Interview

What do you get when you take a story of ancient satanic text and mix corporate corruption, an ailing child, and an elderly church caretaker who has lost his faith? You get C.G.

What do you get when you take a story of ancient satanic text and mix corporate corruption, an ailing child, and an elderly church caretaker who has lost his faith? You get C.G. Bauer’s thrilling novel Scars on the Face of God.

I was getting older and my father got sick from something that he later recovered from, but I realized my father was not going to live forever. And so I felt a kind of urgency to fill in the gaps.

What if apes were living side-by-side the human species, wearing Urban Outfitters, taking public transportation and even talking? What would they talk about? That’s the question author Walt Maguire seeks to answer in his new novel Monkey See (ENC Press, Summer 2009).

In a phone interview about his first book, Dope Thief, Philadelphia author Dennis Tafoya marveled at his “incredible luck” at being published by Minotaur Books.

Local author Marc Schuster sat down with us to discuss his upcoming novel The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom and Party Girl (PS Books May 2009). The tale centers on Audrey, a woman who struggles with issues of addiction and romance. The novel offers a darkly comic look at consumerism and the ideal of perfection.

Some say that the Internet will destroy the written novel as we know it today. However, after hearing the story of N. Frank Daniels' futureproof, an argument can be made in support of the World Wide Web as a source for finding the best in new literature.

Josh Emmons Few writers walk the line between the real and the fantastic quite like Josh Emmons.

His first novel, The Loss of Leon Meed (Scribner 2005), reads like a cross between the works of Philip K. Dick and Jonathan Franzen. His second novel, Prescription for a Superior Existence (Scribner 2008), has been described as “a wicked skewering of religious cults and a finely wrought testament to their power.” Fresh off a stint at Yaddo, the renowned artists’ community, Josh sat down with us to discuss writing, faith, and inventing one’s own religion.

Broad Street is set in Philadelphia during the height of the grunge-rock scene of the early-nineties. Why did you choose this setting, and how does it factor into the story?

I was in a Philadelphia band called Mae Pang, which was mainly a chick rock garage band that started in the mid-90s. It was a great time for

Adam Rex understands children. As both a writer and illustrator of children’s books, his work captures the imaginative world children love to inhabit. His characters are heroic kids in cowboy boots who face the world fearlessly, taking on aliens and rambunctious zoo animals. His characters also include a lumbering, strangely human Frankenstein and assorted other monsters who somehow don’t seem so scary in the pages of his books.