Upstart Crow

Second of four in the Upstart Crow–Fairfax County Public Library Interview Series, celebrating America's 250th anniversary. More information about the series and upcoming interviews is available below. If a person has room and time to choose where and how to construct a life, what will they choose? How aware will they be of the process before, during, and after? How much awareness does it take to...

What makes an extraordinary accomplishment disappear from the history books? And what does it take to leave one life behind and begin another? Liam Callanan, author of four novels, a short story collection, and his first work of nonfiction, Stone Age Astronaut , joins host William Miller for a conversation about aviation history, the art of storytelling, and the surprising connections between the...

Lois Romano – Mary Todd Lincoln: An Inconvenient Widow This is the first of four interviews in the Upstart Crow–Fairfax County Public Library Interview Series, presented as part of the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary. Details about the remaining three interviews appear below. “Tell people you’re reading a book about Mary Todd Lincoln, and they might well say something like, ‘Oh, wasn’t...

Internationally known, award-winning writer and editor Ilan Stavans sees an anthology as something akin to a library where the books come down from the shelves at night and fly around, mixing and mingling and enriching each other in a great time of sharing. So it makes perfectly good sense that Stavans would mark the 250th birthday of his adopted country by editing a book of more than 100 works sp...

From 1932 until the end of World War II, Peter J. Ortiz was almost constantly involved in international warfare—13 years of it—either fighting or gathering intelligence about fighting. He started in the French Foreign Legion, moved to the U.S. Marines when the United States entered the war, and was one of the first people to serve in America’s fledgling spy network, the Office of Strategic Service...

Marty Ross-Dolen’s memoir Always There, Always Gone , winner of the 2026 Ohio Book Awards Readers’ Choice Award, carries the subtitle “A daughter’s search for truth.” Marty Ross-Dolen is the daughter. What she searches for is a fuller knowing of her grandmother, her mother’s mother, about whom her mother will talk but can’t seem to do so without looking pained or breaking into tears. What Marty kn...

Kathryn DeZur – Objects of Affection The things Kathryn DeZur focuses on—a doll, a quilt, bookshelves, a gun, an ashtray, a table, a finial—in this book of 15 essays are things that connect her to and shape her memories, which is to say that inform her sense of self, her history, her culture, the people around her. Hence, objects of affection. She is a daughter whose father was asked by her mother...

Emil Wilson – The Nightingales. Based in San Francisco, Emil Wilson is an advertising art director and illustrator as well as a comic artist. His work has appeared in magazines and newspapers, on websites, the Oscars, even the Super Bowl. You’ve probably seen his work and not known it. The Nightingales is his first book, a graphic novel. He sets it in Oregon and the story he tells is semi-autobiog...

Lina Patton – The Lake Club A spirited read about the sort of people who spend summer days sitting poolside and playing golf, versus ambitious young adults starting their lives and wanting to right all the wrongs they know of even as they make their own mistakes. Competing goals among a troika of main characters, mysteries, wrongs to be set right—all within a tight-knit community in the land of 10...

Melody Lomboy-Lowe — Founder, Luna Peak Foundation Melody Lomboy-Lowe was 6 years old when she planned her own funeral. She had been diagnosed with leukemia, and in 1983, treatment options were limited. But Lomboy-Lowe survived, and today her Los Angeles-based organization, the Luna Peak Foundation , publishes books on cancer and grief. Luna Peak has donated over 4,000 books to children, families,...

Caroline Bock – The Other Beautiful People In the entertainment world, there are the on-stage, front-of-camera, beautiful people, and there are those who actually make things happen. The ones who work behind the scenes, who make the deals, sell the projects, ensure the funding, move things forward. It is their lives that are the focus of this taut and evocative novel. The story juxtaposes the shoc...

Zach Powers – The Migraine Diaries: A singular, first-person novel. This story goes into the interior life of a thirty-something man who has just lost the best friend he ever had, a man he has known for ten years, a man he has seen most every day of those ten years as they pursued their separate creative projects and shared a social life, a man who knew to kick the narrator’s butt when it needed k...

Caroline Bicks – Monsters in the Archive: My Year of Fear with Stephen King Monsters in the Archives – that’s the main title of Caroline Bicks’ latest book, which is based on her experience digging through the archives of manuscripts and margin notes, plus her own interviews and emails with him, to gather insights into the workings of the creative soul behind all those scary works. In the book, sh...

