The New Yorker has posted a very lengthy article and interview with J.K. Rowling about her book, The Casual Vacancy, which releases on September 27th.  The interview touches on Harry Potter, her life before and after Potter, and more.  On releasing the Potter books, and any details or plots, they reveal:

“We coined the phrase ‘denial marketing,’ ” Minna Fry, a former marketing director of Bloomsbury, recently said of the series. “The more people want, the less you give.” Ahead of each publication, she said, “we were extremely tantalizing—releasing little nuggets.” She laughed. “If you were really lucky, you’d get the title!”

Another part of the interview follows:

We were walking along a wet Edinburgh street of pubs and sandwich shops, hemmed in by the construction of a new tramline. Rowling wore a tan raincoat and stiletto-heeled boots. She seemed like someone who would gratefully return to a pre-adventurous life. Referring to the Edinburgh apartment where she finished her first book, the one that she secured with Sean Harris’s loan, she said, “I sometimes feel that everything that happened since I left that flat is a little bit unreal. And that’s where I’d go back to if it all vanished.” She once had the idea of publishing “The Casual Vacancy” anonymously but realized that her anonymity would be short-lived. “In the final analysis, I thought, Get over yourself, just do it.” She is working on two books “for slightly younger children” than her Harry Potter readers, and she has begun her next adult novel—although she has written only “a couple of chapters,” the story “is pretty well plotted.”

When talking about the book, the author of the article says:

“The Casual Vacancy” will certainly sell, and it may also be liked. There are many nice touches, including Rowling’s portrait of the social worker’s gutless boyfriend, who relishes how, in an argument with a lover, you can “obscure an emotional issue by appearing to seek precision.” The book’s political philosophy is generous, even if its analysis of class antagonisms is perhaps no more elaborate than that of “Caddyshack.” And, as the novel turns darker, toward a kind of Thomas Hardy finale, it hurtles along impressively. But whereas Rowling’s shepherding of readers was, in the Harry Potter series, an essential asset, in “The Casual Vacancy” her firm hand can feel constraining. She leaves little space for the peripheral or the ambiguous; hidden secrets are labelled as hidden secrets, and events are easy to predict. We seem to watch people move around Pagford as if they were on Harry’s magical parchment map of Hogwarts.