All Blog Posts from Author Talk

Jeff Glor talks to legendary sportswriter Frank Deford about his book, "Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter."

Jeff Glor: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

Frank Deford: How difficult it is to get humor right. It's much easier to write serious or sad.

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

FD: Right now, I'd probably be retired, because I can't imagine that I'd like anything as much as I do writing, so I'd probably have given up work by now. If I hadn't become a writer, I think I might have tried acting. It was something else I did well as a kid, and I liked it.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

FD: "Bring Up The Bodies," by Hilary Mantel.

JG: What's next for you?

FD: Try to dream up another novel, while still doing commentaries for NPR and the occasional piece on HBO for "Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel."

MORE VIDEO:

Frank Deford on how sports has changed in 50 years

Deford's favorite athletes?

For more on "Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter" visit the Grove/Atlantic website.

Jeff Glor talks to Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford about his latest novel, "Canada."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Richard Ford: What originally "inspired" me, I suppose, was a notion of a teenage boy being abandoned by his parents (I didn't know why they'd abandon him; I had to make that up), and being transported across the border from the US into Saskatchewan, Canada, where he knew no one. It seemed dramatic -- which is generally what I'm looking for. I was also interested in borders, themselves; emotional ones, moral ones, psychic ones, as well as national ones, and what happens when you cross them.

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

RF: What surprised (and pleased me) most was how much I enjoyed describing a man robbing a bank. I may have always wanted to rob a bank myself. Thoreau says a writer is often not the man who has the experience, as much as the one who needs to have it. I guess I needed that.

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

RF: I hope I'd be being a cartoonist, and playing the blues harmonica on the weekends.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

RF: I'm reading William Boyd's first novel, "A Good Man in Africa," which is terrific.

JG: What's next for you?

RF: The interesting thing about being a writer is that you simply don't know what;s next. It's why I'm not a lawyer. On the other hand, I'm 68, so I have some idea.

MORE VIDEO:

Author Richard Ford talks about the border between childhood and young adulthood, as well as the U.S.-Canadian border. His new novel is called "Canada." Author Richard Ford talks about how the landscape and language of Saskatchewan influenced his writing in his new novel, "Canada."

For more on "Canada" visit the Harper Collins website.

(Credit: Harper Collins, Lucian Read)

Jeff Glor talks to Andrew Blackwell about "Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Andrew Blackwell: It was an accident. I had been traveling through India, and ended up spending a couple of days in Kanpur, which had just been declared India's most polluted city by the national government. Not exactly an award you want to win. But somehow I ended up really enjoying myself there, despite all the untreated sewage and industrial waste. And I became a little obsessed with figuring out how I could have had such a good time in such a crummy place. To be sure, there was educational value in seeing environmental issues up close, instead of reading about them in a magazine; and it was inspiring to hang out with people who were living with and combating their city's problems. But eventually I realized that the real reason was that Kanpur simply has plenty to offer a visitor besides pollution. It has some good restaurants, and a nice temple complex, and a scenic riverfront--even though the river was full of arsenic and feces. Most of all, because a place like Kanpur is supposedly such a dump, you're always the only foreign traveler there... and there are always good deals on hotels. That was my realization: that there are these absolute gems out there that no traveler ever bothers to visit, because everyone thinks, with some justification, that they're just too gross.

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

AB: That my destinations were as nice as they were. I fully expected to be viscerally grossed out in the process of traveling for this book, and it almost never happened. The pollution was always present, but I found it surprisingly easy to get in touch with whatever was welcoming or fun about a place. Even a city like Linfen, China--often referred to as the world's most polluted city--has an energetic civic life that really sucks you in. Provided you can handle the smog, of course, which is just horrendous.

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

AB: Working on documentaries.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

AB: "The Gift" by Lewis Hyde. "Zona" by Geoff Dyer. "The Cornbread Mafia" by James Higdon. "Travels in Mundania" by Lizzie Stark. "The Taliban Shuffle" by Kim Barker.

