Jay MacDonald
Content by Jay MacDonald
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When Alan Corey moved out of his mother's Atlanta basement at 22 to face the real world, his goals were both clear and clearly preposterous: have fun, hustle and become a millionaire by 30 in N
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Amy Tan had fervidly hoped to publish her fifth novel this fall, but fate would not allow it.
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If you reduced the novels, short stories and poetry of Elizabeth Cox to a bumper sticker, it would read: "Life is messy." It is the very untidiness of our ordinary lives, filled with unp
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Eric Garcia's anti-Bridget goes to extremes in her search for the perfect mate Ever since Helen Fielding unlocked Bridget Jones's Diary, the sheer number of similar modern-day-Cinderella tales
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Should Stephen King ever need a place to crash in Manhattan, the welcome sign is permanently affixed to Ron McLarty's door.
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For more than a year, journalist Norah Vincent experienced life in a man's loafers.
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Jonathan Lethem takes readers on a magical history tour of Brooklyn Jonathan Lethem has spent the better part of his literary career circling the one book everyone knew he would eventually write: the
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It is well-nigh impossible to take composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim out of the theater or the theater out of Stephen Sondheim.
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Writer Brad Barkley engineers a winning story of grief and redemption When spring approaches, a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of cars, girls and warm summer nights, especially in Frostburg, a t
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Considering the pain and suffering he experienced at the hands of no-nonsense headmasters during his Catholic school days in Limerick, Ireland, it's a wonder even to Frank McCourt that he went
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Augusten Burroughs didn't set out to become the new bad boy of American letters when he careened onto the bestseller lists two years ago with Running with Scissors, his hilarious, horrifyin
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For those who have ever said of a spouse or partner, "Can't live with them, can't live without them," Amy Sutherland offers a third option: train them.
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Issue:
Surprise may be the last thing readers expect from the third book in a trilogy.
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Jessica Speart grew up dreaming of Broadway, preparing for the day she would portray fascinating women with all the nuance and grace of Meryl Streep.
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Somewhere between Dr. Seuss and Dr.
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Some of the best books find their author instead of the other way around.
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Julia Keller loathed the assignment. What editor in his right mind would send her, cultural critic for the Chicago Tribune, to cover the aftermath of a tornado two hours west in Utica that had already been thoroughly chronicled by the paper’s own news staff? Did they need an emergency book review?
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As the unmistakable voice of Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs.
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With The Greatest Generation, veteran NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw shined a spotlight on the courageous and determined men and women who lifted America out of the Great Depression and defe
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When the family maid took seven-year-old Marshall Chapman to see Elvis Presley in concert, the wide-eyed daughter of a prosperous Spartanburg, South Carolina, textile family formed a permanent, pri
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Novelist Pat Conroy once observed, "A bad childhood is a constantly renewable resource." No one knows the truth of that better than Augusten Burroughs.
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You would never notice to look at him, but Carl Hiaasen is angry again.
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Here's a classic tale: the well-meaning but gullible innocent, seduced by corruptors into a morally murky enterprise, must question everything he holds true in order to redeem himself.
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Leo Demidov's personal hell has truly been paved with the best of intentions. The Soviet war hero and rising star within Stalin's State Security force has ordered the execution of thousands of his countrymen, or worse, dispatched them to the infamous gulags, all in service to the greater good of communism. But when he obediently dismisses the brutal 1953 murder and evisceration of a colleague's young son as nothing more than an accident, the narrow path of lies on which his career is founded suddenly veers into a nightmarish landscape of his own worst fears. The child is, in fact, a victim of an evil the Soviet state has never seen before: a serial killer.
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The prolific, perennially best-selling Patricia Cornwell first kicked her way into publishing 20 years ago with Postmortem, a risky little mystery that introduced the world to Dr.
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Contrary to what her readers insist upon believing, Terry McMillan is not perpetually holed up in some swank Jamaican love crib dreaming up novels while dreadlocked Rasta cabana boys cater to her
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Alan Furst admits he's "not entirely clear" on how he came to be the pre-eminent American writer of World War II spy novels.
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Christopher Buckley had just endured that baby boomer rite of passage, a colonoscopy, when he received a blind-sided compliment that trumped every glowing review he's ever received.
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Jasper Fforde takes readers on a witty, wild ride Humpty Dumpty and his nursery rhyme mob are threatening a boycott.
