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 Lindsi at Books, Sweets and other Treats:

Where did the inspiration for Pure come from? Why dystopian?

I never thought of the word dystopian while writing PURE. Post-apocalypse, yes. But that feels more incidental. Dystopian feels more philosophical. I think that I came at the novel up through the roots of magical realism. So the larger ideas that exist -- or seem to -- those BIG ideas of dystopian literature don't apply as much -- or if they do, it's something for the reader to apply. I was trying to tell an intimate story against a massive landscape, a world I got to build by hand, word by word. I hope this helps.

How did you come up with the names for your characters? They're very unique.

Names come and sometimes for various reasons, they have to be changed. That's painful. Nicknames are odd in that I don't know where they come from and have to dig -- Partridge and El Capitan work that way. I love making up names. I'd in fact love to make up more words, but people don't care for that so much. In my poetry, I use words that have been dropped from the English language. A little...[read on]

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

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

The Page 69 Test: Pure.

Writer Read: Julianna Baggott.

--Marshal Zeringue