JG: What's next for you?

AB: A vacation, I hope. I'd love to go back to Chernobyl or Linfen without having to be working on a book the whole time...

For more on "Visit Sunny Chernobyl" visit the website.

Jeff Glor talks to Jennifer Miller about "The Year of the Gadfly."

Jeff Glor:  What inspired you to write the book?

Jennifer Miller: The Year of the Gadfly is a literary mystery set at a high-powered prep school in northwestern Massachusetts. The novel grew out of two experiences I had as a teenager. The first and most serious, was the death of my high school boyfriend, who was killed in a car accident at the age of 17. I based one of the characters in Gadfly on him. I wanted to remember my boyfriend, of course, but I also wanted to better understand the brilliant, kind, and troubled person he was. The second event was a fairly major cheating scandal that my brother exposed at his all-boys prep school in Maryland. In bringing this event light--and in spite of being labeled a NARC and a snitch-- my brother exposed the hypocrisy of the school's honor code and its proclamations of integrity and brotherhood.

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

JM: I spent six years writing this novel and the book I started out writing bears almost no resemblance to the book in its current form. My protagonist--a precocious teenage journalist who talks to the apparition of CBS' own Edward R. Murrow--didn't exist until year 4 of the writing process!

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

JM: I don't have any other skills! I'm a journalist as well as a fiction writer, so even if I wasn't writing novels, I'd still be out reporting. I also love bluegrass music and play the banjo, so maybe I'd join a band.

JG:  What else are you reading right now?

JM: I just started "A Thousand Acres" by Jane Smiley.

JG: What's next for you?

JM: I'm working on a second novel about the daughter of a Vietnam vet who takes off on a motorcycle trip with her dad and his war buddies when her fiance comes home from Iraq with PTSD.

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Jeff Glor talks to Kevin Moffett about "Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events: Stories"

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Kevin Moffett: Since it's a collection of short stories, the inspirations were pretty manifold. The story of a friend's gray parrot who would harass him whenever the friend left the house, a short passage about John D. Rockefeller from the old WPA guide to Florida. Generally, the book arose out of a vague feeling of not getting it right with my first collection--or at least having some unfinished business with the story form. When that first book was published, there was a huge pull, both from within and without, to follow it up with a novel. Which derailed me for a while. I worked for about a year on a novel that I eventually abandoned and have successfully wiped out from my memory. Once I went back to writing short stories, I felt a palpable calming. It felt like home.

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

KM: I don't map out my stories at all so I'm constantly surprised. With the endings, with how different a story turns out from how I'd originally envisioned it. Often I was surprised with how the stories for which I'd had the highest hopes fizzled out on page 5 or so, never to be seen again, while the ones I went into with a lot of skepticism and uncertainty ended up lasting for the long haul and found their way into the collection.

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

KM: I could imagine a pretty distinguished and satisfying career as a stay-at-home dad to an eight-year-old boy. With moonlighting gigs as a sous-chef and/or semiprofessional banjo player.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

KM: A lot of student stories. In my spare time, I've been reading oral histories--Studs Terkel as well as online archives of medical oral histories: polio and AIDS and leprosy. Next up: Adam Levin's new collection "Hot Pink".

JG: What's next for you?

KM: Short term, I'm finishing a collaborative project with editor Eli Horowitz and writer Matthew Derby, called "The Silent History." It's a novel-length narrative meant to be read on iPhones and other mobile devices, with elements of the story that will be accessible only when the reader takes himself (and the iPhone) to certain specific locations related to the text of the story. It should be out by fall 2012.

Long term, I'm in the early-to-middle stages of a novel.

For more on "Further Interpretations" visit the Harper Collins website.

Jeff Glor talks to Victor Cha about "The Impossible State."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Victor Cha: I did not want to write a book right after I returned from the White House (He's a former director for Asian Affairs in the White House's National Security Council).. Too early, too soon. After a few years, I felt as though a book for a general audience on this difficult policy problem was needed...and from someone who had academic qualifications and policy chops.

