Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

Always on the lookout for a way to take my interviewees down a peg or two, I began shuffling through the thick resume of Lisa Unger. Eleven novels? International bestseller status?! Beloved by critics and readers alike?!? How do I combat all that? Fear not, gentle reader. For there is always the humiliation of masterfully [...]

Lisa Brown may be the most anonymous name since “John Smith,” but damn if she isn’t out to own that particular Google search. No demographic is safe from her bestselling authoring and illustrating and cartooning and general overall excelling (examples: Picture the Dead, How to Be). Sources tell me that she also cohabits with Lemony [...]

If you’ve haven’t heard of Ernest Cline, then congratulations–it must be cozy under that rock of yours. May I join you? Because my sensitive, beautiful ears can’t take any more of the praise for this guy’s (pretty fantastic, I admit) geek-gasm of a debut novel, Ready Player One. All right, Cline. Remember those unkind jocks [...]

Looking for a raw, stark, relentless take on a grueling topic? You’re in luck! Ellen Hopkins has you covered. Crank takes on crystal meth addiction; Burned looks at abuse; Impulse examines suicide; Tricks explores prostitution; and–well, how much time do you have? Her verse-novel style and one-word titles are trademark at this point. I wonder [...]

We had no beef with Daniel H. Wilson back when he was earning a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. But then the good Dr. Wilson had to shove his knowledge of “science” and whatnot into our faces with “books,” including the brand-new Amped and the bestselling Robopocalypse, soon to be a “major” motion [...]

Sure, Mary Roach looks like a formidable foe. She got up close and personal with decomposing flesh in Stiff, got intimate with death in Spook, got just plain intimate in Bonk, and then went cosmic, man, with Packing for Mars. But I have an edge: If there’s one thing I know about the nonfiction publishing industry, [...]

You’d think I’d be intimidated by Neal Stephenson. Only a madman berserker could turn out such unwieldy tomes as Cryptonomicon, “The Baroque Cycle,” REAMDE, and the new multi-authored, community-driven interactive serial novel The Mongoliad. But you’re looking at one hostile questioner unfazed by Stephenson’s hyperliterate cyberpunk — or, if you prefer, postcyberpunk, or scifihistoricalcyberpostcyberpunk, or… [...]

Beware Ally Carter. She’s got sticky fingers, if you know what I mean. You might be, say, conducting a perfectly innocent interview in which you are throwing extremely aggressive questions in her general direction and suddenly–hey, didn’t I have a priceless Rembrandt on my office wall? Well, what did I expect from the bestselling author [...]

We knew Todd Strasser was going to be a tough nut to crack. I mean, the guy has written over 120 books for teens and middle graders, including such gritty, hard-hitting award-winners as The Wave, Give a Boy a Gun, and If I Grow Up. But this nut came even tougher than expected, proving that [...]

Steve Ulfelder builds, rents, sells, and services race cars. Even we here at Hostile Questions can respect that. But then he has the audacity to write books, too? And then has the cheekiness for his first novel, Purgatory Chasm, to be nominated for an Edgar Award? Oh, it’s on. I’ve got my tire iron, Steve’s [...]