Featured Interview With Peter G. Pollak
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
After careers as a journalist, educator and entrepreneur, I allowed myself to do what I’d always wanted to do–write novels. I’ve self-published five to date, satisfying readers’ desires for page-turning thrillers, but only whetting my appetite to improve both my story telling and writing chops.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
Thanks to my mother’s reading bedtime stories, I was a library patron at a young age. One of the first adult books I read was To Kill a Mockingbird, but it was Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, that converted me from a reader into a would-be writer. What I wrote at first was typically self-indulgent and immature. So it was good that I waited until now before attempting to gain a following for my novels.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I read all genres except for horror and romance. I feasted on SciFi in the 1960s and 70s, now read more Fantasy than SciFi. Although I write thrillers, I don’t read the popular thriller authors with one exception–Daniel Silva. Other contemporary favorites are Michael Chabon, Richard Russo, Geraldine Brooks, Alice Hoffman, Dennis Lehanne, & Neal Stephenson. Inspirations? Samuel R. Delaney and Ursula LeGuin because they were pathfinders for blacks and women in Sci/Fi, and they were innovators as well.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
House Divided is a contemporary thrillers. I wanted to explore how a family would deal with a division that seems innocuous at the start, but quickly escalates into a life or death situation. Alison and Leonard Robbins are unhappy that their college student daughter has joined the radical group Students for Justice in Palestine because they know the group fronts for terrorists. Neither can foresee what happens when terrorists set their sites on Courtney Robbins as their next victim.
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