Random House, Michael Lionstar

Jeff Glor talks to Courtney Sullivan about, "The Engagements."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Courtney Sullivan: After attending many weddings over the course of several years, I was thinking a lot about why we choose the mates we do, and what happens next. I wanted to write about marriage in all its complexity and at various stages of the relationship -- a content and long-married couple, a frazzled young couple with kids, a husband and wife who have seen the passion between them vanish.

Some of the characters had been in my head for a while. I had this idea of a couple who have been married for decades, and came together in the first place because of a mutual loss. They turned into Evelyn and Gerald. And I kept thinking about paramedics -- what was it like for them to go into the homes of strangers, whose only common trait was the fact that they weren't expecting to need an ambulance that day? And so James came into being. Delphine started as an image: A beautiful French woman trashing the apartment of a man who had wronged her. Kate was essential to the story, as someone who resists the very idea of marriage.

These four main characters came together easily, but as I was writing them, I felt like someone was missing. I always thought I might include diamonds in the plot, because while the stories are all about the everyday, nitty gritty parts of marriage, diamonds represent a sort of perfection and hopefulness. And they've been a symbol of marriage for so long. I was reading a fascinating nonfiction book called "The Heartless Stone" and there was one sentence about a woman named Frances Gerety in it. It said she had written the line "A Diamond is Forever" for De Beers in 1947 and that she herself never married. I knew right away that I had to write about her.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

CS: I knew that research would be a key component because the story spans almost a century and is largely concerned with worlds unknown to me -- modern paramedics, the rare instrument business in France, advertising in the '40s and '50s, and so on. I started off by reading stacks of newspaper articles from the last hundred years to decide which major and minor cultural events would have significance for each of my characters. Then I went to the experts. What amazed me was the sheer generosity of strangers (many of whom have now become friends) who were willing to share their expertise. Anne Akiko Meyers, the wildly talented violin soloist, helped me write a convincing virtuoso. The paramedics in Cambridge, Mass., brought me on ambulance ride-alongs and answered hundreds of questions. And Frances Gerety's former co-workers and neighbors shared their recollections of her. I started off thinking the research was something to get through before the writing could begin. But in fact I loved the research aspect so much that I kept going with it right up until the end, adding bits and pieces along the way. I think I might still be researching this book if there were no such thing as a deadline.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

CS: My fantasy backup career has always been kindergarten teacher. There are definitely bad writing days or weeks when I still think about it. For a year in my early twenties, I worked as a nanny for a family with three boys under the age of 2, so I know how exhausting it can be to spend your days with young children. But I love the sheer exuberance and rich imagination that kindergarteners have. And I share their passion for snack time, art projects and naps. The only downside I can see is that teachers have to wake up so early. Novelists get to sleep in.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

CS: Last night I started "Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald" by Therese Anne Fowler. It's wonderful so far. I've also been slowly re-reading George Eliot's "Middlemarch" for several weeks now.

JG: What's next for you?

CS: Eleven days after "The Engagements" is released, I'll be getting married in Maine. (This timing may not have been my finest idea ever.) A week after the wedding I will head off on a book tour of the U.S. and the U.K. After that, possibly a honeymoon! By then, I know I'll be itching to get back to my desk and start work on a new novel.

For more on the "The Engagements," visit the Random House website.

Penguin Group, Robin Brown

Daniel Brown: Inspiration literally walked into my living room in the person of my neighbor, Judy Willman. She had been reading one of my earlier books to her father, Joe, who was living out the last days of his life at her house, under hospice care. She had been reading one of my earlier books to him and he wanted to meet me. So a few days later I went down to Judy's house and sat down with her father. We talked for a bit about that earlier book, but then the conversation shifted to his experiences growing up during the Great Depression. Then it shifted again to his experience rowing for gold at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. As he spun out his tale I became absolutely mesmerized. It was utterly compelling. And I noticed that from time to time he was tearing up, particularly whenever he began to talk about the other boys who had rowed with him on the crew. He was a big, tough guy, and men of that generation don't generally cry easily, so I knew there was even more going on under the surface that he was telling me. I asked him right then and there if I could write a book about his experiences and he said yes, but only if it was about all the boys in the boat.

