Author Author

I owe apologies to several different authors and publicists, not to mention many readers. This week I was supposed to have posted three interviews with authors of books about Jane Austen, and I’ve been trying – I really have! I’m having technical difficulties with a far-too-expensive digital recorder that I bought from A Well-Known Store that is — get this! — a completely new and supposedly up-to-the-minute device that is not compatible with Windows Vista.

I found this crucial fact out the week after we got a new Vista-ready computer (my laptop is already loaded with Vista).

Rest assured my elves are on the case and we’ll get these interviews off of the fiendish recorder and they will be posted in their entirety. My sincere apologies to everyone who has been waiting for them; thank you for your patience!

Submit a comment

Welcome to our second Jane Austen discussion — this time, with Goucher College professor Carol Pippen, who is also the newsletter editor for the Jane Austen Society of North America.

We had a big crowd of readers who listened to me interview Carol about Pride and Prejudice, its BBC adaptation (recently run on PBS’s The Complete Jane Austen), and Jane Austen in general. I’m afraid you’ll have to bear with a number of Colin Firth jokes if you listen, but you’ll also get a wealth of information from Dr. Pippen about Jane Austen, her world, and her works.

Submit a comment

Steve Berry is a busy man. He practices law, engages in local government, and writes best-selling novels. But he doesn’t seem jaded about any of these things, and it was fun to talk with him about how he goes about researching locales and developing characters for his latest novel, The Venetian Betrayal.

Berry does most of his research in a bookstore near his Jacksonville, Florida home, although (oh, the trials of being a writer…) he did go to Venice while working on this book. His research secret? You’ll have to watch to find out, but I think you’ll be interested to know it’s something you probably have in your own house.

I hope you’ll enjoy this interview, and please let me know if there are particular authors you’d like to see on this show. We can’t promise interviews with all of them, but we’ll try!

3 Comments

If you’ve been waiting for a cracking good read, please enter this week’s giveaway for ten copies of The Venetian Betrayal by Steve Berry. The only thing you have to do? Tell us in which city you’d most like to see an historical thriller set. That’s it!

I wanted to keep things simple, because there’s a lot going on in Berry’s latest suspense novel featuring former U.S. Department of Justice investigator-turned-bookseller Cotton Malone. Malone lives in Copenhagen, Denmark — but the action in this pageturner roams from the Italian title city to the Central Asian Pamirs to London and on and on.

The plot is based on an ancient secret of Alexander the Great’s, and its contemporary implications. I don’t want to say much more, although if you’re intrigued, stop back here on Wednesday and watch my interview with Berry for a few clues.

Meanwhile, don’t forget to tell us your fave thriller setting!

13 Comments

And now for something completely different…last week I had the honor of conducting an interview with Michael Dirda again, this time in front of a live audience of WETA members and donors. Dirda and I were asked to have a discussion about the BBC movie “Miss Austen Regrets” starring Olivia Williams and Greta Scaachi, that had aired on Sunday, February 3, as part of the PBS Masterpiece presentation of The Complete Jane Austen.

Both of us were a little apprehensive about the experience. After all, Janeites are notoriously well-informed about their favorite author and eager to dispel any mistakes made about her, too. Would we be up to the task?

I hope you’ll be able to see from this video that we at least acquitted ourselves with aplomb. More important, we both had a terrific time chatting about Austen, classics, the 18th century, adaptations, and women’s roles. We also got wonderful questions from the audience of approximately 80 Austen fans who were attentive and flattering (maybe it was the effect of the absolutely delicious tea and treats from DC’s Teaism that made them so nice…).

One of the most interesting things about our discussion was dismantling what in the film we thought was too modern. For example, both Dirda and I agreed that the scene with Jane Austen and her niece Fanny drinking wine and giggling in the shrubbery while gazing inside at the men with their cigars and port was something Carrie and Samantha from “Sex and the City” might do — but not well-bred 18th century ladies (and trust me, that’s not because those ladies wouldn’t want to, but only because they wouldn’t think of it).

I’ll be hosting two more of these Jane Austen-centric conversations, and I can’t wait. Although I have read all of Austen and am enjoying these productions, I’m certainly not an Austen expert, so I’m learning a lot in this process. Conversation about books…tea and scones…fellow readers…I love my work!

1 Comment

Super Tuesday may be over, but the race to the White House isn’t by a long shot. This week we’re featuring author Garrett Graff and his new book The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web and the Race to the White House, and I think you’ll find Graff’s insights about just how our new economy and new media have changed the game fascinating.

Some of you out there will have thought about this already — but Graff’s book provides a background of American political campaigns over the last 40 years that will help give you a deeper understanding of why this latest shift is so significant. Others who know less about new media may be a little shocked to learn just how much society is being reinvented online. This isn’t just an American election any more — it’s something that affects every corner of the world.

As Graff says, new media is evolving and reshaping our lives so quickly (think of the YouTube “macaca” moment, available only since 2006) that one of the things most difficult is trying to predict what might shape this race.

Of course, as Graff also says, this is unpredictability is exciting and galvanizing. If we can’t predict what might change things but we have so much information at our fingertips, there’s always hope that things can turn around — no matter which way you’re hoping things will go.

Submit a comment

Greetings, fellow bibliophiles! I apologize for the lack of posts last week — we’ve been experiencing some technical difficulties (on my end, NOT WETA’s), but they’re all worked out, now.

It’s not always possible for Author, Author! to be timely and topical, but we do try, and this week we’ve hit a home run. Tomorrow is Super Tuesday (get out and vote! I’ll be the lady in Arlington trying to squeeze my Mini Cooper into the last spot at my local elementary school…), and we’ve got the perfect book for you to grab a copy of today, then watch my interview with the author on Wednesday.

That book is ‘The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web and the Race for Office’ by Garrett M. Graff, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Graff was Howard Dean’s first Webmaster, and founded the popular (and local!) blog Fishbowl DC (now run by Patrick Gavin). Graf is currently an editor at Washingtonian magazine, where he’ll be covering politics and new media (I hope for a long time to come).

Here’s a little bit more about the book from the publisher:

“The 2008 presidential campaign will be like none in recent memory: the first campaign in fifty years in which both the Democrats and the Republicans must nominate a new candidate, and the first ever in which the issues of globalization and technology will decide the outcome.

Garrett M. Graff represents the people that all the candidates want to engage: young, technologically savvy, concerned about the future. In this far-reaching book, he asks: Will the two major parties seize the moment and run the first campaign of the new era, or will they run the last campaign all over again?

Globalization, Graff argues, has made technology both the medium and the message of 2008. The usual domestic issues (the economy, health care, job safety) are now global issues. Meanwhile, the emergence of the Web as a political tool has shaken up the campaign process, leaving front-runners vulnerable right up until Election Day.

Which candidate will dare to run a new kind of race? Combining vivid campaign-trail reporting with a provocative argument about the state of American politics, Graff makes clear that whichever party best meets the challenges of globalization will win the election—and put America back on course.

The First Campaign is required reading for the presidential candidates—and for the rest of us, too.”

You can read an excerpt here.

We’ve got ten copies of ‘The First Campaign’ to give to the first ten readers who tell us that they plan to vote tomorrow — extra question from me: will you be using online information in making your decision?

5 Comments