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| photo: Melissa Hurwitz | |
Gregg Hurwitz is the author of 26 thrillers. His novels have won numerous literary awards and have been published in 33 languages. Additionally, he's written screenplays and TV scripts for major studios and networks, poetry, and is an award-winning documentary producer. He has also written comics for AWA, DC, and Marvel. Hurwitz currently serves as the co-president of International Thriller Writers. Currently, he is working against polarization in politics and culture. To that end, he's penned dozens of op-eds and pieces for the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Bulwark, Salon, and others. Antihero (Minotaur Books, February 10, 2026) is the 11th novel in the Orphan X series, continuing the story of Evan Smoak, once a black ops assassin for the government.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
A woman, brutally assaulted, demands that Orphan X observe a higher code in his pursuit of her attackers. Can he integrate mercy with assassin's vengeance?
On your nightstand now:
A Jack Reacher book by Lee Child. Natalie Babbitt: Tuck Everlasting. David Duchovny: Truly Like Lightning. David McCloskey: The Persian. Anthony J. Tata: Brace for Impact. Lisa Unger: Served Him Right. Beth Macy: Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America. Andrew Reid: The Survivor. Stephen Blackwood: The Consolation of Boethius as Poetic Liturgy. Daniel Quinn: Ishmael. Thomas Sowell: A Conflict of Visions. Jean-Paul Sartre: Anti-Semite and Jew. Ed Schmidt: 3 Plays. The Megillah of Esther. Mark Twain: A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage. Robert D. Crouse: Images of Pilgrimage. Dale Carnegie: How to Win Friends and Influence People. The Scribner-Bantam English Dictionary. Water bottle. Page points from Levenger.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Any of the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators mysteries by Robert Arthur. They were charming and twisty and fun.
Your top five authors:
William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Harris, C.S. Lewis, Robert B. Parker.
Book you've faked reading:
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. Incredible exploration of the truth that fiction can hold.
Book you hid from your parents:
They tried to hide books from me--Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex, Jean M. Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear, Peter Benchley's Jaws, etc.
Book you've bought for the cover:
U.K. book club edition of Peter Benchley's The Deep.
Book that changed your life:
The Screwtape Letters. C.S. Lewis had a brilliant psychologist's mind, digging deep into the human mind and soul here to explore how to corrupt it for evil.
Favorite line from a book:
"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking." --Joan Didion
Five books you'll never part with:
The Riverside Shakespeare. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.
Which is more important, plot or character:
Plot is character in motion, nothing more.