DB: There were many surprises as I dug deeper into the story, but I have to say that stepping back from it the biggest surprise was just how deep the bond between these nine young men was, and how that long that bond endured -- really until the last of them died. Rowing is an unusual sport in the degree to which it requires strong-willed individuals to subsume their egos to the larger needs of the whole crew. To perform on championship level the coxswain and the eight rowers have to perform with such precision, in such unflinching unison that they become one, perfect thing in motion -- a kind of symphony of motion. They have to learn to trust one another utterly. They have to throw themselves into each stroke knowing absolutely that the others are going to be right there with them, over and over again. That's what these guys had done 75 years ago, and they never really let it go. For the rest of their lives they remembered what they had once been, and remained almost like family, constantly checking in on each other. When there were only two of them left -- Joe Rantz and Roger Morris -- the two of them would get together on the phone for hours at a time and say almost nothing, just needing to be connected.

DB: I would probably be what I once was -- a writing teacher. That at least would keep me close to what I love. And words are what I love. I love the feel of them rolling around in my head and finding their way out onto the computer screen. I love feeling their texture, sensing their nuances. I love the way they come out of nowhere and manifest themselves suddenly in crisp, clean black and white before your eyes. I love arranging and rearranging them, sculpting shapes out of them, piling them up in pleasing ways. I even like deleting them--cutting them carefully here and there, pruning them from a composition to make the remaining words stronger, livelier, more resonant. So, I guess that means I could be an editor, as I also once was. A writing teacher or an editor, either would suit, but something to do with words certainly.

DB: I just finished Laura Hillenbrand's "Unbroken," which I think is absolutely stunning. I have widely eclectic tastes in reading -- a lot of history, biography, adventure, contemporary fiction, Victorian novels, popular science, you name it. But in the end I always come back to the kinds of books I like to write myself -- narrative nonfiction -- and I think Hillenbrand is the current reigning champion of the genre. She is so good at unveiling the drama inherent in her subject, finding the apt detail, pacing the unfolding of the story, building character. Just masterful. I also recently read the manuscript for David Laskin's upcoming book, "The Family," and was thoroughly engrossed by it. And I'm particularly looking forward to a recent book by another narrative nonfiction writer I admire a great deal -- Timothy Egan's "Short Night of the Shadow Catcher."

DB: A long book tour, followed, I hope, by enough time and space for some serious reflection on what I want to write next. The one downside of having a great story walk into your living room is that it's hard to find a worthy successor. You can't really expect great story ideas to just show up uninvited like that. Over the course of the last year or so I've considered and rejected perhaps a dozen subjects for a next book, not because they wouldn't make good books, but because they wouldn't make great books. I research my books very intensively--for four of five years each time -- and it's hard (and unwise) to give your heart away to something you are going to spend that long with unless you really love it.

Charis Brice,Random House

Jeff Glor talks to Neal Thompson about "A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert 'Believe It or Not!' Ripley"

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Neal Thompson: One day (in August of 2007, to be exact) I read a New York Times story about a Ripley's Believe It or Not museum in Times Square, and I had this A-ha! Moment, realizing that Robert Ripley -- whose cartoons and books I'd read growing up -- was not only a real guy, but an amazing man, whose influential life had been largely overlooked. When I learned that no one had ever written a full-fledged biography of Ripley, I dove in. I mean, like, that very afternoon. I spent the next five years obsessed with Ripley's world.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

NT: I loved learning how hugely famous and popular Ripley was during his time. Far more than a cartoonist, he was among the wealthiest men in entertainment and among the most popular and best-traveled men in America. And like a living believe-it-or-not, he lived an over-the-top life of extremes -- he traveled to scores of countries, collected a harem of girlfriends, lived in a mansion (one of three homes) on a private island. For someone who grew up shy, poor and bucktoothed, his life was the perfect example of the oddballs and underdogs he celebrated in his cartoons.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

NT: If I could live the fantasy? I'd love to make films -- a different style of storytelling. If the fantasy isn't possible, I'd be doing something that allows me to create. I loved my high school and college jobs as a mason's helper and breakfast cook, and I could see myself building stone walls or furniture, or tending bar, or running a restaurant. In fact, one dream I've had for retirement was a combination coffee shop, bar, bookstore, music club. But, you know, one that makes tons of money.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

NT: Two of my recent favorites are Colum McCann's brilliantly beautiful "TransAtlantic" and Stephen King's sweet and spooky "Joyland." The new Neil Gaiman is wonderful, too. Oh, and I can't wait to dive into NFL punter Chris Kluwe's smart, funny, weird "Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies."

