The Bookshelf: Joe Hill on Collaboration: 'Story is Our Family's Private Language'

When Joe Hill launched his career as a writer, he didn't want anyone to know about his famous writer parents, Stephen and Tabitha King. Rather than ride their coattails, he wanted to find success on his own—thus the pen name, Joe Hill. Now, more than a decade since his first collection of stories was published, Hill is comfortable with publicly discussing his origins as a writer—so comfortable, in fact, that his introduction to his newest collection of short stories features descriptions of early life with his literary family. These descriptions are one way of explaining how he came to collaborate with his father on two of these stories, one of which is being made into a Netflix film. The new collection of stories is called Full Throttle , and recently I went to Hill's home in Exeter to talk about the book. Below is a lightly edited transcript of Peter Biello's full interview with Joe Hill. Find Joe Hill's top five reading recommendations here . This book has a variety of short stories