Michael J. Agovino

Claire Zulkey interviewed Michael J. Agovino, author of The Bookmaker: A Memoir of Money, Luck, and Family From the Utopian Outskirts of New York City. From her introduction, and their first exchanges:

[Agovino] writes about growing up the son of a buttoned-up union man who moonlighted as a gentleman bookmaker and gambler in the Bronx's Co-op City, the largest and most ambitious state-sponsored housing development in U.S. history. When the winnings were good, the Agovinos were taken on exotic vacations: when they weren't, well, they lived in Co-op City. When he's not working on his next project, Agovino contributes to such publications as the New York Times, Esquire, GQ, Salon, Elle, and The New York Observer.

Since when did you know that you wanted to write a memoir?

Probably since the mid-1990s. There was a former colleague of mine--from smalltown, Texas, a brilliant, well-read guy, who I felt very comfortable with--and I told him about my background and upbringing, and about my father's gambling, which I'd never told anyone. He said, 'Wow, that would make for a wonderful book.' But it seemed impossible to write a book. And frankly, I was afraid. Afraid of what people might say, about what they might think, and afraid I might write a bad book. And fear can paralyzing--especially for writers. I wish I wrote it ten years ago, but I probably wasn't ready, psychologically and intellectually. It's a rigorous pursuit, writing a book.

Why did your father bet so much on sports, as opposed to at the casinos or something?

My father was a smart guy--smarter than me--but when he didn't go to college and needed to supplement his income on top of his day job, he fell back on what he knew, which, in his neighborhood, East Harlem, was sports gambling. Casinos weren't that accessible to him and never a big deal in his world. And when he married and had kids, it was a good way to be at home. He never boozed or womanized. Being a bookmaker and sports gambler, he was always home. And that's what he wanted: to be close to his family, to be a present father....[read on]

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Kimball

Michael Kimball's recently released Dear Everybody is the story of Jonathon Bender told through a series of his own suicide letters, as well as his mother's journal entries, his brother's narrative, and other media.

He talked to Jonathan Bergey at Keyhole Magazine. Their opening exchange:

Jonathan Bergey: How did you develop Dear Everybody from the initial idea to completion, from the concept of suicide letters to its final form, which ended up including not just the letters but interviews, newspaper clippings, journal entries, and a narrator?

Michael Kimball: It went through a few different, very distinct stages. The whole novel actually started as just one letter, which then morphed into about 100 letters. At that point I actually thought I just had a longish short story, something like that, and that the thing was done. A few months later it happened again—I wrote another 100 or so letters, and so I just had this bigger bunch of letters. But at that point it started to open up a bit. I added an introduction to it. I added the last will and testament, a couple other things. So there began to be this frame around it. And it was really after I sort of recognized the possibilities of the frame that other things started to open up. And then I got to the newspaper articles, the encyclopedia entries, the psychological evaluations, all the weather reports, year book quotes, all that other stuff.

Read--or listen to--the complete interview.

Read an excerpt from Dear Everybody, and learn more about the book and author at Michael Kimball's website and blog.

Michael Kimball's first two novels are The Way the Family Got Away (2000) and How Much of Us There Was.

The Page 99 Test: Dear Everybody.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rose George

For Library Journal, Wilda Williams interviewed Rose George about her new book, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters.

One exchange:

In The Big Necessity, you tackle a rather unpalatable topic. Why did you decide to write a book about bodily waste?

I used to work as a writer at the magazine Colors. Its editor, a rather eccentric photographer, decided to do a glossy coffee-table book on excrement. I didn't like the pictures, but the research I did for the stories accompanying them stayed with me. That's when I was introduced to such memorable characters as Bindeshwar Pathak, an Indian sanitation activist who has installed half a million toilets in India. I noticed that every so often the topic would make the news but only ever in a jokey way. I found this odd, having learned the astonishing fact that four in ten people in the world have no sanitation whatsoever. When it came to writing a second book—my first was about refugees—the topic of toilets and sanitation transformed from a background noise in my brain to the obvious and compelling choice.

Read the complete Q & A.

Read more about The Big Necessity, and visit Rose George's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sean Chercover

Sean Chercover is the author of two excellent novels featuring P.I. Ray Dudgeon, Big City, Bad Blood and Trigger City.

