A Lexicon You Actually Want to Read

His first novel, Syrup, is a satirical comedy for which the author is famous for three things: the very funny original novel, the film adaptation hitting movie and video screens this summer, and the extra X in the author name “Maxx Barry” that he thought was a funny joke about marketing but led to a lifetime of misguided ridicule.

His second and third novels, Jennifer Government and Company, were tagged by Kirkus as “bubblegum pop-future comedy” and “raucous black comedy about corporate management,” respectively, but both remain squarely within the ...

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We Make Our Own Monsters

By this point in the long game, I’ve interviewed a lot of crime writers. Elmore Leonard once read me the opening chapter of a novel—while he was in the middle of typing it up. I spoke with Walter Mosley and Donald E. Westlake within the same two-hour window one Christmas eve. Go toe-to-toe with Richard Price and you’ll come out of it feeling like the losing end of a prizefight.

But there is nothing in the world like a sit-down with Andrew Vachss.
 
I first interviewed Vachss a decade ago about his superb novella The Getaway Man ...

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Making Good Use of Paranoia

Novelist Alan Glynn chuckles to himself as he reveals the secret of his success. In his soft Dublin accent, he recalls W. Somerset Maugham's advice. “There are three rules for writing a novel,” Maugham famously declared. “Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

It may very well be to Glynn’s advantage that he doesn’t have more of a plan, because one of the attractions of his twisty, ominous financial thrillers remains the fact that they are utterly, convincingly unpredictable. This is dark territory, where titans of industry brandish soul-crushing power with ruthless ambition, corrupting the very core ...

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Brad Taylor’s Real-World, Down-and-Dirty ‘Enemy of Mine’

Sometimes, the world we live in just won’t cooperate with a novelist’s needs. Such was the case with Brad Taylor’s latest Pike Logan thriller Enemy of Mine, which takes the former Delta Force operator’s heroes into the gnarly geopolitical schemes of the Middle East.

Specifically, much of the plot of Taylor’s down-and-dirty revenge thriller takes place in Syria, a country whose fate is impossible for even the most gifted analysts to predict. With President Bashar al-Assad under siege by his own people, Taylor had himself a very interesting writing exercise under way.

“The truth is ...

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The Lost Boys of 'Life! Death! Prizes!'

In a novel that Kirkus’ reviewer called “a graphically up-to-date coming-of-age tale,” British novelist and playwright Stephen May captures the caustic voice of Billy Smith, a teen in modern-day Essex. Billy’s mother has been abruptly killed, leaving him and his little brother Oscar on their own. Left to their own devices, Billy and Oscar teeter precariously between youthful self-indulgence and risky behaviors that raise the specter of social services’ intervention. On the eve of the book’s U.S. publication, we exchanged questions and answers by email about angst and adolescence with the author. 

Life! Death! Prizes! begins with ...

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David Byrne Explains 'How Music Works'

There may be no other artist in the world of modern music quite as versatile as David Byrne. As one of the founders of Talking Heads, he revolutionized the New Wave movement with his histrionic performances of songs like “Life During Wartime” and “Burning Down the House.” Today, he continues to polish his polymathic skills with forays into film (This Must Be the Place, 2012) and literature (Bicycle Diaries, 2009, etc.) as well as theater, art and music—Byrne is currently between tours for his newest collaboration, Love This Giant, recorded with Annie Clark, known by her stage name, St ...

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Col. Oliver North on the 'Heroes' of the Near Future

From time to time, Kirkus Reviews has to go a long way to land an author interview. This month, we sent questions all the way to a combat outpost in Afghanistan, where retired United States Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North has been capturing stories from the front lines for Fox News. With limited access to the outside world, Col. North sent answers by email to offer our readers great insight into his new novel, Heroes Proved. Set in 2032, this futuristic thriller combines North’s patriotic fervor with the high technology from his other recent consulting project, Call of Duty: Black ...

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George Bristol: 'On Politics and Parks'

In 1961, 20-year-old Democratic activist George Bristol began the journey of his lifetime. The young man took a long train journey from his home in Austin, Texas, to work for two summers in the wilds of Glacier National Park. “Can you imagine awakening in the middle of paradise, going to breakfast with beautiful women and new friends, hiking through forests and around glacial lakes, climbing mountain trails into the clearest blue sky to work?” he asks in his new memoir, On Politics and Parks. A lifelong advocate for our nation’s National Park Service, Bristol recalls his influential career in ...

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Barbara Kingsolver's 'Flight Behavior'

Award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver is one of those authors whose work inspires profound affection in the hearts of her readers.

Best known for her Pulitzer-nominated novel The Poisonwood Bible and nonfiction works like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, her work is rich in science, politics, texture and character. She is also proudly the founder of the Bellwether Prize to support unpublished novelists writing literature about social change.

Check out our recent interview with Emma Donoghue about her new short story collection, 'Astray.'

Her latest, Flight Behavior, draws on Kingsolver’s origins as a curious and highly trained biologist. It opens on the ...

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J.R. Moehringer on 'Sutton' and Bank Robbery as an American Pursuit

In his debut novel, J.R. Moehringer (The Tender Bar, 2006, etc.) delves into the mythology of legendary bank robber Willie “The Actor” Sutton. During a lifelong criminal career, Sutton stole more than two million dollars and cashed in on the urban legend that he robbed banks because, “That’s where the money is.” Sutton captures this cipher on Christmas Day in 1969, when a New York reporter takes the aging bandit on a tour of the sites of his most famous exploits.

