Robert Neubecker's Wow! Everything! World

Robert Neubecker is an artist and freelance editorial illustrator whose work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Business Week, Time, Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal. Neubecker moved to Utah in 1994, and, inspired by his young family, made his publishing debut in 2004 with the children's picture book Wow! City!, which he followed with Wow! America! and Wow! School! Neubecker, who currently works for Slate.com, says that his daughters helped him write his children’s books: “All I did was observe and take notes.” 

Let these books take your kids to ...

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Medicine and Motherhood in ‘This Won’t Hurt a Bit’

An Atlanta-based anesthesiologist, Michelle Au has chronicled, with great humor and insight, the uneasy intersection of life and medicine in her blog, the Underwear Drawer, for the past seven years. Now Au’s provocative insights on motherhood, medicine and more are collected in her memoir, This Won’t Hurt a Bit (And Other White Lies), out this week.

Read more excellent titles on motherhood at Kirkus.

Can you comment on this impulse to create or laugh under pressure?

Well, they say humor is a defense mechanism, isn’t it? It definitely is one for me, and since college and med ...

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'Real Housewives' Teresa Giudice gets 'Fabulicious'

Teresa Giudice not only stars on a reality show, raises four young daughters and still finds time for date night with her husband, but her first cookbook, Skinny Italian, was a New York Times bestseller. Giudice believes in living the good life, never passing on the the cannoli and raising daughters who know how to cook the authentic, healthy Italian food that she grew up eating. Here the Real Housewives of New Jersey star dishes on food, family and her new cookbook Fabulicious!

Love cookbooks? Check out Gwyneth Paltrow's latest and Cristina Ferrare.

Your first cookbook grew out of ...

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In the Yard with Lisa Campbell Ernst

Prolific author/illustrator Lisa Campbell Ernst has been nationally recognized for her picture books and stories for young people. Her many honors include the Show Me Readers Award, a Parent’s Choice Award, Booklists’s “Pick of the List” and a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor. Here she talks about her newest picture book, which explores How Things Work in the Yard.

Discover some great gardening books for kids.

Please tell me about how you came up with the concept for this new book. You’ve said that you like to mull things over.

My goal…was to celebrate the ...

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Into the Wild with Thomas F. Yezerski

Thomas F. Yezerski is the author/illustrator of several children’s books, including Mrs. Muddle’s Holidays, by Laura Nielson, which received a starred review in Kirkus. An avid outdoors person, Yezerski lived on the edge of the Meadowlands for 12 years, 10 of which he spent working on the project that became his latest book, Meadowlands, which he discusses here.

See all the books in our 2011 Kids' Earth Day Roundup. 

What was the seed of the idea for this project?

“Seed” is the perfect word for a book about the Meadowlands estuary, because so many plants and other ...

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Geneen Roth Gets Real About Food and Money

Geneen Roth’s books and articles explore hunger, deprivation and healing, including her New York Times bestseller, Women Food and God (2010). When Roth and her husband lost their life savings in the Bernie Madoff scandal, the sense of financial free-fall prompted her to write the memoir Lost and Found: Unexpected Revelations About Food and Money.

Interested in more titles similar to this one? Check out And I Shall Have Some Peace There and The Gospel According to Coco Chanel.

What sort of realizations helped form this book?

In order to keep my sanity during the days after I found ...

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The 'Trouble with Chickens': Farmyard Noir

Doreen Cronin has authored many children’s picture books, including the Caldecott Honor–winning Click Clack Moo: Cows That Type, illustrated by Betsy Lewin, and the beloved Diary of a Worm, illustrated by Harry Bliss. Here Cronin discusses her newest book, Trouble with Chickens, a noir-type mystery chapter book illustrated by Kevin Cornell that features a hard-boiled canine detective, J.J. Tully.

READ ABOUT MORE MYSTERIES FOR THE BUDDING NOIR FAN.         

You have a lot of fun thinking up wacky characters—cows that type, a diary-keeping worm and now a canine detective. Where do all these characters come from? And ...

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10 important lessons from Suze Orman’s 'The Money Class'

Financial guru, TV personality and motivational speaker Suze Orman has written numerous best-selling books on money management, yet never with the urgency apparent in her 10th book, The Money Class. Arguing that the old American Dream is officially over, Orman advises readers to “stand in their truth” by embracing important, if harsh, realities if they wish to create their own version of the new American Dream.

Here are a few important lessons covered in The Money Class that Orman believes will help readers survive—and ultimately thrive—in our altered economic landscape:

Learn to “stand in your truth.” Begin ...

