses — teenaged bullies in New Jersey, captive Japanese women converted into factory machinery, vampires in recovery. Human subjects converted into objects by violence.

What fictional character would you like to date, and why?
I'd like to date Bone from Russell Banks's Rule of the Bone. Provided that I, too, were 14 years old — it would be a little Mary Kay Letourneau to date him now, at age 31. Maybe Russell Banks will write a sequel where Bone is an adult man on a Jamaican schooner and suitable as an imaginary love interest? Because I love that character. His put-on swagger and his anger and his complete vulnerability.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
For several years I worked as a receptionist at a veterinary clinic in New York City, a job I really loved and repeatedly failed at. At first I'd considered training as a vet tech, before it was revealed to me that none of my love ...