Olufunke Grace Bankole – The Edge of Water In an immigration novel not like others, a Nigerian daughter wants to try life in America, and so once more she enters the visa sweepstakes. Her mother says nothing, though she has been forewarned by a conduit of the oracle, “this time, the order of things will be shaken. The souls will lose their own way.” These are the tensions within Olfunke Grace Bank...

Jung Yun – All the World Can Hold It is Sunday, Sept. 16, 2001. The Sunday after 9/11. Five days after the Tuesday when hijacked planes are flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in DC, and a field in Pennsylvania. As searchers still comb through smoldering wreckage, a cruise ship that should have left from New York’s Passenger Ship Terminal in Manhattan ins...

Cristina Jimenez – Dreaming of Home The subtitle of Cristina Jimenez’s memoir is, “How we turn fear into pride, power, and real change.” In the book, she defines “home” as a place of self-acceptance, which was not an easy place for her to find after she, her parents and her brother, fled the chaos of her hometown in Ecuador and settled in New York in 1998. She tried to be a “good” immigrant, but b...

Shubha Sundra – Optional Practical Training In 2006, when this novel is set, American immigration law allows students, scholars, trainees, teachers, etc., on temporary visas to have a year of practical training not required by the person’s basic program. Optional Practical Training. The novel covers just such a year in the life of Pavitra, a young woman from Bangalore, India, who has finished her...

Margaret Hutton – If You Leave With the intrusive, catalytic forces of two wars, World War II and Vietnam, Margaret Hutton’s debut novel, If You Leave, tells of two women who mother one baby girl into her own young womanhood. Each of the three discovers the strength of herself as an individual as well as the strength of unity. Thus does this quietly vibrant story illustrate the way one life impact...

Linda Chavez – A Novel of the Spanish Inquisition: The Silver Candlesticks Linda Chavez began working on The Silver Candlesticks after appearing on the PBS series Finding Your Roots during which she discovered that members of her family were Converso Jews who fled Spain in 1597. Using details the PBS researchers uncovered as well as her own work on the Spanish Inquisition, she created a fictional...

W. Ralph Eubanks – When It’s Darkness on the Delta Some today would cross off the Mississippi Delta as a backwater beyond redemption or a region where bad history happened, but W. Ralph Eubanks drives the area roads and small-town streets, meets the people who live and work there, some of whom strive hard to make it more than it is, and through his evocative writing he portrays not just the econom...

Mary Kay Zuravleff – American Ending Mary Kay Zuravleff is the author most recently of the novel American Ending, a story inspired by the experiences of her grandparents, Old Believer Russian Orthodox emigres. She combined those experiences to tell the story of immigrants recruited into the dangerous work America needs to have done but which workers are reluctant to do. The book seems entirely app...

Upstart Crow: Library Reads Special Edition – Fairfax Local Author Festival In this special edition of  Upstart Crow , host Jennifer Disano visits the Fairfax Regional Library for the Local Author Festival, recorded November 15, 2025 in Fairfax, VA. Jennifer sat down with 16 talented authors and received submissions from 2 additional writers, exploring a wide variety of books, from memoirs an...

Andy Shallal – A Seat at the Table Andy Shallal has been a voice for social causes in and around Washington, DC, so consistently and for so many years that many who stop in at one of his Busboys and Poets restaurants, bookshops and event spaces may think of him more as a social activist than as a restauranteur. But he grew up in a restaurant. His father, who came to the U.S. as a diplomat, bought...

Amy Stuber wrote the stories and Rebecca Burke edited them to produce the book Sad Grownups that won the 2025 PEN/Bingham Prize for Best Debut Short Story Collection. A big deal in literary circles, the book becomes a milestone for its publisher, Stillhouse Press, a teaching press at George Mason University staffed by students and alums who learn the book business by publishing and selling books....

In his new book, Matthew Davis explores one of the most iconic monuments in America—and perhaps the world. For nearly a century, Mount Rushmore has loomed large in the American imagination, but its origin story is far more complex than most visitors ever realize. From the slow, decades-long path to its creation, to the artistic and engineering challenges faced by sculptor Gutzon Borglum and the 40...