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Paula McLain on Hemingway's First Wife

Paula McLain has been a resident of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. She is the author of two collections of poetry as well as a memoir, Like Family, and a first novel, A Ticket to Ride. Here, she answers questions about her historical novel, The Paris Wife, written from the point of view of Hemingway’s first wife Hadley Richardson.

Discover all the year's top books with our best of 2011 fiction list.

Was there a moment that led you to this project?

I had a general thought that I might write a novel about a writer in the ...

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Kirkus Q&A: Joyce Carol Oates

Renowned for her prize-winning fiction, poetry and reviews, Joyce Carol Oates’ latest, A Widow’s Story, is an intimate, often wrenching memoir about the abrupt death of her husband, Raymond Smith. In the book, Kirkus said that Oates “writes with gut-wrenching honesty and spares no one in ripping the illusions off the face of death.” Here, the author shares some thoughts on writing her memoir.

For a list of all Kirkus-reviewed titles by Joyce Carol Oates,click here.

Memoir is not something readers are likely to associate with you. Can you comment on your decision to create this work ...

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Kirkus Q&A: Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby is known for her bestselling books that question comfortable American assumptions about politics and life. The author, who began her career as a reporter for the Washington Post, has contributed to many national publications, including the New York Times, The Nation and AARP magazine. Her latest book, Never Say Die, takes a hard look at popular myths surrounding growing old in the United States. 

SEE MORE REVIEWS OF JACOBY'S BOOKS HERE: The Age of American Unreason, Freethinkers and Half-Jew.

Was there a moment, or an accumulation of events, that prompted you to tackle this book?

There wasn ...

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2010 Best Books: Margriet de Moor

A classical singer before becoming a prize-winning author, Margriet de Moor’s books have been translated into 20 languages. Here the Dutch author discusses The Storm, which Kirkus called an “exquisitely composed” story of the life lines between two sisters forever changed by a catastrophic event. The novel also explores the connections between music and literature. The breath, says de Moor, is the point of intersection between the two arts, connecting the “singing voice of music with the telling voice of literature.”

You gave up your musical career because you didn’t like the “direct confrontation” with the audience. How ...

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2010 Best Books: Stacy Schiff

Stacy Schiff is the award-winning biographer of several books, including A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (2005) and Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) (1999) for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. Here she discusses her fascination with Cleopatra, the subject of her much-praised biography that reportedly will become a film starring Angelina Jolie and directed by James Cameron.

What drew you to write about Cleopatra?

Cleopatra is a woman whose name we all recognize but about whom we know virtually nothing. I was amazed by my own ignorance. She’s arguably the most famous woman ...

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2010 Best Books: The Blindness of the Heart, by Julia Franck

Set in 1945 war-torn Germany, this novel opens with Helene abandoning her 7-year-old son Peter at a railway station. To produce this international bestseller, Julia Franck spent a year reading literature written in central Europe between 1900 and 1935. Not just “Kafka or Krauss, but Musil, Walser, Schüler and Kalecko,” says Franck. “Reading them helped me understand what a writer thought about at this time.” But Franck’s family history also informs the novel—having listened to her grandmother’s memories all her life, she knew “just how it was to live in the ’20s.” The author’s interest ...

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Saving the Kakapo

Sy Montgomery has written many award-winning books for readers of all ages, including the international bestselling memoir, The Good Good Pig (2006). With photographer Nic Bishop, she’s contributed to the Scientists in the Field series, garnering two Sibert Honor recognitions, for The Tarantula Scientist (2004) and Quest for the Tree Kangaroo (2006). Their most recent collaboration recounts the dramatic, often-heartbreaking efforts to save New Zealand’s tame, flightless, oversized parrots—the kakapo. Here, Montgomery discusses their book Kakapo Rescue.

In a video interview with [the adolescent literacy resource] adlit.org, you said that your field work for the kakapo ...

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History, Retold through ‘Gutsy Girls’

At 49, Karen Cushman started writing about “gutsy girls figuring out who they are,” and she says she has no plans to stop until she’s at least 100. A winner of the Newbery Award for 1995’s The Midwife’s Apprentice, Cushman says that writing for this audience lets her entertain “the child in me who likes to imagine other people and other lives…I can sit in my chair with the cat on my lap and make things up.” Here the author talks about her seventh novel, Alchemy and Meggy Swann.

Finding a sense of place, of belonging ...

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Kirkus Q&A: Harold McGee

A renowned expert on the science of cooking, Harold McGee sees his role as a guide helping home cooks navigate their way through a constantly expanding culinary universe. The award-winning author of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (2004) and author of a monthly column, “The Curious Cook” for the New York Times (also a book we reviewed here), McGee has been named food writer of the year by Bon Appétit magazine and to the Time 100, an annual list of the world’s most influential people.

With Keys to Good Cooking, out Oct ...

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