JG: What's next for you?

NT: I doubt that I'll dive into another big research-driven project right away. But one idea I've been exploring (possibly as a digital short) is a look at the history and origins of the skateboarding culture that, via my two teens sons, has come to dominate our family. My kids and I, along with a few of their friends and another skate dad, crossed the U.S. two summers ago, visiting skate parks. I hope to write about that.

For more on "A Curious Man," visit the Random House website.

Little, Brown and Company, Rachel Cobb

Jeff Glor talks to Dean King about, "The Feud: The Hatfields and McCoys: The True Story."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Dean King: I love to take a forgotten piece of history and make it come alive again. Almost everyone had heard of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, but almost no one knew what it was all about or had a mostly false impression. (The feud went all the way to the Supreme Court? Really? Yes, it did.) The fact that there were larger than life characters, bold and reckless plots, and plenty of controversy and uncertainty over what happened--what started the feud, who was to blame, how it occurred -- all made it intriguing for me. After writing books set in Africa and China, returning to my own back yard was appealing as well, especially to this place of wilderness and adventure and one that hearkens back to my family roots. While I was born and raised in Virginia, both of my parents came from West Virginia. It's a place that echoes in the family memory banks and calls you back.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

DK: I was surprised and happy to discover a fascinating hero in the story, a U.S. deputy marshal named Dan Cunningham, who arrested McCoys and Hatfields. He has largely been left out of the histories and is never mentioned in the History Channel miniseries. I actually discovered quite a bit about his background and was pleased to elevate him to his rightful place in the epic story. His family was also embroiled in a feud that devolved from the Civil War, which sheds light on the Hatfield-McCoy feud.

I was surprised to find that even after more than a century, there were still significant sources out there that had not been tapped, including eye-witness accounts at shootings and funerals and a detailed description of Devil Anse's moonshining operation from a surprising source that had lain dormant since it was originally written in 1888.

Still, I guess it would be impossible to say that anything surprised me more than the bullets that started flying in my direction while I was investigating the murder site of one of the McCoys. Standing with my teenage daughter Hazel, who had come along to help with the research, and two guides on a silt delta at the mouth of Thacker Creek on the Tug River, I was busy writing a description of the scene in my notebook, when all of sudden a gun cracked. Seven or eight shots fired from around a bend in the river hit the water not ten yards from us. That was quite startling and certainly got the message across that we should move along.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

DK: If I weren't a writer, I'd be a chef or a baker. Ultimately, I write because I have always loved escaping into a book and entering a world that is in my mind and outside of time, whether it is historical or fictional. If I can provide that for other people, I feel fulfilled, worthwhile on some level. I have also had a lifelong love of food and more recently of wine, and so, likewise, it gives me pleasure to share that with others. I am the breakfast short-order chef for my wife, Jessica, and our four daughters, whipping up scrambled eggs with diced tomatoes and oregano or eggs in a frame before school. Judging from the way it gets gobbled down, I make a pretty mean buttermilk, almond banana bread, too. I get pleasure from that and take pride in it. Fortunately, in Jessica, I married the best cook and copy editor I have even known. So, most of the time, I get to write.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

DK: I recently read a phenomenal memoir called "The River Bend Chronicle" by Ben Miller. It's a book of dense wordplay that you sip like a fine whiskey. Likewise, I am savoring poet Ron Smith's "Its Ghostly Workshop." The last great books I read were Hillary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" and all of Daniel Woodrell's books, including "The Bayou Trilogy, Give Us a Kiss, Woe to Live On," and "Winter's Bone." My most recent guilty pleasure: a Jerry West memoir. West was a freshman on the West Virginia University basketball team, when my father, Bill King, and his freshman roommate Hot Rod Hundley were seniors. Apparently, it took some creative reffing that year for the varsity squad to beat the freshman team.

