Interviews

Alice LaPlante teaches Creative Writing at Stanford University and San Francisco and lives in Palo Alto, California, with her daughter and her partner. Turn of Mind is her first novel and received multiple literary awards.

Scott Hutchins is a teacher of Creative Writing at Stanford University. A Working Theory of Love is his first novel.

Noah Hawley is a TV and movie producer and writer, a composer and a novelist. The Good Father is his first novel.

Melanie Warner is a journalist and former staff reporter for the New York Times. In Pandora’s Lunchbox, she takes us to the frightening but very real world of industrial processed food.

Gavin Corbett was born in the west of Ireland and grew up in Dublin, where he studied History at Trinity College. This is the Way is his second novel.

Qiu Xiaolong was born in Shanghai in 1953. During the Cultural Revolution, his father was the target of revolutionaries and he was forbidden to go to class. He is the author of the famous detective series featuring Inspector Chen, as well as the Red Dust Lane cycle.

Jenni Fagan is a novelist and poet based in Edinburgh. She won numerous awards for her fiction. The Panopticon is her first novel.

Gerbrand Bakker won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2010 for his novel The Twin. Ten White Geese is a quiet and haunting novel in which we follow a Dutch professor and Dickinson scholar fleeing to Wales after an incident and trying to settle on a remote farm.

Robert Williams is a writer based in Manchester. Luke and Jon is his first novel.

On the eve of her ninth birthday, Rose asks her mother to bake a lemon-chocolate cake. Instead of enjoying her favourite cake, she discovers that she can taste the feelings of her mother, and by extension, of anyone preparing the food she eats. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is the second novel written by American author Aimee Bender.

Everything is set from the first chapter. It’s the story of Calum McLean, a hitman who has to stop working solo and get into the organisation.
The threat of a steady and mandatory job, loss of freedom, questions that would concern any average worker.

David Bell lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he teaches Creative Writing. When he doesn’t write, he likes to wander around in the nearby cemetery.

After a first novel under the influence of Southern Literature and winner of the Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, Hillary Jordan delivers a radically different second novel. Written as an hommage to Hawthorne’s masterpiece, When She Woke is a chilling dystopia taking place in a country where religion is the new justice.

The Middlesteins is the fourth novel published by Jami Attenberg. This funny and moving story of a Jewish dysfunctional family introduces us to Edie, the mother who is obsessed with food, Richard, her husband drifting apart, and her children, who quite don’t know how to deal with something that might lead to her demise.

Are you lucky? Do you believe in luck? If you like mystery novels, parody and San Francisco, do not hesitate to read this novel: you’ll spend a really good time. S.G. Browne’s talent should now be poached.

Murder in Memoriam is a major work of Didier Daeninckx. It allowed French people to discover that on October 17, 1961, 200 Muslims were thrown in the Seine during a peaceful demonstration organized against the colonial war that was led in Algeria at the time. The Parisian head of police was Maurice Papon, and had already made himself known during the Second World War for organizing the deportation of Jews. This mystery novel is an interesting introduction to the inspector Cadin series.

End of the seventies: Brezhnev half-opens the Iron Curtain. Thousands of Jewish families from the Eastern Bloc emigrate to Canada, to the US or to Australia. With this bittersweet family chronicle, David Bezmozgis tells the story of the Krasnansky family, who arrived in Rome after a difficult journey from Latvia, waiting for this freedom promised by the Western world.
We got to meet him in Paris and were able to ask him a few questions about this novel, which echoes his own personal story.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette is the second novel of American author and former screenwriter Maria Semple. Funny, clever, original: the novel is all that – and much more.

With The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt has written a highly entertaining, funny and enjoyable revisited version of the classic western novel. We were lucky enough to meet him and ask him a few questions about this exhilarating story of two brothers on a killing mission in Oregon in 1851.

Jonathan Dee is a writer for Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine and The Paris Review. Before tackling the financial world in The Privileges, he wrote about the world of advertising and its impossible ideals. Halfway between F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Cheever, Palladio is a superb novel with a vertiginous subject.