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| photo: Matt Kallish | |
Archer Sullivan is a ninth-generation Appalachian who's moved 37 times and lived everywhere from Monticello, Ky., to New York, N.Y., and from Black Mountain, N.C., to Beverly Hills, Calif. She is the author of the Annie Gore novels; the second in the series is Brimstone Hollow (Minotaur, August 11, 2026), which takes the former Air Force special investigator back to the Appalachian Mountains.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
Annie Gore returns to Appalachia and confronts deadly vipers, dangerous criminals, and her own demons to uncover the truth behind a snake-handling preacher's suspicious death.
On your nightstand now:
Laura Lippman's Murder Takes a Vacation and Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I loved Else Holmelund Minarik and Maurice Sendak's Little Bear and Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends to literal pieces. Once I was a bit older, Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown and Edith Hamilton's Mythology were the next to be read ragged. In high school, I carried around dog-eared paperback copies of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.
Your top five authors:
In no particular order, the authors I return to over and over are: Lois McMaster Bujold, Robert B. Parker, John le Carré, William Goldman, Dava Sobel.
Book you've faked reading:
As a kid, I used the CliffsNotes of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield to get the Accelerated Reader police off my back. I saw it as a small price to pay to read Douglas Adams and Spider Robinson without being hassled. Later, when I actually read the novel, I loved it. Though Bleak House was my first and still favorite Dickens.
Books you're an evangelist for:
Hardcover: The Vanishing Velázquez by Laura Cumming
Paperback: Looking for Rachel Wallace by Robert B. Parker
Audio: Unruly by David Mitchell (read by the author)
Book you've bought for the cover:
Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey. I was a teenager and so enamored of the cover that I spent precious grocery money to possess it. Then--maybe because by the time I got home, I'd built it up too much in my head--I didn't actually get around to reading it. It sat on my shelf for almost 20 years but once I finally cracked the spine of that thing, I couldn't put it down. I think I read the whole Phèdre trilogy in about a week.
Book you hid from your parents:
Thankfully, my folks never policed my reading. Though, if they'd had any idea what was in that Jacqueline Carey book, they might've started.
Book that changed your life:
Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare by E. Nesbit. My mom found an ancient copy in a thrift store and gave it to me when I was in second grade. The book instilled a love so deeply ingrained that I found myself forever threading Shakespeare into my life.
I studied Shakespeare in college and was lucky enough to be cast in a few excellent plays. I met my husband at an audition for Romeo and Juliet and our first words to each other were the balcony scene. Together, we ran a summer Shakespeare program (an hour-long cut of a real Shakespeare play with the original language from audition to fully lit and costumed production in a week) for kids in Appalachia.
Those plays and sonnets--those stories and characters and individual lines--continue to impact my life as I approach my own work. I never think about writing without thinking about Shakespeare's pithiness, his ruthlessness, and his astounding empathy.
Favorite line from a book:
"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." --The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Five books you'll never part with:
I've moved around a lot (37 times; I went to 13 different schools before high school) and wasn't able to hold on to many items from my childhood/young adulthood, including some of my most treasured books. As an adult, I've finally managed to collect (and fiercely guard) the following items:
The Complete Works of Shakespeare, inherited from my great-grandmother.
Faeries by Brian Froud and Alan Lee, given to me by my own fairy godmother at my high school graduation.
The little hardcover Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel my grandma taught me to read from, which I found on her bookshelf after her death.
The first book I ever wrote: Princess Lollipop and the Purple Unicorn, which my mother had bound by an artist friend when I was eight and which she kept in a trunk and gave to me when I was an adult pursuing a career as an author.
Robert B. Parker's complete Spenser novels (which I'm going to count as one book since I acquired the series as a set upon marriage to a guy with excellent taste in books).
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
My favorite crime novel: True Grit by Charles Portis. I'd give just about anything to meet Mattie and Rooster for the first time all over again.