Q&A with 2012 Featured Author Adam Hochschild

Adam Hochschild has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and many other magazines, and is the author of seven books. “King Leopold’s Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa” was a finalist for the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award and “Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves” was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His latest book is “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918.”

Where do you find inspiration?
In the words and experiences of people who, in times past, have come face to face with evil and tried to do something about it.

What advice do you have for aspiring authors?
Analyze closely the books that move and delight you, and try to figure out how the author does it. Reverse engineering, as it were.

What are you reading right now?
I just finished two marvelous travel books by Patrick Leigh Fermor, and am now rereading “Pride and Prejudice.”

What’s your favorite opening line from a book?
The first sentence of “Anna Karenina” is the famous one, but it’s the second that guarantees you will keep reading: “Everything was topsy-turvy in the Oblonskys’ house: the wife had just discovered that her husband was having an affair with the French governess…”

What book has inspired or affected you in some way?
Many. But let me put in a special word for Victor Serge’s “Memoirs of a Revolutionary.” A good man and a superb writer who kept his integrity, despite being imprisoned by Stalin and then hounded out of Europe by the Gestapo. His neglected memoir is a vivid window onto his times and the greatest political autobiography of the 20th century.

If you could sit down at dinner with three other authors, living or dead, which three authors would you choose, and why?
Tolstoy, Chekhov and Orwell. The first two because I simply want to meet the people capable of making such magic with words on the page, the third to ask what he thinks of the follies of our world today.