Posts Tagged HarperCollinsPublishers

Susan Henderson on Up From the Blue

Posted by admin in Literature on March 30, 2011

Up from the Blue

Sometimes I get lucky. Such was the case, when Susan Henderson emailed me, wondering if I wanted to discuss her 2010 novel, Up From the Blue (the story of “a 1970s bi-polar housewife who goes missing and her daughter who won’t give up the search for her”). As described at her site: “Susan Henderson is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets award, and her work has — twice — been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut novel, UP FROM THE BLUE, was published by HarperCollins in 2010 and is now in its fourth printing. Rights have been sold to five other countries, and it’s currently being translated into Norwegian and Dutch. UP FROM THE BLUE has been selected as a Great Group Reads pick (by the Women’s National Book Association), an outstanding softcover release (by NPR), a Best Bets Pick (by BookReporter), Editor’s Pick (by BookMovement), Editor’s Choice (by BookBrowse), a Prime Reads pick (by HarperCollins New Zealand), and a Top 10 of 2010 (by Robert Gray of Shelf Awareness). She blogs at LitPark.com and The Nervous Breakdown. Her husband is a costume designer, filmmaker, and tenured drama professor. They live in NY with their two boys.” (In one of those happy coincidences, this interview is my 500th post for the blog. Seeing as I started the blog [back in late 2007] as an outlet for my pop culture/interview interests, I think it apt that the 500th post would to be an interview.) My thanks to Henderson for her time. Please be sure to read to the very end, as Henderson’s detailing the roads taken by first-time novelists is eye opening.

Tim O’Shea: How challenging is it emotionally/psychologically/physically to write a novel that delves on some level with depression?

Susan Henderson: You know, it’s funny. It’s not hard for me to write emotional material. I find that freeing. And it’s a little backwards from my real life, where I’m fairly guarded. The things that are challenging for me on paper have to do with plot, with trying to take my kind of circular way of seeing the world and make it into something linear, or trying to take intuitions and philosophies and translate them into characters’ actions.

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Brom on The Child Thief

Posted by admin in Literature on October 14, 2009

The Child Thief: The Novel

A few months back, a preview copy of Brom‘s The Child Thief: A Novel arrived at my house. As described by the publisher, Eos (An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers), the novel is “a spellbinding re-imagining of the beloved Peter Pan story that carries readers through the perilous mist separating our world from the realm of Faerie. As Gregory Maguire did with his New York Times bestselling Wicked novels, Brom takes a classic children’s tale and turns it inside-out, painting a Neverland that, like Maguire’s Oz, is darker, richer, more complex than innocent world J.M. Barrie originally conceived. An ingeniously executed literary feat, illustrated with Brom’s sumptuous artwork, The Child Thief is contemporary fantasy at its finest—casting Peter Pan, the Lost Boys, even Captain Hook and his crew in a breathtaking new light.” Brom was kind enough to do an email interview with me about the book. My thanks for his time and to HarperCollins’ Pamela Spengler-Jaffee for helping to arrange the interview.

Tim O’Shea: I minored in folklore back in college, so I know of the original unsanitized Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Is that the kind of tone, along with the “dark undertones” of Barrie’s original Peter Pan (as you referenced to it in the book’s advance press), you were aiming for in The Child Thief?

Brom: I loved the old Fairy Tales, which were usually devised as cautionary tales, stories in which bad things happened to children who didn’t listen to their elders. There is certainly plenty of those dark undertones in the Child Thief. But my real fascination lay in peeling back Jame’s Barries lyrical prose and portraying the Peter Pan story in a gritty realistic light.

O’Shea: In the back of the book you acknowledge the influence of Irish, Welsh, Scottish and English folklore on the tale. How much of the folklore did you know from growing up and how much did you learn it through research in more recent years?

Brom: I’ve always had a love of folktales, myths, and legend, so was aware of most of it. I knew I didn’t want to simply retell Barrie’s Peter Pan, but instead create my own Peter, my own world, the darker story behind the fairy tales, so I began to dig into the same myths and legends that originally inspired James Barrie himself and was delighted to find so many connections.

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