JG: What's next for you?

DK: A 2,000-mile driving book tour of the South, which takes me from Richmond out to Nashville, Tenn., and Atlanta, to Oxford, Miss., to both Charlestons (West Virginia and South Carolina), and to Asheville, Charlotte, and Raleigh, N.C., among other towns. I'm really looking forward to clearing my mind on that journey and then returning to the five or six ideas I have teed up, all involving rugged history and adventure. In the meantime, I am producing a Hatfield-McCoy reality series for the History Channel, which airs this summer. I am excited to see these real-life Hatfields and McCoys, many of whom have become my friends, pool their family arts in a legal whiskey-making business. Judging from the illicit versions I sampled during the writing of this book, these are going to be some fine spirits ... That is, if we can keep them cooperating long enough!

For more on "The Feud" visit their website.

Harper Collins, Szabolcs Dudas

Adam LeBor: Yael Azoulay, the heroine of "The Geneva Option," takes her name from Yael in The Book of Judges. After the Israelites defeated Sisera, Yael offered to hide him in her tent. She gave him milk and a blanket and he fell asleep. When Barak, the Israelite general, came by looking for Sisera, Yael ushered him inside. There was Sisera, dead, with a tent-peg in his head. Another version says Yael seduced Sisera seven times to exhaust him before she killed him. Sex, murder, betrayal, it's all there. I learnt Yael's story at school and it stayed with me for decades.

Yael Azoulay works for the United Nations, doing the secret deals that keep the wheels of superpower diplomacy and big business rolling. That comes from my time as a reporter covering the Yugoslav wars and UN peacekeeping operations, which led me to write a non-fiction book about the UN's failures, called "Complicity with Evil." Then I began to think, what if there was an essentially good person working at the UN, who was forced to operate in the shadows, even to kill?

AL: How the characters really do come alive and start doing things of their own accord. This was a real revelation to me about the power of fiction. It was a kind of magic and an amazing high. Some nights I could not get to sleep, there was so much happening. I was totally absorbed in the story, as though it were taking place around me.

AL: I wanted to be a writer since I was eighteen and read "The Road to Wigan Pier" by George Orwell, about poverty in 1930s Britain. Otherwise, I would like to be an architect. Fine buildings, like fine books, contribute to the greater good and add something to the fabric of life. Perhaps there is also something about wanting to leave a legacy. And you cannot demolish a book.

AL: I have gone back to the master: everything by Eric Ambler. "The Craft of Intelligence" by Allen Dulles for hints and tips. I also have a non-fiction book out, "Tower of Basel," the first investigative history of the mysterious Bank for International Settlements, so I am re-reading "Lords of Finance" by Liaquat Ahamed.

AL: The next book in the Yael Azoulay series. She is going deeper into danger and her past.

Random House, Benedict Brain

Jeff Glor talks to Brian Kimberling about, "Snapper."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Brian Kimberling: I've lived abroad for several years, and whenever I tell people I'm from Indiana they ask if I know Bobby Knight personally, or if there are a lot of Indians in Indiana, or something silly like that. I'm also considered an authority overseas on Iowa and Illinois and Idaho and other states I've never been to, because they're all the same place as far as most people are concerned. Snapper is in some sense the result of 15 years itching to tell people where I'm really from. And it is, I think, like something cooked up in a meth lab on Lake Wobegon. I wanted to put some pristine woodland and overcrowded prisons and nice Episcopalians and white supremacists and pretty birds all in the same fictional bag and shake them up to see what happened.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

BK: How interesting southern Indiana became to me personally as I wrote. I grew up there and I thought I knew it cold. Revisiting it in new fictional ways brought out things I hadn't considered before; the ways the land itself makes the people who they are, and so on. I got into a very productive feedback loop: the more I wrote about it, the more I needed to write subsequently. Although I made a lot of false starts and wrong turns that I later had to cut, there was never a point when I thought, gee, I don't know what to do, or oh no, I've run out of material.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

