Stephen E. Ambrose is a patriot, arguably the most brilliant, compelling and least abashed patriot
publishing history in this country today. He’s also a partisan of the spoken word.

“I’m a great fan of audio- books,” said Ambrose, who had most recently listened to a Shelby Foote Civil War history. “I do a lot of driving across the country, and I always listen to a book. Reading a book on a computer is going to ruin your eyes. I think audiobooks are a leap forward.”

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Fans of Jean M. Auel’s hugely successful Earth’s Children series have been waiting 10 years for the fifth book about Ayla and her companion, Jondalar, in Pleistocene Europe.

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Elizabeth Berg, known for her life-affirming books about people in crisis, likes to listen to audiobooks with one exception: her own works. “The truth is I don’t listen to my own tapes because it’s hard to hear someone read your work in a way that you wouldn’t. So with my own work I tend to just listen a little to hear what the voice is like.”

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For as long as he can remember, Chris Bohjalian has loved stories—reading them, writing them and hearing them. So it was with great pleasure that the 39-year-old author discovered the world of audiobooks a couple years ago. He was especially grateful because, as a relative newcomer to rural Vermont, he found himself spending huge amounts of time in the car. With audiobooks, though, it was like having a storyteller in the passenger seat riding along with him.

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When she had the idea for her first novel, the rags-to-riches story of the indomitable Emma Harte, Barbara Taylor Bradford sat down and wrote a 12-page outline, which she showed to a friend. By chance, he happened to be seeing an American editor who "was looking for a big, old-fashioned family saga." Bradford met with the editors, who said they wanted 200 pages. When she appeared with two shopping bags and 1,592 pages of manuscript, they were overwhelmed. However, she had to wait only two days before they bought the book. After some editing, A Woman of Substance exploded onto the publishing scene in 1979.

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“Do you re-read your own books, Mr. Brett?” It’s a question which, as an author, I’m asked surprisingly often, and it’s one to which, these days, I tend to give the answer, “No and yes.”

No, I’m not one of those writers whose idea of a pleasant evening is luxuriating in his own prose, marveling at the euphony of its juxtapositions, the aptness of each sparkling image. I don’t have that kind of attitude about my work. I enjoy the writing process, but I also enjoy drawing a firm line under the end of a book and getting the wretched thing off my desk. For months of composition I live and dream with the book’s characters. But the minute I finish, I depart abruptly from their world and return to my own.

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The hardest part of recording audiobooks, author Bill Bryson told AudioFile, was learning to keep very still when he speaks. “I tend to gesticulate.” The noise of his clothes rustling as he moved was captured on tape. “Each time I did it, I had to go back and repeat,” said Bryson, who has now recorded five of his books, including the new IN A SUNBURNED COUNTRY, about his Australian travels.

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James Lee Burke, as listeners might expect, grew up in Cajun country. He and his cousin, the brilliant short story writer André Dubus, were born four months apart. Burke’s own literary accomplishments are no small feat. Referred to by Jonathan Kellerman as “the Faulkner of crime fiction,” Burke started his career with the publication of Half of Paradise in 1965. Not until his 1987 novel, Neon Rain, did he introduce Cajun cop Dave Robicheaux, who has consistently put Burke on the bestseller lists. Burke’s writing has a slow, methodical pace, like the flow of wind across the bayou, the vice and violence never gratuitous or sensational.

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With snappy patter, self-deprecating humor, and sharp-tongued wit, Augusten Burroughs has explored his life, from tortured adolescence through rehab to recovery. His personal remembrances, RUNNING WITH SCISSORS (2002), DRY (2003), and MAGICAL THINKING (2004), have become international bestsellers. Born in Pennsylvania and raised in Massachusetts, Burroughs credits lying on the floor and listening to his mother’s recordings of old radio shows for some of his happiest early memories. “Audiobooks bring back that experience.”

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Sandra Cisneros is not only the award-winning author of two novels, countless essays, and poetry, she’s also the narrator of her own work on audio. A devoted audiobook listener, Cisneros prefers hearing authors narrate their own work. “I like to hear the writer. I feel angry when I find the narrator isn’t the person who wrote the work. Even in fiction.” She notes that not all authors will be good narrators, but she still feels strongly that “you find out something about the author just in the way that she expresses herself.”

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It takes a lot of moxie to model your main character’s mother after your own, especially when your real-life mother has earned critical acclaim in your chosen field. Carol Higgins Clark, however, sees more fun than competition, more affection than comparison in her relationship with bestselling mystery author Mary Higgins Clark. So when Carol’s editor suggested she make private detective Regan Reilly’s mother a famous mystery writer, the daughter laughed and said, “Why not?”

