It’s sometimes hard to remember that A Land More Kind Than Home (Discover, Summer '12) is actually a first novel, but spend more than a couple of minutes talking with the down-to-earth and very funny Wiley Cash, and, well, it’s no surprise that his storytelling is mature and thoughtful. So here's Wiley on learning how to tell stories and handle literary rejections, what the characters he creates teach him about normal people, and answering an age-old question: Does seeing your roommate weep help dry your own tears?  Interview by Michael Jauchen for the Discover Blog.

Funny is powerful stuff in literature, but easy to botch.  So funny done well – funny with a soul, the potent, arm-whack-you-have-to-hear-this, new-image-tattooed-on-the-back-of-the-brain kind of funny, provocative funny -- always gets the attention of the Discover selection committee readers. David Abrams (Fobbit) and Alex Gilvarry (From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant) have created darkly comic novels, easily read as companion pieces, that compelled our readers to think long and hard about war and death, race and human rights. Here are David and Alex discussing what they learned at the movies, the literature of war, and satire’s reverberations, among other things, on the Discover blog.

We're terrifically excited about our Spring  2013 Discover Great New Writers list, 14 titles carefully chosen from hundreds of submissions. By turns exhilarating and heartbreaking, lyrical and thought-provoking, these are the amazing true stories, the unforgettable memoirs laced with unexpected humor, and the dazzling novels that the Discover selection committee members can't stop talking about.

Winner Parker is having a very, very bad day in Diana Wagman's audacious novel, The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets (Discover, Holiday 2012). Locked inside a sweltering house in an LA 'burb with an enormous iguana, Winnie's trying to figure out why she's been taken before her kidnapper goes completely off the rails. Here, Diana takes readers behind the scenes in a guest post for the Discover blog.

The Discover selection committee readers weren't alone in their praise for Dan Josefson's debut novel, That's Not a Feeling (Holiday '12) -- We asked Dan about three books he frequently recommends, and this is what he said...

Jonathan M. Katz's first book, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster is what the Discover submission committee  calls "1 AM reading"- an incredibly compelling narrative worth staying up all night to finish.  We're turning our first post of the new year over to the former AP correspondent who was the only full-time American Reporter on the ground when an earthquake devestated Haiti in January, 2010.