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

VC: How quickly I could write it (!) and the lack of balanced work on the topic. Most of the literature is ideologically charged from the left or the right.

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

VC: Either a sportswriter or an investment banker.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

VC: Rafael Nadal's autobiography and Condoleezza Rice's No Higher Honor

JG: What's next for you?

VC: I would like to write a book about Jeremy Lin and Linsanity

For more on "Impossible State" visit the Harper Collins website.

Jeff Glor talks to Nick Arvin about the "Reconstructionist."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Nick Arvin: I'm an engineer, and some years ago, I stumbled into a field known as forensic engineering, working on reconstructions of car crashes. We applied the principles of engineering and physics to determine the events that led to an accident and, ultimately, who was at fault. The work was incredibly interesting, but also discomforting in the way that it required taking a purely analytical approach to events that were full of coincidence and human drama. "The Reconstructionist" was, among other things, an effort to explore this paradox.

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

NA: This is my third book, but I'm surprised every time by how hard it is. I had great material in hand, from the details and stories of working in accident reconstruction, but it took a great deal of work to develop characters and a larger story that made the material meaningful. I also felt a real obligation to do my very best to honor and do justice to the stories I was working with, which arose after all from events that were terribly painful to the people involved.

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

NA: I'm engineer, as well as a writer. I no longer work in forensic engineering; I'm now in power plant and gas facility design. The easy assumption is that if I weren't writing, I'd just be an engineer. But I don't know. If I didn't have my writing to explore stories, human relationships, larger themes, and my own creative instincts, I might have lost my marbles and run off to start a fish farm in Bolivia or something.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

NA: I just finished Faulkner's novella "Spotted Horses" (a great, funny, fast read) and I'm looking forward to starting "The Reeducation of Cherry Truong," by Aimee Phan.

JG: What's next for you?

NA: I'm well into a collection of stories about engineers and other technical types -- the kind of people who are creating the technologies and machines that are rapidly remaking our world, and yet don't get written about very much. It's tentatively titled "An Index of Human Properties."

For more on the "Reconstructionist" visit the Harper Collin's website.

Jeff Glor talks to Donovan Hohn about "Moby Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them"

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Donovan Hohn: There are many different answers to that question. Sometimes I blame Herman Melville, who made me want to do what Ishmael sets out to do--"sail about a little and see the watery part of the world." Sometimes I blame my upbringing on the shores of San Francisco Bay, which for a while made me want to be a marine biologist when I grew up. I could also blame certain living writers I admire. But the simpler answer is that when I stumbled on the story of the bath toys lost at sea, the version of it I stumbled on raised more questions than it answered. I'd never heard of containers falling off ships. And there was something both riddling and enchanting about the images that swam into my brain--of yellow duckies out there on the deep, or traversing the Arctic. But I think the single thing that turned my flights of fancy into a multi-year adventure and into a book was a map I received from oceanographers in Seattle on which they'd charted where the toys had been found and where they were likely to go. It was as if the currents and the toys had drawn a trail for me to follow.

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

DH: The most honest answer? That I actually managed to make it to all the places on my itinerary--the factory in China that made the toys, the Arctic in the company of scientists. I hadn't really thought I'd be able to find any of the toys out there in the wild, but I did. Really the research was an endless source of surprise, which is one of the reasons to go on a journalistic adventure. There's no substitute for field work. One example: I hadn't set out to find an environmental story, but on my first research expedition, in 2005, I heard of the so-called Garbage Patch in the North Pacific. That was surprising. But more surprising still was my discovery that the story of the so-called Garbage Patch was a much more complicated one to tell than I'd initially realized.

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

DH: Teaching American literature.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

DH: "Tubes" by Andrew Blum (forthcoming). "Rabid" by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy (forthcoming). "The Missing of the Somme" by Geoff Dyer. "The Thousand Saints" by Eleanor Henderson. "Breaking and Entering" by Eileen Pollack. "Reading Chekhov," by Janet Malcolm. "Travels in Siberia" by Ian Frazier.

