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 |

Read This: The Final Character Approved Picks

photo: Shem Roose Photography

In the summer of 2011, I took on a gig as the “Writing” correspondent for the USA Network’s Character Approved blog, providing weekly pointers toward new books and authors. My first post was a five-book summer reading list, so it seems somehow fitting that as USA puts the blog on hiatus, I end with another summer reading list, this time focusing on debut novelists.

I actually didn’t realize it as I was picking out the books to include on this list, but both Can I Get an Amen? by Sarah Healy and Wichita by Thad Ziolkowski are comic novels about adults who move back in with their wacky parents—whether that wackiness is of the born again or New Age variety—and it’s also a prospect that comes up in Leni Zumas‘s The Listeners. (The protagonist of Gilded Age, a modernization of The House of Mirth by Claire McMillan, returns to her hometown as the novel begins, too, but it’s a slightly different scenario.) So there’s a cultural/literary trend I may have inadvertently stumbled upon, eh?

photo: Travis Tanner

When I got the news about Character Approved suspending publication, I’d just submitted what was going to be my next post, about Meg Howrey‘s The Cranes Dance. It’s hard not to think about Black Swan when you’re reading this novel, especially since it leads off with a performance of Swan Lake, as described by Kate Crane, one of the dance company’s leading performers. It’s a semi-sarcastic recap of the plot, with a few insider jokes thrown in. (Later, Kate will admit you might have seen her and her fellow dancers in the background of a recent ballet film, lending ambience to the star actress’s performance. “Between the actress’s lobster-claw hands and biscuit-shaped feet, no one could mistake her for the real thing,” Kate snarks. “Except for the millions of people who completely loved the movie, of course.”) The deeper we get inside Kate’s head, though, the more Howrey—herself a former professional dancer and actress–is able to take the story in her own direction. So, although my post may not run there, I wanted to make sure you knew to keep an eye out for this one.

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3 July 2012 | read this |