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There are few people busier than the “Queen of Suspense.” The day of her interview with AudioFile, Mary Higgins Clark enjoyed a special luncheon attended by members of her French book club. That evening she was to have dinner with her editor to talk about her new book.

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Catherine Coulter

For 30 years Catherine Coulter has been entertaining fans with widely popular novels, including historical romances, romantic suspense, and suspense thrillers. In 1988 she hit the New York Times Bestseller List for the first time with her historical novel MOONSPUN MAGIC. She has now made the list 59 times.

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Author and political analyst John W. Dean—yes, that John Dean, of Watergate fame—has listened to audiobooks for decades. “I listen all the time,” he says. “I listen when I shave in the morning. I listen when I brush my teeth at night. I listen in the car and when I’m exercising.” With a gentle laugh, Dean adds, “I guess that makes me an audio bibliophile, or it is biblio audiophile? Or whatever.”

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His job is to “scare the socks off readers” and provide lots of surprises and twists, says mystery author Jeffery Deaver. “My books are about misdirection, and I lead the audience through distractions and regressions.” That’s why he decided to use the world of magic and illusion in his newest Lincoln Rhyme exploit, THE VANISHED MAN.

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Janet Evanovich barely has time to sit down, let alone read. The months between June and November 2002 saw the publication of three new books: HARD EIGHT (the eighth novel in the popular Stephanie Plum series), FULL HOUSE (first in a new series of zany romantic adventures), and VISIONS OF SUGAR PLUMS (a novel-length Christmas story featuring Stephanie Plum). In September Evanovich took the time to chat with AUDIOFILE about reading, listening, and the art of storytelling.

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When one imagines the type of person who writes dark thrillers about FBI agents and serial killers, abduction, abuse, and violence, Lisa Gardner is not the kind of person who comes to mind. She’s the kind of person you’d expect to meet at toddler time.

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Tess Gerritsen had published nine romantic suspense novels when she began formulating a medical thriller. Then she was told publishers only want medical thrillers written by doctors. Gerritsen responded, “ I am a doctor!” What followed was a string of highly successful medical thrillers: Harvest (1996), Life Support (1997), Bloodstream (1998), and Gravity (1999). The Surgeon, Gerritsen’s latest novel, introduces Boston detectives Thomas Moore and Jane Rizzoli, as well as trauma physician Catherine Cordell.

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Getting into journalism was a “complete accident,” says the author of SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE, an exhaustive and important study on the neuroscience of human interactions, released last year. After finishing his Ph.D. at Harvard in the 1970s, Daniel Goleman didn’t find a psychology teaching job he really wanted, so he abandoned academia when offered an editor position at Psychology Today. Writing advice from his managing editor led to 12 years as a science writer for The New York Times and seven books, most of which are available on audio.

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When one thinks of ancient Rome, one tends to think of gladiators facing off against wild beasts. But as Robert Harris reminds us in his new historical novel, IMPERIUM, Rome in 1st century B.C. was a hotbed of devious politicians facing off against each other. They may have had names such as Pompey, Caesar, and Marcus Cicero, but their intrigues are familiar to anyone who reads today’s headlines. In IMPERIUM, Harris brings to life the rise of famed orator Cicero and his battle against corrupt politicians, including Julius Caesar.

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“I very much wanted these books on audio,” Ursula Hegi said. In fact, the author is so committed to audiobooks as an art form that she has abridged two of her own books herself, STONES FROM THE RIVER and THE VISION OF EMMA BLAU. Speaking from her home in New York City, Hegi explained, “Originally it was planned that someone else would abridge STONES and then I would do the narration. But I felt that I knew it so well—from the inside—that I should create the abridgment myself.” When she writes, Hegi said, she revises each manuscript fifty to a hundred times. “I treat my writing as if it were poetry,” she said. “There cannot be one superfluous word.” When working on her abridgments, Hegi does about three passes on the work—excising whole characters and scenes in some spots, cutting down sentence by sentence in others. The last pass moves in on the “final count,” which reduces the book to about 30 percent of the original.

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Though many listeners have discovered the work of Alice Hoffman through her most recent books —TURTLE MOON; LOCAL GIRLS, made into a movie; and HERE ON EARTH, an Oprah selection — she’s no overnight sensation. She’s been writing and publishing for 25 years. A trip to the fiction section of Borders reveals nearly a whole shelf of her work.

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Iris Johansen

In the early 1980s, with her children leaving home for college, Georgia homemaker Iris Johansen began filling her empty nest with the array of fictional characters who populate the romance novels she wrote for the Bantam Loveswept series..