From his ITW interview with Tasha Alexander:

What do you think is the most important influence on a writer?

Reading. By a mile. It saddens me to meet aspiring writers who say they don't read much. They will never make it. You've got to read, every day. There's no substitute for reading good books. Reading is how we first learn the craft of writing.

Life experience is also important, and I gained enormously from my time working as a PI ... but it didn't teach me how to write.

Trigger City is simply impossible to put down. How do you write like this?

First of all, thank you. I'm thrilled that you enjoyed it.

I think my inability to outline may be a blessing in disguise. Sometimes you read a thriller, and you can't avoid "seeing" the writer's bag-of-tricks. You "see" the writer thinking, "I must end every chapter (better, ever scene!) with a question or revelation or new peril or startling plot twist." But because you see the man behind the curtain, it all feels formulaic and you don't buy into it emotionally. The tension is lost.

But I'm not good at outlining in detail. I know how I want the story to end, and I know some major scenes that have to happen in order to get there, but most of the stuff that happens along the way comes to me as I write. So in many ways, I'm like the reader; as I'm writing the book, I want to know how it all turns out. Since I'm surprised by it, I assume the reader will be too. I actually have a piece of paper taped to my wall that says, "Just write the story that you would want to read." That advice has gotten my past many stumbling blocks, and I think it helps keep the tension high.

Read the full interview.

The Page 69 Test: Big City, Bad Blood.

Visit Sean Chercover's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Larry Beinhart

Larry Beinhart's new novel is Salvation Boulevard.

One exchange from his January Magazine Author Snapshot:

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?

That’s tough. I’m basically unemployable. I might try to make a go of it as a ski instructor, but the money is really insufficient. To even try you have to be a gung ho member of a team! Which is probably beyond my capacity.

I could, I suppose, be entrepreneurial again. I once co-owned a film production company. We did quite well. But the talent you need as a producer is to be a salesman, which I’m not that good at. You also have to be detail oriented, keep accounts, keep track of nickels, also not my forte. I was a director as well as a producer. But I know people, like my wife, who are much better at that than I am.

Perhaps, in desperation, I might try to found a new religion, or a new non-religion religion. That can be exceptionally lucrative. But it may require being more intuitively exploitive than I naturally am. I don’t know and wouldn’t find out until I tried it.

But, now that you’ve asked, I will give serious consideration to it.

Read the complete profile.

Visit Larry Beinhart's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nick Harkaway

From a Q & A with Nick Harkaway about his debut novel, The Gone-Away World:

Gone-Away World has been compared to everything from Dickens to Rushdie to Terry Pratchett. Have you heard any parallels that you feel are really off the mark?

The Observer said it was "Thackeray on acid," and that caught me off balance. But the Vonnegut comparison makes me extremely happy.

But the authors you acknowledge yourself predate dystopian satire: Dumas, Doyle, and Wodehouse.

I would guess that if you could track down Vonnegut and his guys, they'd also point to those adventure-story writers. I think lots of boys sat down with The Three Musketeers and felt it was a really long book, but then discovered that it's a really gripping swashbuckling story. Pynchon's still around. You don't want to be doing something just like Pynchon. I want Pynchon to come up to me at a bar and say, "That book you wrote — it wasn't bad."

Read the complete Q & A.

About all these comparisons, January Magazine editor Linda L. Richards writes: "As the son of one of the top-selling authors in the world, one can imagine Harkaway has had it to here with comparisons. And, truly, The Gone-Away World demonstrates a clear voice and sharp vision. And, whatever else, with everyone scratching about for all these wonderful comparisons (Pynchon, Vonnegut, Rushdie and Dickens, for crying out loud!) it’s clear, boyfriend can write." [read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

John Shors

From a Q & A with John Shors, author of Beneath a Marble Sky and Beside a Burning Sea:

Was it hard to go from writing about the Taj Mahal in Beneath a Marble Sky to World War II in Beside a Burning Sea?

I think that transitioning from one book to another is a difficult process. After spending such a long time writing Beneath a Marble Sky, I became quite connected to its characters. And having to create a batch of new characters for Beside a Burning Sea felt somewhat like learning a new language. The voices in both novels are fairly unique, I believe, and giving life to such voices was a time-consuming process.

