Barnett lists opera, theatre, ballet, and cinema as influences, and brings a knowing theatricality to his own readings. But even apart from the highly recommended experience of witnessing Barnett read, the pages of his books spill over with an enthusiasm for the intersection of written and visual media that bridges the chasms of age, genre, and attention span.
than those claimed by her Victorian characters. She’s been aptly described as Gail Carriger: New York Times bestselling author in PR material and, among speculative fiction fans, her name is commonly associated with Steampunk, Teapunk, Mannerspunk and a number of other subgenre descriptors that try (and fail) to put her work into a single category. Aside from the various handles ascribed to Carriger as the popular contemporary writer behind the Parasol Protectorate series, she can also claim Masters degrees in both Archaeology and Anthropology, two disciplines that make her uniquely qualified to make a career of refashioning a bygone era, telling new and fantastic stories about manners, machines, and empire making in the bargain. Her next book, Etiquette and Espionage, will be out in February.
narrative up the ever-steepening slope of countless sentences and paragraphs, only to start over— revising, replacing, and deleting the product of previous climbs, always eyeing the horizon line of clear, engaging, well honed prose. For me personally, I marvel at the fact that books are ever completed at all and, given the opportunity to interview a prolific and talented author like Jane Smiley, my first thought was: "how does she do it?" Part of the answer, is that Smiley keeps at it on an almost daily basis and the results are formidable: her novel A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992, and her novel The All True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton won the 1999 Spur Award for Best Novel of the West. She has contributed to a wide range of well respected magazines, including The New Yorker, Elle, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, and Harper's. Her most recent novel is Private Life.
