Vintage Interviews With Notable People
(Originally posted here in 2020) When I was a kid, all my friends and I were into The Twilight Zone, the Rod Serling TV series. But in the later 2000s, another “twilight” captured the world’s imagination: the “Twilight” series of novels by Stephenie Meyer. Four, in all, chronicling the stories of teenager Bella, vampire Edward. […]
From her earliest days growing up in New York City and later in New Jersey, Sister Souljah was an activist. Surrounded by the poverty and despair of an urban neighborhood, Sister Souljah made it her mission to try to change things. She became a strong voice for change, through writing, film, and music. In 1999,she […]
Over the last three decades, millions of people around the world have enjoyed a series of novels about a fictional amateur bounty hunter from New Jersey named Stephanie Plum. Stephanie is the creation of writer Janet Evanovich. In the 1980s, she was a stay-at-home mom, but when her kids were nearing the age at which […]
Indian-born author Salman Rushdie was building a solid literary reputation in the 1980s. His novels won several prestigious awards. But it was his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, that earned him not accolades, but I death sentence, pronounced by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini Rushdie spent the next several years essentially in hiding, with constant death […]
Tom Keneally has written dozens of books in his career, spanning from the 1960s. But the one book with which you may be most familiar is his prize-winning 1982 book called Schindler’s Ark. It was later renamed Schindler’s List, and that’s what the movie was based on. Keneally is one of Australia’s most prolific, and […]
Our recognition of Pride Month continues, with a look back at an interview with one of the most prominent African American and LGBTQ authors of contemporary literature. E. Lynn Harris quit his job as a computer salesman in 1990 to begin a full-time writing career. His first novel, invisible life, won widespread acclaim. He followed […]
American history is a trove of compelling yet largely forgotten stories of courage and ingenuity and principle. Among them is the story of one African American slave who, during the Civil War, showed his true courage. And in 1994, historian and writer Louise Meriwether used that story as the basis for a novel called Fragments […]
25 years ago this week a new series premiered on HBO. It was based on the cloumns written by a journalist named Candace Bushnell. She called it Sex And The City. Bushnell had a lifelong ambition to be a successful novelist. So when I met her, in 2003, she had actually just written her first […]
A funny thing happened on the way to Ron McLarty’s career as a famous novelist. He became a very successful actor first . If you’re a fan of TV series such as Law & Order, The Practice, Judging Amy, or Spenser for Hire, you’ll recognize Ron McLarty.9. Often cast as a police detective or a […]
As they say on a popular TV show, sexually based crimes are considered especially heinous. That’s why, in the 1980s prosecutor Linda Fairstein was instrumental in helping establish the first sex crimes unit in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. It later inspired the TV series “Law & Order Special Victims Unit.”. In the1990s, Fairstein diversified […]