Your first novel took place in India, and your second novel occurred in the South Pacific. Why do you like to write novels set overseas?

I was lucky enough to grow up reading, and have consumed a couple of books a week for most of my life. I have always most enjoyed novels that took me to a new place, and that taught me something. Such novels prompted me to explore much of the world, in fact. And after visiting so many wonderful places, I decided that I wanted to share such locales with my readers.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Linda Robinson

From Brian Lamb's C-SPAN interview with Linda Robinson, author of Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq:

BRIAN LAMB, HOST, Q&A: Linda Robinson, why did you want to write a book about David Petraeus?

LINDA ROBINSON, AUTHOR, ”TELL ME HOW THIS ENDS: GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS AND THE SEARCH FOR A WAY OUT OF IRAQ”: Well, I’d been spending, as you know, Brian, a lot of time in Iraq since the war began. And I’d met David Petraeus when he was writing the counterinsurgency manual – and in fact, even before that.

And retired General Barry McCaffrey said, ”This is an officer you need to take a good, hard look at.” He was very high on Barry McCaffrey, even though – I mean very high on David Petraeus – even though he was against the war.

So, I had numerous indications that Petraeus was one of the generals in the Army to take a good look at.

LAMB: Where did you get the title for your book, ”Tell Me How This Ends”?

ROBINSON: That, in fact, is his phrase. He said this to Rick Atkinson, who was an embedded journalist with him in the major combat phase at the outset of the war. And around about April, Petraeus turned to Rick and said, ”You tell me how this ends.”

And he began repeating that phrase to other journalists. It kind of showed his skepticism early on that this was going to be a quick war.

LAMB: Why did you compare General David Petraeus to General Matthew Ridgway?

ROBINSON: Well, there were two comparisons as we got started on this book project. One of them was the possibility that this war would go the way of Vietnam, and ”Abe” Abrams – Creighton Abrams – would be the general that Petraeus would most be compared to for having been a bright man with some good ideas, but coming along way too late to apply them successfully.

The other one, Ridgway, was, of course, one of Petraeus’ heroes, a fellow airborne soldier. But he was credited with getting the Korean War at least to a steady state, pushing the North Koreans back. And I think that was the closest historical parallel that some of the historians I talked to could find.

Read the complete interview transcript or watch the interview.

Learn more about Tell Me How This Ends : General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dave Zeltserman

Dave Zeltserman's latest novel is Small Crimes.

From his Q & A with novelist Allan Guthrie, for Pulp Pusher:

AG: You mentioned earlier that you’re a ‘crime writer from Boston,’ yet Small Crimes is a rural noir. What made you decide on the small-town setting and how important is location to this particular story?

DZ: A rural setting was a must. There were a lot of reasons for this; two big ones being the claustrophobic atmosphere of the book and the damage that Joe Denton ends up doing to the town. Plus the best scene in the book involves a dried-up quarry, so I needed that. Also, with the police and Sheriff’s office being as corrupt as I made them, I had to make the area fictional.

AG: Joe Denton, the protagonist, is a complex individual with an unusual – some might say, abnormal – personality. There’s the suggestion that there might even be a name for his condition – if indeed he has one. How did you go about creating such a convincing psychology?

DZ: You’re right, it is suggested, but it can really go either way, and it’s left up to the readers own interpretation. I have my own personal opinion which I’ll be coy about and keep to myself for the time being. I do research such things using the Internet, which is a great source for articles on all sorts of personality disorders. For Small Crimes I ended up reading a number of papers on the disorder you’re referring to. Also, for whatever reason, I have this talent of being able to get into the heads of sociopaths and other broken individuals. It’s a skill that makes my wife and parents proud.

Read the complete Q & A.

Visit Dave Zeltserman's website and his blog.

My Book, The Movie: Small Crimes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alafair Burke

From the Powells.com Q & A with Alafair Burke:

Name the best television series of all time.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Simultaneously funny, dark, and sweet, this series gave viewers seven seasons, each with an identifiable arc as carefully crafted and well layered as you'd find in any novel. Only Joss Whedon could create a character who credibly transitions from bouncy cheerleader to sacrificial savior to death-savoring self-abuser, all while turning in the requisite snark during the "slayage."

