Did you miss these the first time around? Here’s your chance to catch up on what your favorite writers have been saying!
- Sebastian Junger. In Tribe, Junger says our high depression rate owes to the fact that “we live in an individualistic society and we’re affluent enough to live separate lives, which is good in some ways. But it can lead to alienation and loneliness, which correlates to...mental-health issues like suicide and depression. Necessity requires us to become close, but wealth allows us to be buffered by space, time, and separateness.”
- Eric Jerome Dickey. The author of Blackbirds explains that his newest novel came about “[at] random. I hadn’t planned on revisiting this set of characters, but I’d always thought about doing a novel featuring characters from different novels, as I did here.”
- Rebecca Traister. The author of All the Single Ladies feels progress is being made as far as society’s acceptance of women’s roles, but there’s still a long way to go. “So there’s a lot happening around social and economic policy by women and men in Congress, and it’s expanded into popular culture visionaries like Lena Dunham and Shonda Rhimes. There are all kinds of forces and voices in pop culture that are offering us a diverse view of what independence what might look like. There are still women who are being jailed for having abortions around the country, or denied reproductive rights, so we need those kinds of omnipresent voices that can deliver a strong message.”
- John Prados. The historian says of Storm over Leyte that “I’ve followed the evolving history of World War II for decades. A few years ago, I argued that the next great challenge for writers on these events was to go back and reframe our accounts of the battles and campaigns in the light of the intelligence story that we now are attaining good knowledge of.”
- Jen Conley. The New Jersey-based crime writer feels that, when it comes to her work, “Maybe what I have sacrificed is developing other hobbies and interests. I like to garden, but half my stuff doesn’t survive the summer. Honestly, though, I don’t see writing as a sacrifice. It’s my passion, it makes me happy, proud. It’s a frustrating business, so I do have my down days, those days of rejection or waiting to hear from an editor, etc., and maybe that’s where the sacrifice is — if I didn’t write, maybe I’d be a bit more at ease in life.”
- Monica Hesse. The Washington Post reporter and author of the YA novel Girl in the Blue Coat warns against judging the actions of those struggling under Nazi occupation. “It’s really easy, in retrospect, for all of us to look back and say that we would have fought for the resistance, we would have fought against the Nazis. But, in fact, the percentage of resistance volunteers was really small. People were killed for it. People lost their entire families.”
- Joy Callaway. The author of Fifth Avenue Artists Society talks about how she envisioned her novel. “I suppose when I thought of what I wanted the Society to be — a mix of artists of all types, amateur and professional, known and unfamiliar — I thought of who I would want to meet there, and who, from the myriad wonderful Gilded Age artists, could I see mingling easily with any sort of crowd.”
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