Today we're excited to chat with Melissa Albert author of

        Tales From The Hinterland.

Read on for more about Melissa and her book, plus a giveaway!

Meet Melissa Albert!

Melissa Albert is the New York Times bestselling author of The Hazel Wood and The Night Country. She was the founding editor of the Barnes & Noble Teen Blog and has written for publications including McSweeney’s, Time Out Chicago, and MTV. Melissa lives in Brooklyn with her family.

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Meet Tales From The Hinterland!

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~ Author Chat ~

      YABC:   Which came first, the title or the stories?

It was absolutely the title! When I was about twenty I read an essay in Harper's on the mystical cultural idea of the north, or the "Hinterland" (by Peter Davidson, who later expanded it into a book), and it captivated me. I also happened to visit Iceland while I was drafting, so the feelings I got from that essay and from driving through the hauntingly strange vistas of Iceland were cooking together in my head when I was writing about a fantasy world I'd named the Hinterland.

YABC:   Thinking way back to the beginning, what’s the most important thing you've learned as a writer from then to now?

The greatest skill I've developed in the years I've been learning to write under contract, for readers who aren't just me, is shortening the mental loop between despair and hope. I think (I assume!) all writers and other artists despair at times over their projects, but while I used to take too long to climb out of the hole, I can now dig myself out just by stepping away for an afternoon. It sounds like a small thing, but if you can take your mind from, "This is garbage!" to "...but what if it ISN'T GARBAGE??" in a matter of hours, you can waste a lot less time on uncertainty.

      YABC:   What do you like most about the cover of the book?

Tales From the Hinterland first appears in The Hazel Wood, described like so: "Small enough for a pocket and bound in green hardback, its cover embossed in gold. Beneath its strange title, my grandmother's name, all in uppercase." I absolutely love that my publisher (with the help of brilliant cover artist Jim Tierney, who has done all the art for this series) found a way to both pay homage to that description and create a book with enough visual interest to catch readers' eyes at the bookshop.

YABC:   What’s on your TBR pile?
I'm counting the minutes till I can get my hands on poet/memoirist/bizarre Twitter genius Patricia Lockwood's first novel, No One Is Talking about This; Helen Oyeyemi's latest glorious fairy-tale mindf*ck, Pieces; and the first installment in a new narrative arc in Maureen Johnson's Truly Devious world, The Box in the Woods: summer camp cold-case murder!

YABC:   What’s a book you’ve recently read and loved?
I can fullheartedly recommend David Arnold's magnificent, ambitious, exciting The Electric Kingdom, Nghi Vo's jaw-dropping fantasy Gatsby retelling The Chosen and the Beautiful (with a queer Asian American Jordan Baker at the helm), and Stephanie Garber's Once Upon a Broken Heart, which will kick off a new series set in the world of Caraval, with a new heroine, some familiar faces, and an absolute boatload of thrilling magic.

YABC:   What’s up next for you?
I'm SO excited about my next book, which hasn't yet been announced! But I can tell you it's another contemporary fantasy, this time a standalone, told in a dual timeline by a girl having a very unsettling summer break in the suburbs, and her mother, twentysomething years prior, having an EVEN MORE unsettling summer in the city, and the frightening ways their two tales connect. I cannot wait to share this book!

YABC:    Are there any film adaptations, tv shows, audiobooks, or other adaptations in the works for this book?
The Tales, no, but there is a wonderful script for The Hazel Wood kicking around! I'm not sure anything will happen there--I've been told there are about a zillion hurdles for potential book-to-screen projects to jump--but it sure is fun to fantasy cast while I wait. (I've been thinking of Cate Blanchett as Althea Proserpine for a loooong time.)

YABC:    Which was the most difficult or emotional scene to narrate?
I found "Alice-Three-Times" to be the most difficult story to get right. I wanted to find the balance between giving readers closure with the ending while still maintaining the feeling of a character writing her own destiny, as explored in The Hazel Wood and The Night Country.

YABC:   What advice would you give to new writers?

Read LOTS, protect your writing time, and remember your writing is supposed to look insufficient to you for a long time. Writing "badly" feels discouraging, but it's just showing you the gap between your vision and your current abilities. Narrowing that gap is the work of years for every writer, and I'm guessing never really stops. When I started writing a novel for the first time I truly thought I'd just instinctively know how to do it because of all the novels I'd read: INCORRECT. I've heard plenty of symphonies, but I sure as hell can't write (or play) one of those.

Tales From The Hinterland

By: Melissa Albert

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Release Date: January 12th, 2021

*GIVEAWAY DETAILS* 

One winner will receive a copy of Tales From The Hinterland (Melissa Albert) ~ (US Only)

*Click the Rafflecopter link below to enter the giveaway*

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