Indie Icon Seth Godin

Every one of Seth Godin’s 12 books about leadership, marketing and spreading ideas in a post-industrial world has been a bestseller (Purple Cow, 2003, etc.). The 50-year-old author, blogger and entrepreneur, who’s been called “America’s Greatest Marketer,” says that his latest, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? (Penguin, 2010), is about becoming indispensible in the workplace. He also announced that it will be his last book with a mainstream publisher. Here, we talk to Godin about blogging, exiting the traditional publishing route and the current workplace revolution.

Read more of the Best Indie Books of 2011.

Why have you ...

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The Devil and Donald Ray Pollock

When blue-collar southern Ohioan Donald Ray Pollock quit his job of 32 years to write dark, haunting stories of the hardscrabble, often depraved town of Knockemstiff, reviewers were throwing around Flannery O’Connor comparisons. His riveting new novel, The Devil All the Time, is similarly peopled with no-good folks from the holler, doing unspeakable things to themselves, and each other.

Read more new and notable titles for July. 

What called you to the writing life?

When I turned 45, my dad retired from the paper mill where I also worked. He went home, and you know how most retired people ...

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‘In the Garden of Beasts’ with Erik Larson

Erik Larson’s bestsellers (Thunderstruck, The Devil in the White City, Isaac’s Storm) read like hyper-dramatic novels, yet they’re entirely true. The former Wall Street Journal reporter turns his historical prowess to 1933 Berlin, when mild-mannered Chicago academic William E. Dodd became America’s ambassador to Hitler’s Germany. Through the divergent perspectives of Dodd and his flamboyant daughter, Martha, readers experience the initial creeping chill of Nazi rule in In the Garden of Beasts.

Read more of the Best of 2011 Nonfiction.

Why did it take Ambassador Dodd so long to realize Hitler’s diabolical nature?

A ...

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Jean Thompson’s ‘The Year We Left Home’

National Book Award finalist Jean Thompson doesn’t so much write characters as channel the inner sanctums of your friends and neighbors. She launches The Year We Left Home from a 1970s small-town Iowa Lutheran wedding and follows the lives of key attendees over a three-decade span. In this story of insiders and outsiders, she chronicles the drama of America’s generations via the land of quiet cornfields and dried-up storefronts.

Read more books from our best of 2011 fiction list.

You paint Norwegian rural Iowa so perfectly. Where are you from originally?

Chicago. I have lived other places, but ...

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Ann Packer on 'Swim Back to Me'

There is perhaps no more fertile ground for writers than people navigating personal storms and loss. And reading masters like the eloquently detail-oriented Ann Packer (The Dive from Clausen’s Pier) almost feels like voyeurism. In this bestselling author’s new book of short stories, Swim Back to Me, she examines with deft precision human souls experiencing deep loss or family strain.

Read more books about marriage at Kirkus.

Troubled love seems to be a favorite topic of yours.

I would be a little broader and say troubled relationships are where stories happen. Romantic relationships—marriages, love affairs—are just ...

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Margaret Roach Ditches City Life for the Country

In December 2007, Margaret Roach traded her big-city job as an executive vice president for Martha Stewart Living for a little farmhouse upstate where she gardens among snakes and solitude. Roach, writer of the blog A Way to Garden, releases a memoir written during the first two years of the experience, And I Shall Have Some Peace There, out this week.

Interested in more books about strong women? Read more about Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx and Michelle Obama. 

Is this still the place you want to be?

Absolutely. Every day is just better. Change takes a long time. Every ...

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