JG: What's next for you?

DH: Travels in the former battlefields of the 1920 Russo-Polish war.

For more on "Moby Duck" visit the Penguin Group website.

Jeff Glor talks to Cristina Alger about "The Darlings."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Cristina Alger: I was working as a corporate attorney in the fall of 2008, when the book takes place. It was such a surreal time to live in Manhattan and work in finance; it felt as though every day there was news of another firm collapsing or dissolving in the wake of financial distress or scandal. I read a lot of nonfiction about that period, I think in an attempt to understand what was going on around me. I found that I was perhaps most curious about the personal side of the financial crisis, however: who were the people that were behind these scandals? What motivated them? How were their families affected? Writing "The Darlings" became for me a fun way of exploring those questions.

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

CA: I heard the most amazing stories while researching this book. I talked to as many people as I could: lawyers, bankers, hedge fund managers, journalists, friends, family, the baristas at Starbucks, anyone who was living or working in Manhattan during the fall of 2008 who might be willing to waste an hour talking to me. When I started that process, I really just wanted to make sure that I got certain details right. I never expected to learn so much or hear such incredible stories about families, work, love, relationships, New York. It was so cool. I think I told at least 50 people that they ought to write a book themselves.

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

CA: I imagine I'd still be practicing law.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

CA: I'm about to finish an advanced copy of "Gilded Age" by Claire McMillan (out in June). It's a wonderful modern adaptation of "House of Mirth." Claire McMillan is also a former lawyer/debut novelist, so I was thrilled to get my hands on an early copy. And I've just started "Unreal Estate" by Michael Gross. I always find his books entirely un-put-downable.

JG: What's next for you?

CA: I'm working on a second novel now. Between that and my wedding in May, I've got a busy spring ahead of me!

For more on "The Darlings" visit the Penguin Press website.

Jeff Glor talks to A.J. Jacobs about his latest book, "Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

A.J. Jacobs: Three years ago, I was in terrible shape. I was what they call skinny fat. Meaning my body looked like a snake that had swallowed a goat. On top of that, I got hospitalized with pneumonia. My wife said to me, "I don't want to be a widow when I'm in my forties. You've got to shape up." So I said, okay, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to go all in. I'm going to test every piece of medical advice and see what works and what doesn't. I'm going to revamp my diet, exercise regimen, stress level, sleep pattern, sex life, you name it.

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

AJ: I was surprised by all the research showing that sitting at your desk is terrible for your heart. It's kind of scary. Sitting is the new smoking. Any type of movement helps - even getting up once an hour from your desk to walk around for a couple of minutes. I took it further. I wrote this book while walking on a treadmill desk. It took me 1,200 miles.

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

AJ: Maybe a historian. Are there any of those left? Or is that not a viable career option? In any case, I love obscure history. For instance, treadmills were used to reform prisoners in England, until they were banned for cruelty in 1902.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

AJ: I just read Rachel Dratch's book "Girl Walks into a Bar," which I really liked. She says that after Saturday Night Live, the only roles she was offered were "Lesbians. Secretaries. Sometimes lesbians who are secretaries."

JG: What's next for you?

AJ: I'm not sure yet. I usually come up with a new idea a couple of months after a book is published. I get a lot of suggestions from readers. One of the more common ones is that my wife and I re-enact all the positions in the kama sutra. But my wife put the kibosh on that. Which is actually okay by me. I don't think I have that kind of flexibility anymore.

MORE VIDEO:

A.J. Jacobs talks about a discovery he made writing "Drop Dead Healthy" -- sitting is the health equivalent of eating a Paula Dean donut every hour. A.J. Jacobs reveals his surprisingly simple secret to avoiding the common cold. A.J. Jacobs, talks about a growing health movement called chewdism that encourages people to chew their food 50 times a mouthful.

For more on "Drop Dead Healthy," visit the Simon and Schuster website.