Interviewed by Hubert O’Hearn

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joan Thomas grew up on the Canadian prairies. She studied English at the University of Winnipeg and taught high school English in three different schools, as well as in a teacher-training program in the Caribbean. She’s worked as a freelance writer, reviewer, and editor, and as Writing and Publishing consultant for the Manitoba Arts Council.

Joan has been writing fiction since about 2000.  Her 2008 novel Reading by Lightning won the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book (Canada and the Caribbean) and the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.  Her second novel,Curiosity, was published in April 2010 by McClelland & Stewart. It was named aQuill and Quire Book of the Year and has been nominated for the ScotiaBank Giller Prize and the International IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award.

ABOUT THE BOOK
More than 40 years before the publication of The Origin of Species, 12-year-old Mary Anning, a cabinet-maker’s daughter, found the first intact skeleton of a prehistoric dolphin-like creature, and spent a year chipping it from the soft cliffs near Lyme Regis. This was only the first of many important discoveries made by this incredible woman, perhaps the most important paleontologist of her day.

Henry de la Beche was the son of a gentry family, owners of a slave-worked estate in Jamaica where he spent his childhood. As an adolescent back in England, he ran away from military college, and soon found himself living with his elegant, cynical mother in Lyme Regis, where he pursued his passion for drawing and painting the landscapes and fossils of the area. One morning on an expedition to see an extraordinary discovery — a giant fossil — he meets a young woman unlike anyone he has ever met…

Interviewed by Hubert O’Hearn

JOHN BOYNE was born in Ireland in 1971 and is the author of seven novels for adults and two for children. The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas won two Irish Book Awards, was shortlisted for the British Book Award, reached no.1 on the New York Times Bestseller List and was made into an award-winning Miramax feature film. His novels are published in over 40 languages. He lives in Dublin.

September 1919: 20 year-old Tristan Sadler takes a train from London to Norwich to deliver some letters to Marian Bancroft. Tristan fought alongside Marian’s brother Will during the Great War but in 1917, Will laid down his guns on the battlefield, declared himself a conscientious objector and was shot as a traitor, an act which has brought shame and dishonour on the Bancroft family.

But the letters are not the real reason for Tristan’s visit. He holds a secret deep in his soul. One that he is desperate to unburden himself of to Marian, if he can only find the courage.

As they stroll through the streets of a city still coming to terms with the end of the war, he recalls his friendship with Will, from the training ground at Aldershot to the trenches of Northern France,
and speaks of how the intensity of their friendship brought him from brief moments of happiness and self-discovery to long periods of despair and pain.

Interviewed by Hubert O’Hearn

TAYLOR M. POLITES is a novelist living in Providence, Rhode Island with his small Chihuahua, Clovis. Polites’ first novel, The Rebel Wife, was published in February 2012 by Simon & Schuster. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University and BA in History and French from Washington University in St. Louis. In 2009, he was awarded the Norris Church Mailer Fellowship from Wilkes University. He has lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, New York City, St. Louis and the Deep South. He has covered arts and news for a variety of local newspapers and magazines, including the Cape Codder, InNewsWeekly, Bird’s Eye View (the in-flight magazine of CapeAir), artscope Magazine and Provincetown Arts Magazine.

Brimming with atmosphere and edgy suspense, The Rebel Wife presents a young widow trying to survive in the violent world of Reconstruction Alabama, where the old gentility masks a continuing war fueled by hatred, treachery, and still-powerful secrets.

Augusta Branson was born into antebellum Southern nobility during a time of wealth and prosperity, but now all that is gone, and she is left standing in the ashes of a broken civilization. When her scalawag husband dies suddenly of a mysterious blood plague, she must fend for herself and her young son. Slowly she begins to wake to the realities that surround her: her social standing is stained by her marriage; she is alone and unprotected in a community that is being destroyed by racial prejudice and violence; the fortune she thought she would inherit does not exist; and the deadly blood fever is spreading fast. Nothing is as she believed, everyone she knows is hiding something, and Augusta needs someone to trust. Somehow she must find the truth amid her own illusions about the past and the courage to cross the boundaries of hate, so strong, dangerous, and very close to home.

Using the Southern Gothic tradition to explode literary archetypes like the chivalrous Southern gentleman, the good mammy, and the defenseless Southern belle, The Rebel Wife shatters the myths that still cling to the antebellum South and creates an unforgettable heroine for our time.