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Like Saphira, the gem-scaled, fire-breathing, starter-home-sized dragon of his Inheritance fantasy series, teen publishing phenom Christopher Paolini is exceptionally bright, well spoken, irrepress
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Last November, T.C.
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That the name Jesse Kellerman should suddenly appear on mystery bookshelves seems unsurprising if not preordained.
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One month before the 9/11 terrorist attacks reduced the World Trade Center to rubble, Jeffery Deaver was having lunch at Windows on the World, catching up on Big Apple gossip with the chef and wait
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Southern heroines rarely leap off the page as full of life and trouble as Arlene Fleet, the headstrong protagonist and erstwhile alter ego of young Atlanta writer Joshilyn Jackson, whose marvelous
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Somewhere in Edward P.
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A chat with Chuck Palahniuk is not unlike reading one of his novels.
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Jodi Picoult will go to the ends of the earth to confront her readers with unsettling truths they'd rather not face.
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Fans of best-selling thriller writer Greg Iles may be surprised to find him crossing over into Stephen King country with his latest psychodrama, a spooky supernatural tale called Sleep No More
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The best fictional detectives are mysteries unto themselves: hard-bitten, world-weary, troubled souls who keep the dark, uncomfortable corners of their past clearly marked off-limits by yellow p
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Perhaps like me, you've always wondered: do spies read spy novels? The answer in Stella Rimington's case is an enthusiastic yes.
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L.A. traffic can be murder, especially for Jace Damon, the determined bike courier in Tami Hoag's 10th thriller, Kill the Messenger.
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Julia Cameron can overlook the fact that author James Frey embellished A Million Little Pieces; what irks her is that Oprah deigned to endorse the now-infamous memoir.
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Linguistics professor Paul Iverson's life is turned upside-down when the body of his young wife Lexy is found beneath their backyard apple tree. Did she fall or did she jump?
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Russian homicide detective Arkady Renko's cases have mirrored the historic upheavals within the Soviet Union during the past quarter of a century.
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Where fictional private eyes are concerned, Precious Ramotswe, proprietress of Botswana’s No.
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Like a cultural cartographer, poet and novelist Jay Parini charts the major literary islands that expanded to form the landmass of the American psyche in Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Chang
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Let's dispense with the gossip straight away: Jean Auel lives.
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Nine-year-old Skyler Rampike's privileged life takes a triple Salchow into disaster when his beloved six-year-old sister Bliss, the darling of the tri-state ice skating world, is found brutally mu
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Dorothea Benton Frank focuses on the funny side of life As a young girl growing up on remote Sullivan's Island in the South Carolina Lowcountry, Dorothea Benton Frank's lifeline to the world came in
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There is absolutely nothing about Chelsea Cain to remotely suggest that she had the year's scariest novel inside her.
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Success hasn’t gone to Mitch Albom’s head. It’s gone to his heart.
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Among crime novelists past and present, Elmore Leonard is a prime number, a talent so simple and elemental that it refuses to be divided by comparison to others.
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For the Burkes, crime fiction is all in the family In art as in nature, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Case in point: Alafair Burke.
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Literary novelist takes on the Corleone family Mark Winegardner is dead tired.
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Ben Bova's sky-blue eyes twinkle as he gazes out on the white sands and palm trees of Venetian Bay near his home in Naples, Florida.
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Luck, chance, serendipity and coincidence: Patricia Wood knows well these four spices of life.
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The mystery stacks are filled with the works of former trial lawyers, prosecutors, judges, detectives, even beat cops whose procedural knowledge and behind-the-scenes experience bring a heightene
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Stephen King has been scaring us silly for 35 years with the simplest premise: What if? For instance, what if dogs could kill (Cujo)? Or clowns (It)?
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The town of Fallbrook is tucked into the fertile rolling hills north of San Diego, where temperate climate and rich soil combine to form the perfect growing medium for the region's avocado, citrus
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On Monday evenings, Chocolat author Joanne Harris and her 14-year-old daughter Anouchka like to shoot teen-agers.
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The problem with catching literary lightning, as Dennis Lehane did with Mystic River, is, how do you follow it?
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Laura Lippman's crime fiction isn't torn from the headlines in quite the way one might expect from a former news reporter for the Baltimore Sun.
