She thinks I approached her out of the blue. She thinks I wanted to interview her out of the kindness of my heart. The truth is this: ulterior motives.  I must confess that I’m interested in the convergence of several elements in her work (emphasis on several): exotic locale (China, in this case), the thematic rubbing up against each other of missionary zeal (whether secular missionary zeal as found in Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder or sacred missionary zeal which you’ll find in Virginia’s book) with contemporary mores, and the fact that both Virginia and I showed up a little later than usual on the publishing field, despite our lengthy, lengthy, lengthy histories in writing without an audience. And Virginia and I have the same publisher (Unbridled Books). She sounded pretty interesting to me!

The immensely talented Rob Roberge writes like the love child of Denis Johnson and Thomas McGuane.  Cheryl Strayed calls his new novel, The Cost of Living, “Drop dead gorgeous and mind-bendingly smart.” It’s something I imagine you, your neighbor, your sponsor, and your lover will want to read. You might not want your kids to read it until they’re well over 18. In fact, Roberge is so wonderfully frank and open that this interview is being posted anonymously so that my kids won’t get wind of this conversation.

English-language readers might have at long last become acquainted with one of the most-lauded voices in French literature last year when Knopf published Marie NDiaye’s book Three Strong Women to very strong reviews (“NDiaye is a hypnotic storyteller with an unflinching understanding of the rock-bottom reality of most people’s lives,” said The New York Times). The fact that she was also just shortlisted for the International Booker Prize (alongside such giants as Marilynne Robinson and Lydia Davis) probably also brought her a few more well-deserved readers.

Three Strong Women is a difficult-to-classify book, which takes the form of three thematically linked long stories (or possibly novellas), shows NDiaye’s rare ability to take time-worn forms and make them her own. That capacity is further on display in All My Friends, which will be published by Two Lines Press in on May 21 of this year. Instead of three tales this volume includes five, all of which sit somewhere between novella and story, or story and parable. What remains the same are NDiaye’s labyrinthine sentences, her strange but all-too-human characters, and her plotlines that hold up to (or maybe require) multiple reads.

There’s an appealing sureness to Meg Wolitzer when she speaks.  Her answers to questions are considered; she’s thought deeply about being a writer, a reader and the place of art in her life as well as in the “cultural conversation.”

Meg’s new book, The Interestings, is her ninth novel.  It’s a bigger book than her previous ones – longer, deeper, taking place over a greater span of contemporary history – about a group of friends who meet at the age of 15 at a summer camp for the arts in the Berkshires and what happens to them and their relationships over time.

In the summer of 2011, for a review marking the tenth anniversary of the attacks, I read thirteen novels with 9/11 plots, from Jonathan Safran Foer to  Julia Glass, from Jess Walter to Claire Messud. My favorite was Mohsin Hamid’s Booker-nominated contribution, The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a slim, clever allegory with a large ambition — it wants to make you understand something about the experience of Islamic people in the Middle East and in the United States. Like Hamid, its narrator is a Pakistani who has lived in the U.S. but is now back in Lahore. This speaker delivers the entire story as a monologue over dinner to an American visitor whose voice is never heard but who may have a gun.

Gina Frangello is the author of the novel My Sister’s Continent and the story collection Slut Lullabies. She is one of the most bold, fearless, unhindered writers I’ve ever read. After reading the manuscript of My Sister’s Continent, one editor was quoted as having said, “I couldn’t explain this book to a marketing rep without blushing or breaking down.” Here are six sex questions for the inimitable and amazing Gina Frangello.

Alice Rosenthal grew up in the Bronx, in the 1950s, with parents who were (unbeknownst to many of their colleagues, and some friends) card-carrying Communists. I know this because Alice’s older sister, Barbara, is my mother.

When I discovered that Alice was writing a novel, loosely based on her own childhood, I was eager to read it. I’ve long been fascinated by the extremes of American paranoia. What I had not expected when I picked up Take the D Train was how piercingly it would explore the complexity of the Fifties, especially for women with independent minds and inconvenient political views.

The novel focuses on the cautious, married Frima and her more impulsive sister-in-law Beth. The trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage provides a harrowing backdrop to much of the action, which is conveyed in prose that is thrilling both for its restraint and precision.

I was curious to know more about how Alice produced such a riveting novel, after years of writing.

In October, readers of the Style blog of the Washington Post were greeted with some interesting news: Jon Clinch would be self-publishing his new literary novel, The Thief of Auschwitz.

With mainstream publishers snapping up previously self-published titles and more and more genre authors making tidy livings releasing their own work, we’re beyond the days of self-publishing (or “indie” publishing, if you wish) being derided as vanity. But writers of literary fiction, for the most part, have been slow to join the movement. For many people, seeing someone of Clinch’s caliber—here’s a guy with two widely praised novels in Finn and Kings of the Earth—break with the revered publishing houses was jarring. In the blog post that broke the news, Washington Post book critic Ron Charles put it like this: “‘Am I insane?’ (Clinch) asks, as I struggle to come up with some polite way to ask if he’s insane.”