BK: I did many things for many years, such as teaching English, designing databases, dabbling in journalism, and stocking frozen pizzas, in the Czech Republic, England, Mexico, and Turkey. At around the age of 35 it seemed like I'd made a terrible mistake. I'd forgotten to build a career or accumulate debt or any other traditionally adult thing. I had always written fiction, just somewhat lackadaisically. I wrote "Snapper" with a sense of urgency. If I hadn't, I suppose I would still be designing databases and/or editing Irish Dancing Magazine in England.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

BK: I just finished a Margaret Atwood book "Oryx and Crake," a John Updike book "Couples" and a Chris Offut book "Kentucky Straight," all of which I enjoyed. Louise Erdrich and Edith Wharton are next. There isn't necessarily a logic here. I am very likely to skip a groove and just re-read an old favorite, like "Gogol."

JG: What's next for you?

BK: I am working on a second book set in southern Indiana, for Pantheon.

For more on "Snapper" visit the Random House website.

Ellen Warner,Random House

Jeff Glor talks to Nathaniel Philbrick about "Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Nathaniel Philbrick: Like a lot of kids, I read Edith Forbes's "Johnny Tremain" in elementary school. It had a big impact and I've always been curious about what the city of Boston was like during the Revolution. After finishing my book "Mayflower," which ends with the terrible English-Native conflict called King Philip's War in 1676, I realized I wanted to continue the story, so to speak, and tell about what happened a hundred years later in Boston.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

NP: I was surprised to learn that most of the Founding Fathers we associate with the Revolution in New England -- John Adams, John Hancock, and Sam Adams -- were in Philadelphia at the Continental Congress when events were unfolding in Boston. A 33-year-old doctor named Joseph Warren was the one who ordered Paul Revere to alert the countryside that the British were coming. Warren was the President of the Provincial Congress and was the one leading the on-the-ground revolution until he died tragically at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

NP: I'd probably be a teacher of some sort -- in fact, that's what I always assumed I'd be doing until I ended up becoming a writer.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

NP: I'm in the middle of two books -- the second volume of William Manchester's biography of Winston Churchill, "The Last Lion," and F. Scott's Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night."

JG: What's next for you?

NP: Not sure at this point, but I really found the Revolutionary War period fascinating. We'll see!

Penguin Group, Maria Yagoda

Jeff Glor talks to Ben Yagoda about, "How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them."

Ben Yagoda: The short answer is: 20 years in the classroom. When I started teaching writing and journalism at the University of Delaware, I was struck that the universe of writing mistakes students made was pretty small. There were -- and continue to be -- about 50 basic problems that account for maybe 90 percent of the marks and comments I make on their assignments. And I see a lot of the same things when I read blogs and even newspapers and magazines. I thought it would be useful to put together a short book explaining what the "fabulous 50" are, and some ways to recognize and avoid them. And that led to How to Now Write Bad.

BY: The passion and sometimes vehemence people bring to issues of writing, language, and especially grammar. As I was writing the book, I would occasionally write short posts on my blog (www.benyagoda.com) about the issues I was dealing with. And every time I did, there would be many impassioned comments. Who would have thought people cared so much about the Oxford comma, or the difference between that and which?

BY: The honest answer is, a lawyer. I think that profession would feed into my ingrained need to be pedantic and split hairs. But boy, what I wouldn't give to have the passion and dedication necessary to be a jazz guitarist!

BY: I am about four New Yorkers behind on my Kindle Fire. I just finished an awesome book called "Far From the Tree," by Andrew Solomon -- an extremely in-depth look at the American family today. And I'm in the middle of two more excellent non-fiction books: "The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov," by Andrea Pitzer, and "The House That George Built," by Wilfred Sheed.

BY: My next book project relates to the Sheed book (and, I guess, my secret wish to be a jazz sideman). Its tentative title is "The B Side: The Fall of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song, 1950-1965." It's kind of a mystery story that will try to answer the question: what happened to the great American tradition of popular songwriting -- the tradition of Gershwin Porter, and Kern -- after 1950? The traditional answer is that rock and roll took over, but that's too simple. It's been a fascinating project, and I hope to finish within a year or so.

