MATTHEW PEARL

What's most explosive about historical fiction is to use the fictional elements to pressure the history to new insights.

I don't like my birthday. I don't like things that are directed towards me. It took me a long time to get over people asking me to write my name in the book.

I think respectful conflict is intrinsic to the spirit of literature. It reminds us that literary history is living and evolving and thrives on us being active participants.

I still have my high school copy of the collected Poe - missing its covers and pretty worse for the wear.

I love writing shorter fiction.

Dickens's final book, 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood,' forms the jumping-off point for my new novel, 'The Last Dickens'. This last work by Dickens has very little social commentary and a pretty tightly efficient storyline and cast of characters. Not necessarily what we think of when we think what characterizes Dickens.

If we think about what mystery entails as a genre, certainly a big part of it is a resolution.

Films have become shorter in length, jumpier in style, and simpler in story so that they can be more easily transferred to once under-exploited international markets.

My high school English teacher in junior year, Dr. Robert Parsons, assigned us some Poe stories, including 'The Black Cat' and 'The Purloined Letter.' Being an animal person, I had trouble with 'The Black Cat!' I got hooked instead by 'The Purloined Letter,' a Poe story with detective C. Auguste Dupin.

'The Dante Club' was one of America's most important book clubs, as their Wednesday night meetings ultimately led to our country's first exposure to Dante's poetry on a wide scale.

The book I'm working on next, which will be my fifth, returns to literary history. I really do love literary history, and I have plenty more ideas on it.

When Dickens arrives in the United States in November of 1867, he's already in questionable health. So by the end of the trip, he was really in failing condition, and really, he would never recover completely after this point, and you could sort of draw a straight line to his ultimate decline and death.

As a writer of historical fiction, I believe you don't want to fictionalize gratuitously; you want the fictional aspects to prod and pressure the history into new and exciting reactions.

Surprisingly, it was not an American but a British company that opened an amusement park in 2007 called Dickens World, located in the English county of Kent, complete with an Ebenezer Scrooge Haunted House, a Great Expectations Boat Ride and the as-advertised 'costumed Dickensian characters.'

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

Poe was plagued and haunted most of all by something pretty banal: poverty. Probably the most eccentric decision in life was to become a writer in an age when making a living at it was nearly impossible.

I had a dog named Oliver with severe separation anxiety. He couldn't be alone... so I had to bring him wherever I went.

As new technology emerges as the greatest challenge to novels since the advent of film, it may be that the fragmentation of storytelling into installments key to Dickens's era will be recreated in some way.

For several years at the University of Virginia, students had an annual tradition of raising hell around campus, burning tar barrels and shooting pistols into the air.

When it comes to referring to Dickens's life, performing plays with your nine children for friends and family during Christmas is Dickensian.

There's a remarkable power about reading together, reading collectively, that's brought out by reading groups.

When Charles Dickens arrived in Boston Harbor, where he started, they had to keep it secret because there was such a mob of people expecting him, and they actually chased down his carriage at the hotel, the Parker House Hotel.

Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, film has been a shadow thrown over the minds of all novelists. Ever since, novelists have strained to make themselves more relevant and, whether consciously or not, novel-writing has been influenced by cinematic doctrines - by turns, embracing and defying it.

Edgar Allan Poe, an earlier UVA student, once complained in a letter that his stepfather spoke to him as if Poe were one of the black slaves; some of the students at UVA surely felt the same about being told what to do by faculty.

Harvard was also a little bit of a villain in my first book, 'The Dante Club.' I guess there might be a way to make Harvard more of a sympathetic presence, but it's such a powerful institution that it more naturally lends itself toward not necessarily a negative but an obstructionist element in a story.