Julianna Baggott

Critically acclaimed, bestselling author Julianna Baggott also writes under the pen names Bridget Asher and N.E. Bode. She has published seventeen books over the last ten years.

After receiving her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Baggott published her first novel, Girl Talk, which was a national bestseller and was quickly followed by Boston Globe bestseller The Miss America Family, and then Boston Herald Book Club selection, The Madam, an historical novel based on the life of her grandmother. She co-wrote Which Brings Me to You with Steve Almond, a Kirkus Best Book of 2006.

Baggott's new novel is Pure, her first horror novel, which divides future humans into two classes: those cataclysmically merged with animals, toys, and other people, and the dome-dwelling, authoritarian “Pures.”

From her Q & A with Adam Lipkin at Publishers Weekly:

How did you develop the setting?

I was writing a series of strange, fabulist short stories with characters fused to objects that represented their obsessions. Editors didn’t quite know what to make of them. One of the characters in particular, a young woman with a doll’s head fused to her fist, kept coming back to me. At the same time, I wanted to try my hand at world-building, to create big strange cinematic landscapes. It took a while before I realized that the characters in my literary fabulist short stories belonged in these worlds.

Did present-day class and political strife influence the stratified future you developed?

I’m not the kind of writer who’s able to block out the world around me. I’m mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about our precarious economic and political climate. I’m a writer of faith who worries about the intolerance of religion. I look at the past and fear we haven’t learned from it. I believe that humanity is capable of evil as well as great acts of courage and goodness. I have hope. Deep down, I believe in the human spirit, although sometimes...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Julianna Baggott's website and blog.

Baggott also writes under the pen names Bridget Asher and N.E. Bode.

The Page 69 Test: Bridget Asher's The Pretend Wife.

The Page 69 Test: Pure.

Writer Read: Julianna Baggott.

--Marshal Zeringue