Random House, Daniel Addison

Jeff Glor talks to Jonathan Haidt about "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Jonathan Haidt: When I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1980s, I set for myself the task of trying to figure out what morality really is. Where does it come from? Why is it so variable around the world, yet at the same time, you see the same basic elements (such as reciprocity, care, loyalty, and authority) repeated over and over again? I studied how morality varied between India, the USA, and Brazil. But after John Kerry's loss to George W. Bush in the presidential election of 2004, the Charlottesville Democratic Association asked me to give a talk on how liberals and conservatives differ. I found that the ideas I had developed to compare different countries worked quite well to compare different sides of the political spectrum. After that talk, I decided to change my research to focus on the left-right divide, which was (and still is) tearing America apart. "The Righteous Mind" is my effort to explain that divide, while at the same time answering the question I set out to answer in grad school: what is morality, and where does it come from?

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

JH: I tried so hard to see morality from everyone's point of view that I actually came to respect conservative and libertarian ideas, as much as liberal ideas. By the time I finished writing chapter eight, in which I tried to articulate conservative notions of fairness and liberty, I realized that I could no longer call myself a liberal. I am now a passionate centrist.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

JH: I'm a social psychologist who wrote his first book "The Happiness Hypothesis" at the age of 43. I'd be perfectly happy just doing experiments and writing them up for academic journals, rather than writing books. Well, that's not quite true. Writing a book is so much more fun than the defensive writing style one must use to write an article that will get torn apart during the peer review process.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

JH: I've just moved to the NYU-Stern School of Business, so I'm trying to understand the world of business, and the various ethics of capitalism. Books such as "The Mind and the Market," by Jerry Muller, "A Capitalism for the People," by Luigi Zingales, and "The Origin of Wealth," by Eric Beinhocker.

JG: What's next for you?

JH: Business ethics. No, it's not an oxymoron, but it does seem to be the case that business and business schools promote a practical, problem-solving mindset in which moral concerns are often pushed to the background. Business ethics has traditionally been handled by philosophers. I want to see if social psychology can do a better job of it. My goal is not to teach MBA students to be ethical, but rather to apply the ideas in "The Righteous Mind" to teach future leaders how they can set up organizations that will end up producing more ethical behavior by indirect means, and will therefore be less vulnerable to the ethical meltdowns that destroyed so many companies in the last 13 years, and harmed so many millions of people around the world.

For more on "The Righteous Mind," visit the Random House website.

Hachette Book Group,Liz Stubbs

Jeff Glor talks to Robert Weintraub about "The Victory Season: The End of World War II and the Birth of Baseball's Golden Age"

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Robert Weintraub: I wanted to write about baseball related to WWII, and the more I dug in to the research, it seemed that the immediate post-war moment was most interesting. 1946 was fraught with domestic tensions and difficulties as the country transitioned from war to peace, and baseball was one of the things that eased the time for many who were otherwise put out. Also, you had the first glimmerings of the massive changes that were coming for the game -- a black man signing to play in organized baseball, unionizing attempts, and the players first taste of freedom from the odious contractual restrictions on their movement and pay. It was a fascinating, and the play on the field was pretty great too, so I felt strongly compelled to write about it.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

RW: Probably the story of an extraordinary "World Series" that was played at the Hitler Youth Stadium in Nuremberg in 1945, contested by American soldiers based in Germany and France, right on the spot where the Nazis had paraded their power only a few years earlier. More amazingly, one of the teams in the Series was integrated with a pair of Negro Leaguers, Leon Day and Willard Brown, so this was sort of an out-of-town preview of what was coming shortly stateside with Jackie Robinson. In addition, one of the players on the losing team, Harry "The Hat" Walker, would drive in the winning run in the real World Series of 1946, just over a year later.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

RW: Before I ever started writing, I was a television producer (ESPN, ABC Sports, Discovery, Speed, many more -- including CBS Sports as well!), and remain so to this day, so I suppose that's an easy answer for me.

G: What else are you reading right now?

RW: I'm reading "The Angel's Game" by Carlos Ruiz Zafon and "Tough Without a Gun," a biography of Humphrey Bogart, by Stefan Kanfer. Gothic mystery combined with gritty realism!

