PowellsBooks.Blog

Describe your latest book.
It is titled Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man, and it is coming out in May from Doubleday. This is the first ever autobiography of Clarence Birdseye, the man who developed the frozen food industry. Birdseye could be called a foodie in that he thought about food constantly. Every letter he wrote was describing a meal he had recently enjoyed or an interesting dish he had sampled. But, born in 1886, he was a 19th-century foodie. Born at the height of the industrial revolution, he believed that industry would make food wonderful. He constantly thought of ways to industrialize food. He even worked with farmers to make their products more suitable to industry. His dream was for high quality fresh food to be made available to everyone. He saw this as a growing movement in the world. He imagined his native New York food self-sufficient, growing its produce hydroponically on roof tops and freezing it to have throughout the year.

He was a curious man in both senses of the word, interested in absolutely everything, and in how to improve it. But ...

Describe your new book:
This book is the story of my life — the ups, the downs, and the music.

If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
When I was thinking about what to call this book, I went through a whole lot of different possibilities, but I just kept coming back to My Cross to Bear. It's what this book is all about.

How do you relax?
I've always found that nothing helps me kick back quite like music. When I throw on an old blues record — doesn't matter how many times I've heard it — it always manages to do the trick.

Describe the best breakfast of your life.
I can't say what it was, but I can say with almost absolute certainty that I ate it at the H&H Restaurant in Macon, Georgia. Ever since the start of the Allman Brothers in 1969, the H&H has been making the best meals around Macon.

What is your idea of absolute happiness?
Playing music with a group of incredible musicians — basically being on stage with the Allman Brothers.

Who's wilder on tour, rock bands or authors?
Well, ...

Describe your latest book:
Right now, I've got a bunch of different things going on, most of them having to do with the interface of science and literature. I'm developing a show for HBO called Emoticons about punctuation that can turn into robots, but at the same time I'm doing some neuroscience research. It's about chemicals that get released in the brains of runners that make it impossible for them to not constantly tell other people they're runners. I'm also working on a new crime series where the books come out in reverse order so there's less stress on the reader. In book 14, which will be the first one to come out, all the characters are healthy and in their 80s. And this summer, I've got a nonfiction manga coming out about why so few people my age are named Connie.

Or are you asking about my new novel, Wild Thing? Which is all those things combined, but available in February.

If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
Ideally "One-Man Bachelorette Party: The Shockingly Long, Happy, Successful, Revenge-Laden, Sexualized, ...

Describe your latest book.
In 1975 I was a naïve hippie. While working at my uncle's bar in Illinois, I met an apple farmer and three months later we were married. I fully expected to live this kind of back-to-nature, granola existence. Having babies. Growing and canning all of our food. Instead, I found myself swimming in pesticides and shunned by my new husband's family, living an isolated existence in a 400-square-foot house. The Orchard is told mainly through the eyes of my 20-something self. It's a fish-out-of water, up-close-and-personal examination of '70s and '80s farm culture from a raw perspective.

What fictional character would you like to date, and why?
Scooby-Doo. Because I have the feeling he wouldn't be judgmental. Of course I'm talking about a purely platonic relationship.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
I worked at a Levi's Strauss factory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I sewed back pockets on jeans. You know that little red or orange logo? I sewed that too. Spread the fabric over machine's flat surface, pocket positioned at marks. Hit the gas with ...

Describe your latest book.
My (latest, first) book is a novel called The Art of Fielding. It's set at an idyllic but dilapidated Wisconsin college called Westish, and it follows a cast of five characters whose lives become increasingly tangled up — three members of the Westish baseball team, the president of the college, and the president's daughter, who's just abandoned a bad, impulsive marriage (she was 18 when she eloped) and returned home to live with her father. It's a story about baseball, and about the way that athletes navigate between the demands of artistry and brute efficiency. It's also about dealing with profound self-doubt, on the field and off; about male friendship, competition, and love, and how trying (not to say annoying) it can be for a woman to have to deal with these; about college, and how college creates a very compelling world-outside-the-world that can be terribly difficult to leave; and about the profound effects that our favorite books have on us, and the limitations of those effects. (I think there are a few good jokes, too.)

