Author of the week

last updated 8 January 2015

James McBride makes balancing two careers look easy, said Bob Minzesheimer in USA Today. The 50-year-old musician, composer, and author, best known for his 1996 memoir, The Color of Water, has just published his second novel in six years and is awaiting the release of a Spike Lee film based on the first. But nothing comes without effort. Three days a week, McBride takes a 5:30 a.m. train from bucolic Bucks County, Pa., to Manhattan so he can write or compose all day in a small Hell’s Kitchen walk-up he shares with a saxophone repairman. “An artist needs a bit of a ragged edge,” he says. He recently wasted 12 months working on a Civil War novel that just didn’t work. “It was awful,” he says, devoid of “a single believable character.”

His new novel, Song Yet Sung, pushes the clock back just a decade, to 1850 Maryland, said Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg in The Wall Street Journal. Maryland’s Eastern Shore “is a magic place,” McBride says. Trolling around its creeks, swamps, and cornfields, he began to see how the story of a slave breakout could help illuminate the complexity of slavery as an economic force. “Slavery enslaved everyone,” he says. “Slaves and the enslavers, and those who lived around it.” It’s the kind of idea that gets McBride up in the morning. “I’m trying to get Americans to see that we’re all pretty much the same,” he says. “Plus, I don’t know what else to do with myself.”