Thomas Mullen

From a Q & A with Thomas Mullen, author of The Revisionists, which is out later this month:

When did you know you were going to be a writer?

Honestly, for as long as I can remember.

Which authors are your biggest inspirations?

I admire the way David Mitchell, Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Lethem have combined the best elements of literary fiction with all the amazing possibilities that genre fiction presents to the writer. And I love and am deeply impressed by the way people like Steinbeck, Dos Passos, and Hemingway distilled the essence of their times, and found the great stories of their times, in prose.

Which book would you take to a desert island?

“How To Escape Desert Islands.” Surely someone’s written it. Unless I knew I was going to be picked up in a week, in which case I’d probably take the book that I just put atop my To Reread list: Louis de Berniere’s “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.” I read it 15 years ago and loved it to death. Now that I’ve written a few multi-perspective historical epics myself, I want to...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue