Indie Next List Interview

Debut novelist Emma Cline explores the darker side of adolescence in The Girls, the number one pick of independent booksellers for the June 2016 Indie Next List.

Here, author Elizabeth J. Church discusses the unique experience of growing up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, and how her youth shaped and inspired her debut novel, The Atomic Weight of Love.

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s debut novel, The Nest, the number one Indie Next List pick for April, is “funny, thoughtful, and filled with unique and complex characters,” said Jennifer Oleinik of University Book Store in Seattle.

Author Joshilyn Jackson talks about the integral role indie booksellers have played in her career, the process of creating the tough and impassioned character Paula Vauss, and what she’s got coming up next. 

The Swans of Fifth Avenue, which evokes Truman Capote’s entrée into socialite Babe Paley’s rarified life and his ultimate betrayal of her, is a “fun, kind of gossipy read” that author Melanie Benjamin hopes readers will enjoy.

Ashley Warlick, a novelist, food magazine editor, and co-founder and buyer at M. Judson Booksellers & Storytellers, felt honored when her novel The Arrangement was selected by her fellow booksellers for the February 2016 Indie Next List. 

Katarina Bivald, author of The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend: A Novel, discusses the inspiration for her debut title and her love of indie bookstores and small-town America.

Booksellers’ top Indie Next List pick for December is The Selected Poems of Donald Hall by the former U.S. Poet Laureate. Hall selected what he considers the best of his poems for this collection, representing 70 years’ work.

Here, author B.A. Shapiro talks about the making of The Muralist and how she blended fact with fiction to create a detailed look at the birth of Abstract Expressionism during the Depression.

Booksellers have chosen Lauren Groff’s cleverly crafted novel Fates and Furies as their top pick for October’s Indie Next List. Groff’s critically acclaimed work, which has been long-listed for the National Book Award, tells the story of a marriage in which not all is as it seems.

Amy Stewart, the co-owner of Eureka Books, has made both the Indie Bestseller List and the September Indie Next List with her seventh book and first work of historical fiction, Girl Waits With Gun.

Did You Ever Have a Family, the first novel by bestselling memoirist Bill Clegg, “is the sort of work scholars are referring to when they explain why literature and the novel are so vitally important to our understanding of the human condition,” said Jenny Lyons of The Vermont Book Shop.

Paula McLain talks about Beryl Markham, the boundary-breaking woman at the center of Circling the Sun, the challenges of writing historical fiction, and finding what she was meant to do in life.

In 2011, Rinker Buck set out in a covered wagon to navigate the historic Oregon Trail, a trip he chronicles in The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey. Here, Buck discusses some of the surprises he encountered on his adventure and the passion that prompted his journey.

Booksellers have selected Anything Could Happen, the debut Young Adult novel from Will Walton of Avid Bookshop, as one of the Summer Kids’ Indie Next List’s top picks.