I am following up on my January 16, 2026 curation of quotes, links, and book information drawn from my regular social media posts about the Deborah Kalb book/author Q&As, now updating for January-July 2026. Also, stay tuned for my new interview with Deborah about her latest book, Everything She Most Admired, which I plan to post next week. (See below for more information on the book.)
In the meantime, I’ll repeat what I wrote in the introduction to the January post:
As usual in my posts about the Q&As, a wide range of authors is included; fiction and nonfiction, with links to the original interviews. In the latter, Deborah draws out crucial information about how authors found inspiration and creativity for their books, and how they were researched and written.
I continue to support the following sentiment, which I have included on previous curations of Deborah’s work: 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.
Author: Robert Bailey
Book: The Mediator
Author quote: “While “method #writing” (ha!) wasn’t really something I had planned, the story was aided by also having to do the work of a mediator while crafting Max’s journey.”
Author: Robin Becker
Book: Midsummer Count: New and Selected Poems
Author quote: “I’m interested in the impact of the Great Migration on white, Jewish families like mine.”
Author: Jo-Anne Berelowitz
Book: Somewhere I Belong: A Story of Country, Family, Home, and Jewish Identity
Author quote: “I tend to be introspective, so that once I started on this journey, it gained momentum and I kept going.”
Author: Caroline Bicks
Book: Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King
Author quote: “I can’t overstate how generous and brave King was in letting me excavate his manuscripts and publish pages from some of them.”
Author: Caroline Bock
Book: The Other Beautiful People
Author quote: “The Other Beautiful People and Amy Greene are as much autofiction, autobiographical fiction, a blend of fiction and memory, as they are anything.”
Author: Jean Burgess
Book: Navigating Her Next Chapter
Author quote: “A follow up question is: Who has assisted navigating your next chapters in your lives?”
Author: Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio
Book: Building a Thriving Future: Navigating the Metaverse and Multiverse
Author quote: “This book isn’t about predicting the future; it’s about preparing for it.”
Author: Erin M. Cline
Book: new translation of Confucius’s The Analects
Author quote: “I also wanted to translate the Analects in order to show more clearly that it is sketching a vision of a good life for all people.”
Author: Marian Mitchell Donahue
Book: Backstitch
Author quote: “Ultimately, I was looking for a title that was pulled from the world of the book but also revealed something about the story’s structure.”
Author: Louise Fein
Book: Book of Forbidden Words
Author quote: “The book features some real historical figures, including Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII, Desiderius Erasmus and Charlotte Guillard, a prominent 16th century printer in Paris.”
Author: Lee Goldberg
Book: Murder by Design
Author quote: “We spend very little of our time in an environment that isn’t man-made or influenced by human design.”
Author: David Guterson
Book: Evelyn in Transit
Author quote: “I never know where a novel is going. Every sentence is a surprise to me.”
Author: Deborah Kalb
Book: Everything She Most Admired
Author quote: “Writing a mystery novel is incredibly hard.”
Author: Eliza Knight
Book: Lost in the Summer of ’69
Author quote: “I did extensive research on what the road trip itself would entail, as well as the music industry.”
Author: Rebecca Knuth
Book: London Sojourn: Rewriting Life after Retirement
Author quote: “I like the linking of writing with self-development and a stage of life that is too often identified with identity foreclosure.”
Author: Kerri Maher
Book: Summer of Love
Author quote: “Desperate, I finally bought a copy of Julia Cameron’s famous creativity-course-in-a-book The Artist’s Way and vowed to do all 12 weeks.”
Author: Lynn C. Miller
Book: The Surrogate
Author quote: “In a larger sense, I asked myself the question, What happens to a family when a huge loss creates an opening to be filled?”
Author: Cathryn J. Prince
Book: For the Love of Labor: The Life of Pauline Newman
Author quote: “She knew that progress would be incremental, hard-won, and collective.”
Author: Ronald E. Purser
Book: Mind Space: Discovering Meditation Without the Meditator
Author quote: “I am convinced that the biggest problem we face in meditation is the way we are instructed to do it.”
Author: Eric Beck Rubin
Book: Ten Clear Days
Author quote: “The title refers to the 10-day period during which doctors decide whether or not to grant a patient’s request for medical assistance in dying.”
Author: Kelly Scarborough
Book: Butterfly Games
Author quote: “I aimed for a balance that respected the historical record while giving the story room to grow.”
Author: Ilan Stavans
Book: A Nation Wrestles with God: American Prophets, Philosophers, and Firebrands
Author quote: “To me, wrestling with God is what humankind has been doing since the beginning.”
Author: Ela Thier
Book: How to Fail As an Artist, My Best Tips
Author quote: “What emerged on the page was a memoir spanning five decades as an artist, that doubles as a pep talk for all creatives.”
Author: Anne Marie Wells
Book: Happy Iceland: How Icelandic Strangers Taught a Miserable American the Secret to Lifelong Happiness
Author quote: “Writing this book certainly wasn’t linear, but I never gave up on it, and I never gave up on myself.”
Author: Gesche Würfel
Book: The Absence and Presence of the Berlin Wall
Author quote: “This book aims to inspire people to approach others with openness and curiosity.”