Make a question of your own, then answer it.

Q: What's the deal with your name?

A: I was named after my father's maternal grandmother. I spent my childhood hating my name and trying to get a nickname to stick (including "Farrah" in the early '70s). Then a drag queen to whom I sold clothes at this cheesy Kansas boutique called Cricket Alley used my name and won the Miss Gay Wichita pageant. I figured that if she could make it work in designer knockoffs, I could suffer through.

Read the complete Q & A.

Visit Alafair Burke's website, Facebook page, MySpace page, and blog.

A former deputy district attorney in Portland, Oregon, Alafair Burke now teaches criminal law at Hofstra Law School and lives in New York City. She is the author of the Samantha Kincaid series—which includes the novels Judgment Calls, Missing Justice, and Close Case—and Dead Connection, her first thriller featuring Ellie Hatcher, and Angel's Tip, the sequel.

The Page 69 Test: Dead Connection.

The Page 69 Test: Angel’s Tip.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul A. Cohen

From a Q & A at China Beat with Paul A. Cohen, professor of history emeritus at Wellesley College and associate at the Harvard Fairbank Center and author of the forthcoming Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China:

China Beat: I assume you've seen Orville Schell’s recent piece in Newsweek, in which he mentions your work on the power of the idea of “national humiliation” in Chinese historical memory. I was wondering if you had any thoughts to share about Schell’s essay—or about the longer version that appeared in the New York Review of Books?

Paul Cohen: I liked Schell’s piece (which I read in the NYRB version). His take on continuing Chinese sensitivity to “national humiliation” is well-articulated and persuasive. At the same time it must be said that this is a large and complicated topic, one that cannot easily be covered in a short article. Let me touch briefly on a few points that would need to be dealt with to create a fuller understanding of the issue:

(1) The views of different sectors of the population—urban/rural, highly educated/less well educated, young/middle-age/elderly—need to be disaggregated and analyzed carefully. It shouldn't be assumed that they’re all identical either in nature or origin.

(2) The mystery of the young, who are identified in the article as being among the most intense in their sense of victimization in spite of having been born in the post-Mao years, is a conspicuous example. There was a major effort beginning in the early 1990s to indoctrinate this part of the population with the importance of “not forgetting” (buwang) the suffering and humiliation of the imperialist interval in China's history—an interval they themselves hadn’t experienced. This was part of the broader phenomenon of resurgent nationalism that marked these years and was strongly pushed by the state, in part to supply a substitute form of legitimation for a Communist party whose original Marxist-Leninist-Maoist vision had lost much of its shine. It’s important to look at the content and approach of the modern Chinese history this sector of the population has been exposed to. Yuan Weishi got into trouble a few years back for pointing out how little it has to do with reality.

(3) The situational character of many nationalistic outbursts...[read on]

Read the complete interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kim Barnes

From a Q & A with Kim Barnes about her new novel, A Country Called Home:

Q: Part One of A COUNTRY CALLED HOME is preceded by an epigraph by John Gardner: “The fall from grace is endless.” Why did you choose this quote?

A: My young life was defined by the teachings of religious fundamentalism and the constant reiteration of man’s fall from grace—that fall from the Garden of Eden. The fact that my own father was a man characterized by a mix of uncommon nobility and flawed judgment...well, that’s the very definition of a tragic figure.

My father was an absolutist, a man of deep conviction who was determined—driven, really—to create a better life for himself and his family. Even though my character Thomas Deracotte is a Yale educated physician, while my father was a logger with very little education, they both believed that they could control the world around them with a mix of superior insight and will. Such people are often blinded by their own vision, even though the vision itself may be an honorable one. And the fact is that, even in their failure to realize that vision, and even though their flawed judgment and blind hubris may result in chaos rather than order, we benefit from their attempts. This is why A COUNTRY CALLED HOME is divided into two parts: the first part is the story of Thomas Deracotte’s attempt to create a Utopian existence for his wife and daughter. Part II explores how Deracotte’s vision, though destructive, is also creative: in the life of his daughter, Elise, we recognize the chance for redemption.