Clinch isn’t insane. If you read his blog, where he generously shares his insights about going it alone and doing it the right way, you begin to realize that he has managed to bring his literary sensibility—deeply insightful, methodical, precise—to the business of being the wordsmith equivalent of a craft brewer (an analogy Clinch himself champions).

The Thief of Auschwitz is now available in trade paperback and e-book formats. As Clinch prepared the book for release, he agreed to field some questions from novelist Craig Lancaster about how he arrived here—and where he’s going.

Some authors might dateline their novels from London and Paris, but Susan Straight writes by hand while parked in her car, waiting to pick up her daughters or escaping her house crowded with friends and family.  Fitting, because she sets much of her work in the town of Rio Seco, a parallel world to her hometown of Riverside, located sixty miles east of downtown Los Angeles.  A land where, she writes, “the land and sun and smog and violence and people could be forbidding, but the same land and sun and people offered survival and love and tungsten-hard loyalty to each other.”

Her latest novel is the last in the Rio Seco trilogy she worked on for fifteen years.  A Million Nightingales (2006), tells the story of Moinette, a beautiful mixed-race slave and her journey to freedom.  Take One Candle to Light a Room (2010) follows Victor, a present-day descendant of Moinette.  The young man falls into trouble on the fifth anniversary of his mother Glorette’s death.  Between Heaven and Here returns to the night of her murder.  Each chapter, told by different character, reveals the mystery, pain, and beauty of Glorette and Rio Seco.

If there’s a more generous writer in America than Jonathan Evison, I haven’t heard of him. (Full disclosure: Evison was kind enough to blurb two of my novels. This ain’t about that.) This son of Washington, a New York Times bestseller for his sweeping epic West of Here has engendered good will the old-fashioned way: by working damn hard at what he does, being thankful for the opportunities, using his time and talent to promote other writers and being a beacon of optimism in a business that breaks hearts as a matter of course.

With his latest, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (Algonquin), set to drop on Aug. 28, Evison unspooled for a wide-ranging, multi-day email interview about the new book, writing a smaller, more intimate story after the ambitious West of Here, working through the darkness, and what he might say to the 15-years-younger version of himself.

If you don’t know who Junot Díaz is, you should. His writing stands out as startlingly original in a world that often feels crammed with literary replication. He is the author of Drown; he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; and he is the author of the newly-released This is How You Lose Her, a story collection that centers around the charming and irresistible Yunior whose flaws only make us love him more.

I first encountered the work of Maria Semple after reading about her first novel, This One Is Mine, on the Three Guys One Book blog.  One of the Jasons (Rice, I believe) took issue with how girly the cover of the paperback was; the cupcake suggested chick lit, he wrote, and this was not chick lit.

Jason was right, but he didn’t really prepare me for the extraordinary experience of reading that book.  It had everything: it was well plotted, populated with fascinating characters, funny as hell, and so moving that I cried at the end.  I loved it so much, I taught it in my creative writing class a few weeks later.

So it was with great anticipation and excitement that I found that the brown envelope in my mailbox contained a galley of Semple’s second novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette?.  I set it on the table, went to the bathroom, and came back to find that my wife had already snagged the copy and was outside reading it.  She tore through it in a day and a half, during which I had to endure her random laughter and gasps of  ”Oh, this part is so good.”  I did the same.

And so, apparently, did Jonathan Franzen, not the easiest dude to impress.  Here’s what he wrote: “The characters in Where’d You Go, Bernadette may be in real emotional pain, but Semple has the wit and perspective and imagination to make their story hilarious. I tore through this book with heedless pleasure.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

And now, without further ado, here’s my interview with one of my favorite writers, the ever-fascinating Maria Semple.

If there’s something  Jess Walter can’t do as a writer, I’ve yet to encounter it. He can craft plots for detective novels, wax poetic and profound on any number of topics, tackle topics from the election of 1980 to 9/11, and just plain crack you up. His last novel, The Financial Lives of the Poets, was riotously funny but also disturbingly serious, leaving me with knots in my stomach for days afterward (it also inspired my first TNB interview). Beautiful Ruins, his latest and perhaps his most ambitious offering, is, simply put, the result of a novelist working at the height of his powers.

Jess was kind enough to answer some of my questions:

Hey there!

Ahoy, Kimberlee!

I don’t know how to ease into this, so I’m just going to jump in!

Appropriate enough for a gspot, or is this gchat?

Jennifer Spiegel is a way bigger freak than me. I base this solely on her excellent debut story collection, The Freak Chronicles, a suite of stories that includes among its retinue the tale of college girl stalking Mickey Rourke and a coed indulging in some extracurricular international relations with a Russian street artist. Spiegel’s stories are sexy but never salacious, and deeply humane. Her heroines spend a lot of time traveling the world and grappling with the complicated moral terrain they encounter.

She seems to have a big mouth, so I was wanted to toss a few provocations her way. Here’s what happened…