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Issue:
When you're down and troubled and you need a helping hand, chances are you've found comfort in the music of Carole King, the Brooklyn-born musical prodigy with the unruly mane whose 1971
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Daniel Alarcón was just a toddler when his family emigrated from Lima, Peru, to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1980.
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Memphis historian and subculture explorer Hampton Sides was six years old on April 4, 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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During war, there are no holidays.
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Andrew Vachss believes there are two versions of the truth in America: what people believe, and what really happened.
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As most Americans know by now, there are two Stephen Colberts.
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The Sparks brothers recount a round-the-world adventure This experience started the way any Nicholas Sparks novel might a Notre Dame alumni brochure arrived at the author's North Carolina home
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Some say that the practice of law is the art of compromise.
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Like a modern-day Dante, self-taught social explorer Eric Schlosser descends into the darker layers of American life in search of the very core of contradictions that defines the nation itself.
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The crowning irony of British actor Jim Dale's stellar career is that he will best be remembered for having been heard and not seen.
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To the winners go the sports biographies; to the losers go the deathly quiet locker rooms, the self-flagellation, the proverbial kiss from your sister.
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Issue:
Don Winslow knows a thing or two about riding waves.
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The Digger looks like you, the Digger looks like me. He walks down the wintry streets the way anybody would, shoulders drawn together against the damp December air . . .
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Rock 'n' roll bridges the generation gap Somewhere around the time his 11-year-old daughter grew bored with listening to his Beach Boys mix tapes and started worshipping Britney Spears, it dawned on
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A victim turns the tables on her attacker in a powerful new thriller If Jilliane Hoffman's fiction debut, Retribution, seems sinfully rich in the stuff we crave most in a good legal thriller,
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Since Scott Simon has chronicled the American experience for years as the host of NPR’s “Weekend Edition,” it seems only fitting that he should apply his prizewinning reportorial
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You’ve probably never heard of Thad Roberts, the brilliant young NASA recruit who pulled off one of the most audacious heists in history when he tiptoed out of the Johnson Space Center one rainy Texas night in 2003 with a 600-pound safe containing $20 million in moon rocks.
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Israeli spy Gabriel Allon returns in Daniel Silva's latest Daniel Silva watched the televised images of Yasir Arafat's chaotic funeral last fall from several different viewpoints.
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Anne Rice has spent the past three decades making us believe in the supernatural.
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San Francisco thrift shop owner Charlie Asher is in first-time-father fluster when his ever-so-patient wife Rachel shoos him from the recovery room so she and baby Sophie can catch a break from hi
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Country-singer-turned-mystery-writer Kinky Friedman rises each morning in his little green trailer deep in the heart of the Texas hill country and tilts at America's sacred cows like a modern-day D
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Tom Wolfe never met a culture clash he didn’t like.
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Just weeks away from moving into her new dream home, best-selling mystery writer Elizabeth George is having second thoughts about the weather.
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How well do you know your spouse? Or your best friends? Even if the thought never occurred to you, it will by the time you’re halfway through The Expats, Chris Pavone’s clever debut spy novel that’s suspenseful enough for a man yet introspective enough for a woman.
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Do you suffer from CCR? Nick Hornby has for years.
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Tom Wolfe has always had a seismologist's sixth sense for the subtle shifts in our cultural tectonic plates that signify major social tremors ahead.
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At the age of 62, Henning Mankell recently bought a pair of ice skates for the first time since he was a young boy growing up in northern Sweden.
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It seems inevitable that Bob Lee Swagger, thriller writer Stephen Hunter’s retired Marine sniper, would one day find a place in the November 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
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John Berendt's The City of Falling Angels bears a striking resemblance to a certain 1994 nonfiction debut you might have heard of: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
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Robin Cook's latest medical thriller may seem like yet another example of the author's uncanny ability to anticipate national controversy, in this case the uproar over federal funding for embryon
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As preface to his remarkably honest memoir, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, best-selling novelist E.
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Dee Dee Myers is no stranger to spin.
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With Jarhead, the unflinching account of his six-month tour of duty as a Marine scout/sniper during the first Gulf War, Anthony Swofford delivered furious broadsides at the inanity and insan
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The ghosts of literary heavyweights are never far from the page in Philip Caputo's unflinching, dust-swept African odyssey, Acts of Faith.
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