Introduce one other author you think people should ...

Describe your new book.
Supergods is a personal overview and meditation on the history of superheroes and what they mean to us, beginning with Superman's first appearance in Action Comics #1 in 1938 and continuing to the present day via comic book movies and my own experiences as a writer for DC and Marvel Comics.

How did the last good book you read end up in your hands and why did you read it?
The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker is the best book I've read in a very long time, and, like most of my favorites, I found it by chance while browsing in a bookstore. A downside of Internet shopping is that it makes fortuitous discoveries like this less likely. I read it the way a joiner might study a brilliant new book on the basics of carpentry.

Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
I went to Paris once to loiter around the graves of Baudelaire and Apollinaire. I also made a point of drinking in the Vesuvius Café next to City Lights ...

Describe your new book.
Wildwing is a tale of love, time travel, and the wisdom of following your heart. Fifteen-year-old Addy is pulled from school and set to work as a maid for an eccentric old man, but she knows there must be more to life. So when she enters a locked room and finds a time travel machine, she grabs her chance and runs away to the Middle Ages. There, she's found wandering amidst the splintered remains of a shipwreck, and mistaken for the young woman arriving to marry the lord of the castle. If Addy can play her part, she'll have the respect and riches she's always dreamed of. But soon she's falling in love with the falconer's son, and the castle has dangerous secrets of its own — secrets to which Addy holds the only key.

Why do you write books for kids?
I write YA because I want to write about transformation and having the guts to change; because teens insist on emotional honesty; because I like the pace and excitement of YA; because talking with ...

Describe your latest book.
C is a novel about technology, sex, and death.

What fictional character would you like to date, and why?
Cassandra. Crazy chick.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
Live, nude model in art school.

Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start.
Hergé, Cigars of the Pharoah (Tintin)

Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
I went to Duino Castle, where Rilke wrote The Elegies.

What makes your favorite pair of shoes better than the rest?
They cost more.

Name the best television series of all time, and explain why it's the best.
Twin Peaks. Lynch is the man.

Aside from other writers, name some artists from whom you draw inspiration and talk a little about their work.
Omer Fast. Brilliant artist whose work is all about ...

Describe your latest book.
The Wave is about the quest to encounter one of nature's most powerful forces: the 100-foot wave.

Extreme waves are fascinating, in part because (as with many things in the ocean) we understand them so poorly. For decades and even centuries, a startling number of large ships have vanished without explanation — even now, on average, two dozen ships larger than 500 tons disappear each year, often without so much as a final Mayday. Giant waves were long suspected as the cause, and some clues pointed squarely in this direction, but by the rules of linear physics, they shouldn't have been able to exist. Recently, however, new technologies have proved they do, and in startling numbers. "Scientists Baffled by Giant Walls of Water," the New York Times reported; "Existence of 100-Foot Waves Confirmed." And as climate change brings increasingly volatile ocean conditions, as the global population clusters along the coastlines, and as commercial ships venture into every last corner of the sea, we will be reckoning far more often with what the great explorer Ernest Shackleton ...

Describe your latest book.
Ape House is about a family of language-competent bonobo apes who are kidnapped from their home and mysteriously reappear a few months later as the stars of a reality TV show being filmed in a remote town in New Mexico.

Their main caretaker at the Great Ape Language Lab, Isabel Duncan, has an easier time relating to animals than she does to other humans. And she's not alone. We live in a world full of the faux intimacy that reality television and sites like Facebook have created. We have all this very superficial contact with and information about other people, and yet all this increased information has made it more difficult to form actual relationships. Isabel does not know how to connect. But all that changes when an explosion rocks the lab and her ape family is taken from her. She's set on a collision course with the human race, mostly in the form of a very married journalist who sees her ape family's abduction as the story of a lifetime.

I structured Ape House like a thriller ...