JG: What's next for you?

RW: I'd like to expand my horizons a bit and write about something other than sports, or with sports only in the background. Time to really stretch my legs and get out of my comfort zone a bit, methinks.

For more on "The Victory Season," visit the Hachette Book Group website.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Leonardo Cendamo

Jeff Glor talks to A.B. Yehoshua about "The Retrospective."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

A.B. Yehoshua: When I reached the age of 70, I felt the time had come to deal with the subject of artistic creativity and to write a novel about a creative artist. The professional identity of protagonists is of great importance in their characterization. In the nine novels I have written so far, I have devoted great attention to the occupations of my main characters -- doctor, lawyer, Middle East scholar, human resources manager, accountant, and more. But I felt that at this point in my life I could not escape delving into a character who professional identity was closest to my own -- a creative artist.

But I didn't want to write about a novelist, not only because there are so many novels whose main character is a writer, but because I wanted to examine the various forces and energies that function within literary creativity -- the dynamic tension that exists between the power of wild imagination and the powers of craft and organization: building characters, structuring visual images, and so on.

These are serious questions about artistic creation, especially at a time when literature, music, film, and the plastic arts have become accessible to all, and the practice of these arts has become more popular and democratic.

After the publication of my novel "Friendly Fire," I knew this was what I needed to do next, but the specific spark for the new novel came when my wife and I made a trip to Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain, where I was awarded a modest literary prize. The opening of the novel "The Retrospective" describes exactly what I felt when I saw, on the wall of our room at the Parador hotel, a reproduction of a painting on the classical theme of "Caritas Romana." The painting was a complete mystery to me, and to solve it, I wrote this novel.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

ABY: What surprised me most in writing this novel was the final chapter. This ambiguous mixture of reality and pure imagination -- the encounter between the hero and Don Quixote -- came about in a manner that I never knew I could, or wanted to, achieve. I wrote this ending in a single burst of inspiration while I was in the middle of writing the novel. And at the moments of my greatest struggle while writing the book I went back and read the ending that was already complete, and it encouraged me not to give up and to keep on working.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

ABY: If I had not become a writer I would almost certainly have become a lawyer. The world of law always fascinated me: the search for truth and justice, on the one hand, and the ability to argue with sharp intelligence and bring compelling evidence to defeat the adversary. In my novels there is no shortage of lawyers -- in "A Late Divorce" and "Mr. Mani" for example -- and in "Journey to the End of the Millennium" there are detailed descriptions of two trials that take place between Ashkenazic and "Eastern" (Sephardic) Jews. In "Five Seasons" and "The Liberated Bride" I created strong female characters who are a legal advisor and a judge. Indeed, in Israel today women are very prominent in the legal profession.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

ABY: I divide my reading time between fiction and non-fiction, and I must say that more and more I am drawn to the latter. Most recently, though, I read an amazing book by a young woman author called "The Zionist Comedy - Inferno," somewhere between a novel and a personal chronicle written entirely in biblical Hebrew. It's a strong book that gives our daily lives, politics included, a rich, deeply biblical resonance.

JG: What's next for you?

ABY: Following "The Retrospective," I wrote a play based on an encounter between David Ben-Gurion, the Labor Zionist leader who became Israel's first prime minister, and his rival Ze'ev Jabotinsky, ideological father of today's Likud party, that took place in London in 1934. The play is currently running at the municipal theatre of Tel Aviv, and has been very well received. And now a new novel is slowly taking shape in my mind -- this time with a woman protagonist.

For more on "The Retrospective," visit the website.

Malin Lauterbach, Random House

Jeff Glor talks to Alexander Soderberg about "The Andalucian Friend."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Alexander Soderberg: I had an idea that I wanted to evolve. It started off as a TV-script. But I soon felt that the story was bigger than a script and needed some room to expand. I wanted to paint with more colors than were available for television, in a way. It was great fun to spin out the narrative full blast, building a universe around the characters, and allowing them to live their own lives.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

AS: Time. How important time is when you write. To have the time to put away your work for a while, let the story rest and take a look at it with new fresh eyes. When I wrote "The Andalucian Friend," no one knew about the book. I had time on my side.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

AS: I've taken up horseback riding in the last few years and actually own a horse--a gelding called Quickstep. I'd probably spend all my time with him, trying to win him over (we have a love/hate relationship: I love him, but he hates me).

