Kathleen Sharp: ‘Blood Feud’

When former pharmaceutical rep Mark Duxbury first called Kathleen Sharp in 2004 he gave her the hard sell. “He was real affable and charming like any good American salesman,” Sharp says, mainly because he was desperate to close this deal.

The reason? He was hawking himself. Duxbury was at the center of a massive big-pharma scandal—he had helped doctors make millions off Medicare by encouraging them to inject their patients with larger-than-approved doses of the red blood cell booster Procrit. And that drug might be killing patients.

He wanted Sharp to tell his story, and in the process expose ...

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Paul Trynka: ‘David Bowie: Starman’

When Paul Trynka was finishing his last book—a  thick, detailed bio of Iggy Pop—his son asked him if the punk legend liked kids. “I told him no,” the former Mojo editor says. “So my son said to me, ‘Why are you spending so much time with him?’ I promised him my next book would be about a good dad.”

Of course, it wasn’t David Bowie’s parenting skills that really fascinated Trynka. It was how the rock icon had continually reinvented himself even long before he donned the Ziggy Stardust makeup. It’s the main theme of ...

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Ben Mezrich: ‘Sex on the Moon’

Ben Mezrich loves it when the nerds win. The Boston-based author seems to specialize in books where the hyper-intelligent take on the system and, using nothing but their brains and tanker-sized loads of bravado, manage to recalculate the odds. That was the case with his nonfiction debut Bringing Down the House, following a group of students as they mastered the art of counting cards. And it was definitely at the core of The Accidental Billionaires, the story that became the foundation for The Social Network.

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Mezrich’s latest, Sex on the ...

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Inside the Real China with ‘Kosher Chinese’

Michael Levy’s first assignment from the Peace Corps had him excited—the junior high history teacher was being sent to Romania to teach English. “I was like, ‘Yeah! Go! Rah, rah, rah!’ ” he says with a laugh. Then things changed.

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Levy wasn’t headed for Europe. He was bound for China—interior China, a place most Americans know nothing about, or at least little more than what Kung Fu Panda provides. He was being sent to Guiyang City, the capital of Guiyang province, to teach English at the local university ...

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Josh Ritter: Songwriter to novelist with 'Bright’s Passage'

Josh Ritter has been writing novels for the last decade—he just didn’t meet the word count. A vivid songwriter, the Moscow, Idaho-based folkie specializes in three-minute masterpieces, the kind that establish plot, character and motive before the first chorus. It’s what got him named one of the 100 Greatest Living Songwriters by Paste magazine. It’s also what makes his leap from songwriter to novelist seem more natural than, say, Ke$ha suddenly deciding to write children’s books.

Read more new and notable fiction for July.

Ritter’s debut, Bright’s Passage, is as dense and ...

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Adam Ross, crushing characters in ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’

Adam Ross likes to put people in difficult situations. It’s what he specializes in actually. His debut novel, Mr. Peanut, revved up when main character David Pepin’s fingers, as well as several peanuts, find their way into his wife Alice’s mouth. She’s allergic. She reacts. She dies. But was it suicide or murder?

The protagonists in Ross’ latest, Ladies and Gentlemen, a collection of short stories he wrote while penning Mr. Peanut, often end up facing similarly interesting and questionable circumstances. Ross sees it as a great way to play with the reader, often throwing in ...

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Kirkus Q&A: T.C. Boyle

In his latest novel, When the Killing’s Done, T.C. Boyle revisits the ideological battle over California’s Channel Islands, a Galapagos-like atoll off the SoCal coast that, in the ’90s, sparked a battle royal between animal rights activists and National Park Service scientists. The issue: the removal of non-native species, which meant the killing of feral pigs. His complicated novel pits National Park Service biologist Alma Boyd Takesue against the cranky For the Protection of Animals (FPA) founder Dave LaJoy in a fight over whose vision of preservation should rule the Channel Islands.

Can't get enough T ...

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'UFOs': We are not alone

John Alexander (Winning the War, 2003) knows more than you do—at least about the stuff you’re not supposed to know. Before spending seven years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was instrumental in developing the military’s nonlethal weapons program, he was a colonel in the Army, working at the Pentagon and essentially becoming the military’s Fox Mulder. Alexander was the guy behind some of the Army’s more unconventional projects—psychokinesis, remote viewing, even orgone energy weather manipulation. He also became the military’s defacto expert on UFOs, helping to put together a loose-knit crew ...

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2010 Best Books: Patti Smith

Patti Smith made a promise. Her longtime friend and former lover Robert Mapplethorpe was dying due to complications from AIDS. But he didn’t want to be remembered that way. The complex, controversial photographer could already see that his life and work were being reduced to the spark that launched the culture war. (Shortly after his death in 1989, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., pulled a Mapplethorpe retrospective under pressure from right-wing members of Congress.) He wanted to be remembered for who he truly was. And he made Smith, his longest friend and confidant, promise to ...

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Not So Fab? The Life of Paul McCartney

Howard Sounes has a tendency to rewrite music history. In his 2001 Bob Dylan biography Down the Highway, Sounes revealed that there had been a Mrs. Zimmerman that no one, not even the most diehard of fans, had ever known about, Dylan’s six-year marriage to former backup singer Carol Dennis. The author’s 2006 book Seventies tried to prove something even more daunting—that the disco decade was actually the high point of musical creativity. And now with Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney, Sounes is tackling the life of Sir Paul, from his birth to his breakup ...

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