A Sneak Preview of Beatrice #2

Here’s a short excerpt from the conversation I had with Jodi Picoult in the spring of 2012, just as her novel Lone Wolf was coming out. Lone Wolf, like its immediate predecessor Sing You Home, is told through multiple first-person narrators—one of several complex and often innovative literary techniques I’d noticed once I began reading Picoult’s novels in the wake of the Franzenfreude debate. So we talked a bit about how a literary device that was once considered radical and avant-garde can now turn up in commercial fiction without any fanfare—and, in another part of the conversation not included in this clip, she told me a bit more about how and when she decides to use it to tell the story she’s telling in a given book.

This interview will be published in the second issue of the “enhanced ebook” version of Beatrice later in July 2012, as a feature-length Q&A accompanied by a short video clip—not this one, but an entirely different segment of the conversation. Picoult will be joined in Beatrice #2 by debut novelists Alice Albinia and Nick Dybek. iPad users will be able to purchase the ebook from Apple’s iBookstore for $2.99. (I’m working on also making these ebooks available to readers with other tablet devices, such as the Kindle Fire or the Nook Tablet, as soon as affordably possible.) Keep an eye here for the news of its release, or join the Beatrice mailing list and you’ll get a more direct announcement.

4 July 2012 | interviews |