JG: What else are you reading right now?

AS: At the moment I'm working on my next book, and I don't read much when I work. Just magazines, mostly. I like The Economist and, of course, Your Horse, a British equestrian magazine. The last book I read was "The Good Soldiers" by David Finkel. Laying on my bedside table, tempting me, is "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn.

JG: What's next for you?

AS: I'm working on a sequel to "The Andalucian Friend."

For more on "The Andalucian Friend," visit the Random House website.

Harper Collins, LANN

Jeff Glor talks to Charles Fernyhough about "Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts"

JG: What inspired you to write the book?

CF: I wanted to write a slightly different kind of science book, one that was based on real people's stories as much as it was about communicating scientific findings. I'd become interested in memory through some creative writing teaching I'd been doing, in which I was asking writing students to think about what a reader's brain has to do when it's processing a literary text. And the construction of a self-narrative through memory was a key theme of my previous nonfiction book, about my daughter's early psychological development. Memory is a perfect topic for a slightly left-field approach to science writing, because it's all about personal stories. I'd like readers to come away feeling that they've spent some time in the company of a rewarding narrative that deals with characters and emotions, as well as knowing plenty about the latest research.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

CF: Memory is difficult! It's complicated; it has many moving parts. Our memories are actually memories of memories; they're shaped by who we are now as much as who were back then; and they're susceptible to influence, distortion and bias from many quarters. That made it a challenge to pull it all together, but thankfully there is this fairly strong consensus now about the reconstructive nature of memory, backed up by some ingenious psychological and neuroscientific research. And I was lucky enough to be able to talk to some fascinating and inspiring people -- a trauma victim, an amnesiac, my elderly grandmother -- who shared their stories with me and taught me a lot about what it's like to be a rememberer.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

CF: I have a part-time academic post, and I conduct research on topics such as hallucinations and child development as well as memory. If I had to give up all the bookish stuff completely, I'd be trying to make it as a progressive rock guitarist. Yeah, I know.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

CF: Because I studied science rather than literature, there are big gaps in my reading. I'm currently trying to fill a Shakespeare-shaped hole by working my way through his collected works. I still tend to get some of the comedies mixed up, but I'm making progress.

JG: What's next for you?

CF: I've been working on a novel about a neuroscientist, entitled "A Box of Birds." I'm interested in how we as a society consume neuroscientific information: why we're so attracted to it, and what it might mean for us as people trying to make sense of our experience. My protagonist feels differently about who she is because of what she knows about her own nervous system. Crucially, it makes her act differently too. Fiction is a great way to explore these ideas because it essentially allows you to set up a human experiment: you can create a character with certain beliefs, emotions and secrets, put her in a predicament and see how she acts. In the right hands, the novel can teach us a huge amount about who we are as people.

For more on "Pieces of Light" visit the Harper Collins website.

Macmillan, Israel Byrds

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Frank Bill: I started writing "Donnybrook" during the downturn of the economy. I wanted to write a book that shined a bright light on the working and struggling class of the heartland, like war vets, factory workers and crystal meth cooks. But I wanted to do that with an active narrative and an attention to voice and language, by showing the masculine identities of struggling class men who do what they need to do in order to survive.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

FB: Time and how quickly it passes when you're lost in your storyline.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

FB: Well I still work a day job in a factory. Writing at 3:30 a.m. until 6:30 a.m. and then heading into work. I can't see myself doing anything else other than maybe teaching Chinese martial arts as the training requires the same amount of dedication if you want to be great at it.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

FB: I normally start several books at once. I'm finishing up "The Devil in Silver" by Victor LaValle and "Crapalachia" by Scott McClanahan. And I'm just starting on two new books, "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Ron Rash" and "Detroit: An American Autopsy" by Charlie LeDuff.

JG: What's next for you?

FB: The follow up to Donnybrook, "The Salvaged and the Savage."

For more on "Donnybrook," visit the Macmillan website