After chasing the author for weeks, Kirkus finally caught up with him in Denver, where the conversation ...

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Iain M. Banks Revisits The Culture with 'The Hydrogen Sonata'

Sentient space ships. Drug glands. Multi-species societies. Biological immortality. These are just a few of the futuristic elements readers have enjoyed about The Culture, the anarchist society that features in 10 novels and many short stories by science-fiction specialist Iain M. Banks. Kirkus gave his most recent entry, The Hydrogen Sonata, a starred review, writing that his books “brim with wit and wisdom, providing incomparable entertainment, with fascinating and highly original characters, challenging ideas and extrapolations, and dazzling action seamlessly embedded in a satirical-comedy matrix." 

Banks’ new novel centers on the Gzilt civilization, a military society preparing to transfer its ...

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Will Schwalbe Hosts 'The End of Your Life Book Club'

Will Schwalbe is a genuinely good guy who has spent much of his life championing the authors we love as editor-in-chief at Hyperion. When I was struggling to write about David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter in 2007 following the author’s untimely demise, Schwalbe stepped in to provide an affectionate tribute to the book. When Schwalbe quietly left his position the following year, no one knew he was taking time for a very good reason.

Those reasons unfold in The End of Your Life Book Club, the touching account of the life of letters Schwalbe shared with his inspiring ...

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J.K. Rowling Joins the Grown-Ups with 'The Casual Vacancy'

Today marks the occasion of a Very Big Thing in the publishing world, this being the rare one-day laydown for J.K. Rowling’s first novel written for adults, The Casual Vacancy. For those not in the business, the laydown is an expensive, complicated process to put a book on sale worldwide simultaneously, and it’s reserved for Very Big Things such as, let’s say, any of the latter Harry Potter novels.

With its publication, Rowling joins a collection of authors that may not be exclusive but is exceedingly rare. These are the writers who have made millions by ...

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'Life After Death' with Damien Echols

It is a moniker charged with high emotion, outrage and injustice for the three young men who came to be known as “the West Memphis Three.” In 1993, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. were arrested for the murders of three 8-year-old boys, Stevie Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers.

While his two co-defendants were sentenced to life in prison, then-18-year-old Echols was sentenced to death. He spent the next 17 years on death row, most of it in Arkansas’ Varner Supermax Unit, where he suffered incredible mistreatment at the hands of the justice system. 

Over time, supporters ...

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Junot Díaz on 'This is How You Lose Her'

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Junot Díaz burst onto the literary scene with his short stories of the late ’90s, collected in his debut Drown, and then startled the whole world with the 2007 publication of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which we dubbed at the time, “A compelling, sex-fueled, 21st-century tragi-comedy with a magical twist.”

Oscar Wao has gone on to become a groundbreaking moment in contemporary literature, as has Díaz, the first Latin-American juror for the Pulitzer Prize. Here, a very candid Díaz talks about his latest story collection, This is How You Lose Her ...

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Inside Climate Change and Our World's Beaches with Dr. Orrin Pilkey

There is a vivid and glorious history of writing about the environment, ecology and the world around us. In the seminal book Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), the great transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau chronicled his spiritual journal but also described in magnificent detail the richness of life in the woods.

When John Steinbeck decided to voyage down the coast of California with his friend Ed Ricketts in 1940, little did he know they were leaving behind incredible insight into both their philosophies about the world in The Log of the Sea of Cortez (1951). We still read works ...

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Paul Auster's 'Winter Journal'

Paul Auster is the gifted author of the classic memoir The Invention of Solitude, popular novels ranging from The New York Trilogy to Sunset Park, and the screenplays for the films Smoke and Blue in the Face, not to mention forays into poetry, translations, essays and anything else that strikes a chord with the Brooklyn-based writer.

Browse more of the best memoirs of 2012.

In his latest, Winter Journal, the 65-year-old storyteller points his intellectual curiosity squarely at himself, as he courageously captures the feelings, sensations and experiences that have marked him, body and mind. (Ed note: This interview first ...

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‘Ascent of the A-Word’: A look at one of society’s favorite swear words

There is something about that word. Hell, the last line of The Social Network is Zuckerberg’s lawyer telling him, “You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying so hard to be.”

In his new book Ascent of the A-Word, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg gives thought to the psychology of assholism, the debate over civility, and the action-packed life of the word we all wield so ferociously during rush hour.

Read more of the best new nonfiction.

It's quite the predicament we find ourselves in these days, surrounded, as you note in Ascent of the A-Word, by the ...

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The Power of Words in 'The American Bible'

There is great power in our American texts, and even more intensity to be found in context. In his latest, The American Bible, Stephen Prothero of Boston University brings together a wealth of great American narratives, from “The Star Spangled Banner,” to The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

But this unique collection does more, allowing great minds from Christopher Hitchens to Howard Zinn to comment on these “scriptures” as living works, lending a diverse and uniquely modern perspective to those passages we know so well.

Check out the best new nonfiction out this August.

Why do words matter?

This is an ...

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10 Top Graphic Books to Watch for in 2012

Even in yet another summer of the Superhero, as The Avengers shatter box-office records, The Dark Knight swoops back into town, and Spider-Man fires up his web-shooters, there’s still a place in the dark corners of the comic book world for the iconoclasts, journalists, children’s authors and Zen masters to ply their trade.

This year’s slab of highly anticipated graphic novels includes the return of a modern classic, the rediscovery of legends like Daniel Clowes, and rich histories of larger-than-life characters ranging from Julia Child to Hunter S. Thompson.

Read more reviews of graphic novels and books ...

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