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One could say that the new memoir of civil rights leader and lawyer Vernon Jordan began life as an audio production. After developing an outline, he says that he turned on a tape recorder and “just talked and talked and talked.” The result, written in collaboration with author and law professor Annette Gordon-Reed, is Vernon Can Read!, a moving and enlightening journey through pre- and post-civil rights America.

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“A good reader makes me hear my book in a voice different from my own,” says film historian and mystery writer Stuart Kaminsky. “It’s like hearing a story written by someone else whom I really like. A good reader makes me like my novel even more than I did when writing or reading it.”

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One might imagine, at first blush, that there’s a cottage industry a-plying its trade in the comfortable Beverly Hills home of Faye and Jonathan Kellerman (and their four children)—two of the better-known and more successful current mystery writers.

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Audiophiles, meet one of your own: the delightful Southern author Cassandra King. “I listen all the time while traveling, “ she says. “To me, it’s a way of enriching a book.”

King, whose first novel was MAKING WAVES, is such an audiobook fan that she has several favored habits to share. “I’m building a collection. We’ve got so many books that it’s a relief to be buying tapes instead of print books.” She attributes the abundance to her husband, bestselling author Pat Conroy, an avid book collector.

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Quintessential crime novelist Elmore Leonard has been clearing the criminal underbrush of Detroit, Michigan—with side junkets to sunnier climes like California and Florida and such foreign venues as Rwanda and Cuba—for more than a generation. Scams and murders have alternated and meshed as tawdry tapestries upon which he’s sprinkled his rowdy band of lowlifes with their deliciously economical chatter. Like the late Ted (Dr. Seuss) Geisel, Leonard began telling tales on the printed page while toiling as an advertising copywriter. "I wrote in my drawer," the writer, 78, says. "I didn’t want to get caught writing something else when I should have been writing Chevrolet ads—which were hard to get into, I’ll tell you."

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Ed McBain is a man who knows no rest. With more than 80 novels to his name—50 that have been adapted to audio-book—he continues to put in a full day’s work despite having recently completed his latest book, Candyland, co-written with another award-winning author, Evan Hunter. What makes this collaboration unique is that Ed McBain and Evan Hunter are the same person.

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Jacquelyn Mitchard’s third novel was supposed to be a ghost story. “And it was a real good ghost story, too,” she says. But she ultimately abandoned that project when a dramatic legal case in Wisconsin that raised questions about family and family bonds began to haunt her.

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How does a nice boy from Toledo, Ohio, heavily influenced as a sixth grader by the satire in Mad magazine, become a bestselling author living the Northern California and Hawaiian lifestyle and have so much fun doing it?

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Deborah Norville

Two weeks before her high school graduation, Deborah Norville’s ambition of becoming an attorney changed abruptly after watching a national television crew working hard to set up a telecast. “They enjoyed it and were just as chipper and friendly at the end of the day, and I thought, ‘Whoa, there’s something about this business!’” After graduating magna cum laude from a journalism school in her native Georgia, she held TV anchor jobs in Atlanta and Chicago until NBC tapped her at age 28 to head a morning news program.

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Novelist/playwright John Mortimer’s writings share a preoccupation with lawyers (he himself is a barrister), a satiric edge softened by the gentleness of his wit and a whimsical melancholy underlying his humor. Moreover, he writes for the ear. He composed his first play, The Dock Brief, for radio; only later did it gain success with Michael Hordern on the West End and Broadway. Even his novels and memoirs seem designed to be read aloud. Perhaps that’s why he’s one of England’s most “audiobooked” living authors.

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"Audiobooks are wonderful inventions," says the award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates. "People are often so enthralled by them that they’re disappointed when their trips end. I’ve often sat in our driveway listening to the ending of something—reluctant to break the spell. Obviously, we all love to be told stories, especially by skilled professional storytellers."

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Sharing the good news of middle age is Nuala O'Faolain's purpose in her new memoir, Almost There. It's meant to be a celebration of life. She says, "I hope that listeners hear through the Irish accent to the universal story of potential and happiness in the middle years." A work of passion and optimism, this is the second autobiographical work O'Faolain has recorded; the first was Are You Somebody? Although she doesn't listen to audiobooks--"I've never made it a habit," she says--she thinks it's important for listeners to hear the author's voice.

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Sound emanates from Ian Rankin’s novels, whether in print or on audio. His books, featuring Detective Inspector John Rebus, are dark and edgy police dramas set in the author’s native Scotland. But instead of bagpipes you’re more likely to hear the Rolling Stones or The Cure.

