I’m following up on my December 21, 2023 curation of quotes, links, and book information drawn from my regular posts about the Deborah Kalb book/author Q&As, now updating for the first half of 2024.
Last September I interviewed Deborah about her first novel for adults (which recently had its first publication anniversary), in “Three Questions for Deborah Kalb, Author of Off to Join the Circus.”
I’ll repeat what I wrote in last year’s curation, because it remains true: Continued kudos to Deborah for the many high quality author interviews she publishes each week about both fiction and nonfiction books. They provide a valuable window into the writing process, and demonstrate that while there are commonalities among authors and books, each publishing experience is unique.
If you are looking for reading ideas for the rest of the summer, and would also like to discover some cool authors who might not have been on your radar, the information below is likely to keep you busy!
Author: Laetitia Andrac
Book: Light It: How to Trust Your Intuition and Build a Thriving Business
Author quote: “In essence, intuition in business is about tapping into an innate wisdom, an undercurrent that guides decisions beyond the visible and quantifiable.”
Author: Tracy Borman
Book: Anne Boleyn & Elizabeth I: The Mother and Daughter Who Forever Changed British History
Author quote: “One thing that really struck me when researching the #book was just how pivotal an influence Anne was on the reformation – and on her daughter’s religious outlook.”
Author: Jane Boulware
Book: Worthy: From Cornfields to Corner Office of Microsoft
Author quote: “People see my title and “accomplishments” and think there is something unique about me, that I have a ‘secret sauce’ to success. There isn’t and I don’t.”
Author: Matthew Bowman
Book: The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America
Author quote: “This is the first modern alien abduction story in American history, and it’s famous for that reason.”
Author: Tracy Chevalier
Book: The Glassmaker
Author quote: “I didn’t stop time, but I slowed it way down.”
Author: Eric H. Cline
Book: After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations
Author quote: “Thus, in recent years, so much light has been shone on this period that it really isn’t considered to be a Dark Age at all anymore by scholars.”
Author: Susan Coll
Book: Real Life and Other Fictions
Author quote: “Prior to the disaster, there were multiple sightings in the area of a gigantic creature said to be part man, part moth: The Mothman.”
Author: Claire Coughlan
Book: Where They Lie
Author quote: “I tend to research on a “need to know” business, according to what my character is doing, and then go down rabbit holes of information when I land on something interesting.”
Author: Sara B. Franklin
Book: The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America
Author quote: “Her path was unconventional, built upon intuition, savvy, and guts. I identified with her, and she became an important model for me.”
Author: Paul Halpern
Book: The Allure of the Multiverse: Extra Dimensions, Other Worlds, and Parallel Universes
Author quote: “I researched the book by conducting numerous interviews of prominent physicists, reading the transcripts of oral histories of others, looking at trailblazing articles about multiverse ideas, and so forth.”
Author: Jessica Bryant Klagmann
Book: This Impossible Brightness
Author quote: “But the story turned in a new direction, for example, when I read about the town that heard radio transmissions through their household objects.”
Author: Beth Kurland
Author quote: “… I was taking writing workshops where I was given writing prompts and simply wrote stream of consciousness, whatever wanted to come out onto the page (often autobiographical vignettes).”
Author: Kate Medley
Book: Thank You Please Come Again: How Gas Stations Feed & Fuel the American South
Author quote: “As a photojournalist, I consider myself to be a journalist first and a photographer second. When I go out into the world, my goal is to communicate a narrative to a wider audience.”
Author: Susan Page
Book: The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters
Author quote: “Every woman in journalism, and especially in broadcast journalism, owes her a debt. She cut a path that made it easier for those who followed, and she had the scars to prove it.”
Author: Melissa Pritchard
Book: Flight of the Wild Swan
Author quote: “Years later, on a rainy spring afternoon in London in 2013, I walked into the Florence Nightingale Museum and found myself its sole visitor.”
Author: M.S. Rao
Author quote: “It implores you to follow the philosophy of “health first, education second, and wealth third” to lead a happy and meaningful life.”
Author: Jennifer Richter
Book: Dear Future
Author quote: “Dear Future to me represents a very basic but profoundly universal plea: that everything in the end will be okay.”
Author: Jo Salas
Book: Mrs. Lowe-Porter
Author quote: “I spent hours in the Morgan Library with Elias’s pocket diaries, which yielded up some secrets.“
Author: Lissa Soep
Book: Other People’s Words: Friendship, Loss, and the Conversations That Never End
Author quote: “I hope that the simple observation I draw from Bakhtin — that our speech is “filled to overflowing with other people’s words” — is as transformative for readers as it has been for me.”
Author: Christopher Ullman
Author quote: “David Rubenstein read it and said he learned a lot and enjoyed it. That was quite a relief, since 20 of the 50 lessons are from him and I didn’t get his permission to discuss them publicly.”
Author: Adelle Waldman
Book: Help Wanted
Author quote: “I wanted to paint a hyper-realistic picture of retail work today and the internal life of a big-box store.”
Author: Diana Chapman Walsh
Book: The Claims of Life
Author quote: “I wanted readers to take away a deeper appreciation of a distinctive type of American institution that has a major role to play in our democracy – in the future as it has in the past.”
Author: Tim Wendel
Book: Rebel Falls
Author quote: “I read Burley’s file at the British Library in London and discovered that he had reinvented himself as a war correspondent for The (London) Telegraph after escaping the Civil War.”