In Third Strike (Reviews, Aug. 11), U.K. crime writer Zoë Sharp's Charlie Fox, an ex-British soldier turned bodyguard, faces her toughest protection assignment yet: her parents. What inspired you to create such an atypical heroine? Charlie came about because she was someone I wanted to read about, a strong, independent character but not “a guy in nylons.

I've been practicing the pronunciation of Dr. Alaa al Aswany's name for weeks now and by the time we're set to meet at the Cairo Hilton, I'm confident I've got it down. He finds me in the lobby, a big, burly, effusive man, who apologizes for being late, the Cairo traffic impossible. I think about eating in some out-of-the-way foul and falafel joint, but we end up in the hotel's French restauran...

Curmudgeonly chef Kenny Shopsin talked about his book, Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin (Reviews, July 21), between shifts at his New York restaurant, Shopsin's General Store. You talk about “the art of staying small” and say you have no desire to oversee a Shopsin's restaurant empire or endorse a line of cookware.

In The Shadow Pavilion (Reviews, Aug. 4), the fourth urban fantasy-mystery featuring unflappable Detective Inspector Wei Chen, British fantasist Liz Williams blends Chinese folklore, near-future technology and elements of classic police procedurals. What inspired you to create these fanciful settings and characters? It came about from a visit to Hong Kong.

Majd, grandson of an ayatollah and translator for presidents Khatami and Ahmadinejad, plunges into the heart of modern Iran in The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (Reviews, July 21) You translate for Ahmadinejad on occasion. How do you get along with him? Ahmadinejad wants to give the impression to anybody he meets that he is really, particularly Iranian.

Jo Walton, best known for her fantasy fiction, concludes her alternate history trilogy with Half a Crown (Reviews, Aug. 4), which imagines a world in which England and Nazi Germany made peace How different was writing these books from your fantasy work? For me, it was exactly the same. I have the world and the characters and what I’m doing.

Mississippi is a foreign culture,” says Jamie Kornegay, owner of Turnrow Book Company, located deep in the Mississippi delta in Greenwood. He is, technically speaking, a foreigner himself, having been born in Memphis in 1975. He was then raised over the border in Batesville, Miss., a 30-minutes drive from Oxford, home to Faulkner and numerous other literary lights.

In Fast Food My Way (Reviews, May 19), Jacques Pépin offers an elemental and elegant approach to preparing great meals. “The supermarket as prep cook” is a big theme in both of your fast food books. What do you think is the most convenient prepared item? Probably the packaged, ready-to-cook chicken parts.

In The Wink of the Zenith (Reviews, June 30), poet and memoirist Skloot—who was brain damaged after a viral attack in 1988—dissects his often bumpy path to becoming a writer. In Zenith, you talk about your undergraduate study of Thomas Hardy. What first drew you to his work? Growing up, I was far more likely to read The Hardy Boys than Thomas Hardy.

Bestselling crime novelist Michael Connelly, 52, says that his inspiration “was always wrapped up in Los Angeles, even though I’d never been there.”It was reading quintessential L.A. master Raymond Chandler that made him try to write his own book; he wrote two novels, later scrapped, while working as a crime reporter in Florida (where he grew up), but success came only after h...

Daryl Gregory blends psychology and demonology in his dark fantasy debut, Pandemonium (Reviews, July 7).

In Downtown Owl, the pop-culture critic and Esquire columnist tries his hand at fiction by examining a small town in North Dakota (Reviews, May 5). You've published only nonfiction thus far. Why fiction now? Nonfiction is reactive. You respond to what others have done or said. With my novel, I wanted to write a reality that I could create.

Annie Proulx's new book, Fine Just the Way It Is (Scribner, Sept.), is the third collection in the Wyoming Stories, “the last,” Proulx says emphatically. And when Annie Proulx says it, you believe her. She wants to write about something else, she says. “I like to keep moving... shake things up.

In Dominant Animal (out today from Island Press), ecologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich, who authored the highly influential The Population Bomb forty years ago, recalibrate their vision and find that, despite some progress (heading off some of their more dire 1968 predictions), our species is still overshooting the capacity of the planet to sustain itself, and must change our ways.

Prolific mystery writer Lawrence Blocks talks to PW about his latest series starring Keller, the laconic, stamp-collecting hitman on the brink of retirement. William Morrow will publish Hit and Run on June 24, which is also Block’s 70th birthday.

After nearly four decades of marriage, Anne Roiphe's husband collapsed from a fatal heart attack in the lobby of their apartment building. In her new memoir, Epilogue (Reviews, June 6), she puts to the test the old saying, “Time is the widow's friend,” as she begins rebuilding her life. Tell me about the significance of the moon in the book.

Irina Reyn's debut novel, What Happened to Anna K. (Reviews, June 2), transports Anna Karenina to Queens, N.Y., where she struggles with familiar issues of identity, social rules, gender and loyalty a century later and a continent away. Where did you get the idea to reimagine Anna Karenina? I took a course on the book in graduate school, so I read it over and over again for several months.

The second thriller from former Cosmopolitan (U.K.) editor-in-chief Sam Baker starring fashion journalist Annie Anderson, Deadly Beautiful (Reviews, June 9), takes a hard look at the too often brief careers of teen models, one of whom, Scarlett Ulrich, may be the victim of a serial killer in Japan. What can you tell us about Scarlett Ulrich? The thing about Scarlett Ulrich, who becomes a child model s...

Sarah Prineas has a young reader of the children's magazine Cricket to thank for the impetus that led to her very splashy debut—a three-book contract, two starred reviews for the first volume, and 13 foreign rights sales. Prineas had written only three lines of a story—A thief is a lot like a wizard.

James Wood, 42, is from the U.K. He's tall, walks fast, drives a white Mini Cooper, speaks eloquently and enjoys a nicely tended garden. It's after lunch, and he's walking (quickly) down Brattle Street in Cambridge, Mass., when he spots two kids playing on the immaculate front lawn of a stately house.