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How does Kathy Reichs manage to be both an accomplished forensic anthropologist and a bestselling author? It takes “organization and discipline; whenever I’m not on a case, in court, or on the road, I pretty much write all day,” says Reichs. “So far I’m able to do it.” Indeed she does. In her new adventure, GRAVE SECRETS, Tempe Brennan is sent to find the truth about a brutal massacre that happened in a Guatemalan village in 1982.

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S.J. Rozan is a Chinese buffet of delightful contradictions. Her books are probing and profound, but like her namesake, S.J. Perelman, her humor is witty and infectious. This pint-sized New York architect is neither. Chinese-American nor a macho male, but she writes effectively and credibly from both points of view. Of her five novels, three are written from the perspective of Chinatown private eye Lydia Chin, and two from that of corn-bred tough guy Bill Smith. NO COLDER PLACE was nominated for a Shamus Award and won the Anthony for Best Novel in 1997.

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When Richard Russo does a book reading, he holds the crowd in the palm of his hand. The great warmth and humor of his writing come through abundantly, and he is always a hit.

With respect to audiobooks, the question is so obvious that one member of a recent audience even asks it: Why doesn't Russo read his own works on audio?

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Few Americans know anything of the history of the slaves who joined the Tories during the Revolutionary War. Excluded from the liberty their masters so prized, they fought for England. The English, unlike the Colonists, promised manumission to slaves who would take arms in their cause. A monarchy that offered freedom seems to have been infinitely more attractive than a democracy that did not.

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MOMENT OF TRUTH, Lisa Scottoline’s seventh legal thriller, is flying off the stands at a rate matching the pace of her novels. Harper Audio has simultaneously released MOMENT OF TRUTH in both abridged and unabridged formats, read by two of the top names in the industry. Scottoline (her name, she told us, rhymes with “fettuccine”) draws on her experience as a trial lawyer and a judicial clerk to create believable and entertaining thrillers. People magazine called her “the female John Grisham.” “I’m flattered,” she told AudioFile. “By the same token, I don’t think anybody could read a page of Grisham and a page of mine and mistake the two. He has so few Italian girls, for one thing, and there are no golden retrievers.”

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Carol Shields, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, has narrated all three of her books—THE REPUBLIC OF LOVE, THE STONE DIARIES, and now her newest, LARRY’S PARTY. She always wanted to be an actress. “I always tried out for parts in the school play, but I was too self-conscious, and I didn’t have a loud voice.” When her publisher, Viking, offered the chance to read her works, she thought, “Here’s something I can do!”

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Author Anita Shreve told AudioFile that when she writes, she hears the language—the dialogue of her characters—in her mind. Whether it’s nineteenth-century voices and language, foreign accents or broken English, her muse communicates aurally, giving the author the rhythm and patterns of speech. The scenes and relationships she creates are vivid and uncontrived. The dialogue flows. This perhaps explains why Shreve’s books, and in particular FORTUNE’S ROCKS, set at the end of the nineteenth century in a New England seaside community, have such a finely tuned sense of time and place. They succeed as audiobooks because of these origins.

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Mystery writer Karin Slaughter, whose latest is BEYOND REACH, wanted her Grant County series to have a Southern narrator who didn’t sound like a hillbilly. “Joyce Bean’s narration,” she says, “is close to the voices that I heard in my head. She does well with the subtleties of colloquialisms and accents. And she doesn’t make anyone sound like they’re from a trailer park.”

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Historical novelist Wilbur Smith is “riding high on the wave” of popular and critical response following the release of THE QUEST, the latest in his bestselling Egyptian series.

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Lynne Truss says that people who care about grammar are generally thought “to have no sense of humor and to be hell to live with.” But if the author of EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES has her way, all of us will soon be able to use a semicolon correctly without feeling that we have become nigglers. In fact, says Truss, “Loving precise grammar may even make you a good person.”

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A few years ago, British suspense novelist Minette Walters packed up the audio versions of all her books and sent them to the woman who had been headmistress of her childhood boarding school. “I got this sweet letter in reply.” Transforming her naturally exuberant tone into the precise diction of a 99-year-old retired schoolteacher, Walters recites the words from memory: “Dear Minette, I have listened with great interest to your books on audio. I couldn’t believe it; they are very imaginative. But I was a little concerned about the language. You used to be such a nice girl.”

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It would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall—or on the leaf of a tree—a few years ago when novelist-essayist-social analyst Tom Wolfe strolled through the dorms and along the verdant terrain of a handful of university campuses to research I AM CHARLOTTE SIMMONS, his latest dissection of American society.

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