Interviewed by Ross Rojek

Felix Gilman lives in New York, where he works as a lawyer. Thunderer is his first published novel, and his forty-seventh completed manuscript.

Previous works — all so far unpublished — include Precious Things; The Staggering Velocity of Beauty; The Bluest Sky; The Golden Light of Distant Stars; Bliss; Suicide Note; Despair; Razor Night, Blood Morning, Shit Lunch; Lithium Nightmares; You Won’t Even Open This Submission, Will You, You Bastards?; Fuck You Then, World; Self-Satisfied Sons of Bitches in Shiny New York Offices; iL’l Kil Yuo; I’m So, So Sorry; The Artistic Bankruptcy of the Publishing Establishment: An Investigation in Seven Parts; the short story collection Eighteen Motherfuckers Who Think They’re Better Than Me; J’Accuse! Vol. I; J’Accuse! Vol. II; J’Accuse! Vol. III; How to Assemble a Letter Bomb; and Prozac: A Memoir.

Following a lengthy hiatus, novels of Gilman’s middle period include The Law School Trilogy — One L, Two L, and Whatever (unfinished). He is also the author of the unpublished legal thrillers Final Judgment; Stare Decisis!; Full Faith and Credit; Collaterally Estopped; and Death by Document Review.

Thunderer is the product of a late-period creative burst during which Gilman also authored Valley of the Half-Ogres; DarkRaven: Robot WolfMage; Hooray for Wizard School!; Elves and Sexy Vampires; and City That Vaguely Reminds You Of Borges Or Gormenghast Or Something.

 Visit his website

Interviewer: Ross Rojek

OZYMANDIA -a story of three families from entirely different cultures and with entirely different hopes versus the harshness and coldness of  reality which they encountered upon their coming to mid-America during the mid-1800′s. Jacob’s crossed the Atlantic by choice, leaving behind a rich culture of museums, cathedrals and great music in exchange for a hawker’s promises in the new world. He arrived at his homestead holding a two-man saw, at a place where trees stood ten feet thick, poisonous snakes eight feet long were as thick as a man’s thigh, and hungry  beasts were waiting to eat him for dinner. Tin Cup was a Cherokee, a man of education and wealth, who was forcibly uprooted from his ancestral home  and sent west by the United States government in 1838. He “wept”. George escaped African-American slavery only to become a Cherokee “servant”. He was the one who tried hard to give a “good raisin’ “ to a daughter who “jes would not lissen!”

 These people with their old time religion, old time philosophers, some of whom had a now-time philosophy, along with a few hair (hare?)- brained individuals are the people who made our America of today. While most readers will enjoy OZYMANDIA as an adventure story, some may share the traveler’s observations as portrayed by Shelley in his 1817 poem, OZYMANDIAS. 

Ellie Stiller McClure is of immigrant descent. Her mother came from Ireland, a lady who simply paused here one day to visit relatives as she wended her way to New Zealand. Her father came from Germany, a pampered son who, as a lad of fourteen, hopped ship one day while visiting Hamburg and sailed away to see the world for the next seventeen years at which time his family stipend was ended. Ellie McClure was born in St. Louis and promptly named Elsie after a famous cow which belonged to a local dairy. Her mother’s laughter and her father’s stories made for a happy and informative home-life. Almost. There was little brother who strutted around proclaiming himself as Alexander “de gwate”. McClure is a graduate of USU, a retired teacher of mathematics, who worked for many years in the R&D division of the space industry. Today McClure lives in Montana with her husband Jack, a retired submariner, an officer of the United States Navy who sailed the world, saw much, heard more, did much but says very little.    

Visit her website

Interviewed by Ross Rojek

Robert Hicks, the author of The Widow of the South and A Separate Country, was born and raised in South Florida. He moved to Williamson County in Tennessee in 1974. In 1979, he moved to ‘Labor in Vain,’ a late-eighteenth-century log cabin near Leiper’s Fork, Tennessee.

Working both as a music publisher and in artist management in both country and rock music, Hick’s interests remain broad and varied. A partner in the B. B. King’s Blues clubs in Nashville, Memphis, and Los Angeles, Hicks serves as ‘Curator of Vibe’ of
the corporation.

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