Like Elise, I have been both scarred and shaped by my father’s vision. The strength of his will and demanding nature instilled in me a sense of fearful respect, but it also allowed me the opportunity to rise above the poverty and familial dysfunction that had informed his own life. Without my father’s vision, even though flawed, I would not have achieved my educational and creative goals, and I am grateful. But I’m also aware of how that fall from grace—from childhood innocence and adult obliviousness to consequence—is perpetual.

Read the complete Q & A.

The Page 69 Test: A Country Called Home.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katherine Neville

From a Q & A with Katherine Neville at the publisher's website:

Question: It’s been twenty years since The Eight. Why did it take so long to write THE FIRE?

Katherine Neville: I don’t actually write my books, they kind of write themselves–but they also seem to decide on their own when they are going to be written. Or in this case, not written. Until the right moment.

In the early 1990s, while I was on a 16-hour train trip from Switzerland to Prague, I was pacing up and down through the railroad cars when I figured out how to continue the story that began in The Eight. I saw clearly how the children of the previous characters would have to solve the true underlying mystery, which even their parents hadn’t yet discovered, about the original creation of the fictional chess set that had once belonged to Charlemagne, and of the powerful and very real historic events that had first set its course in motion.

THE FIRE was weaving its tale within me for almost a decade. Then, all of a sudden, one bright sunny morning, a plane smashed into the Pentagon just across the river from my apartment in D.C. I already knew about the two planes in New York–I’d seen them hit the towers on TV just moments earlier–and I knew at once, when the third plane hit, that I wasn’t writing the book I thought I was writing.

Read the complete Q & A.

Visit Katherine Neville's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margaret Atwood

Deborah Solomon interviewed Margaret Atwood for the New York Times Magazine.

Two of their exchanges:

As one of Canada ’s most esteemed novelists and poets, you are about to deliver a series of public lectures on a seemingly nonliterary subject, “Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth,” which is also the title of your latest book. Your timing is perfect.

Well, I didn’t do it on purpose. It’s not my fault. I didn’t make those banks collapse.

* * *

So what led you to take up the subject of debt?

Long ago, I was a graduate student in Victorian literature. When you think of the 19th-century novel, you think romance — you think Heathcliff, Cathy, Madame Bovary, etc. But the underpinning structure of those novels is money, and Madame Bovary could have cheerfully gone on committing adultery for a long time if she hadn’t overspent.

Read the complete Q & A.

Read more about Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Reinhardt

Susan Reinhardt has been called “the Southern Belle’s answer to David Sedaris” and “a modern-day, Southern-fried Erma Bombeck or Dave Barry.” She is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist and author of three books -- Not Tonight, Honey: Wait ‘til I’m a Size 6 (2005); Don’t Sleep With a Bubba Unless Your Eggs are in Wheelchairs (2007); and Dishing with the Kitchen Virgin (2008).

From her interview with Mary Ward Menke for January Magazine:

You’ve been compared to Erma Bombeck, Dave Barry and David Sedaris. How does that make you feel?

I like hearing it, but don’t fully believe it. So it hasn’t gone to my head. Everything tends to go to my belly. Everything. I’m a bloater. By the way, I do love all those writers you mentioned, and was so honored to speak at the Erma Bombeck Humor Writers Conference in Dayton in 2006 and meet all of her family. Betsy Bombeck bought two of my books. I was elated.

Has humor always been an important part of your life? Where did your sense of humor come from?

My dad is the funniest man alive and my sister is the funniest woman on the planet. For example, she recently couldn’t get her kids to bathe, so she just put them in the golf cart and ran them through the car wash. She also had an e-Bay bidding war to win a possum fur coat. She said it has a tire mark through it, too.

Read the complete interview.

Visit Susan Reinhardt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Biespiel

From a Q & A with the poet David Biespiel:

6. What's your best advice for a writer?

Don't listen to me would be my advice...

7. No really. One thing?

All right...read. Immerse yourself in reading the kind of writing you're doing. Writing screenplays? Read them, & watch movies. Constantly. Writing a memoir, read them. Writing poems, read them--& not just the latest National Book Award finalists or whatever is fadish--the Bread Crumb Prize Winner for Best Decolotage Ficton. Follow the trail: If you like writer X, see who writer X read, then read that writer. And so on. There you have it, one thing: Read. The ratio between what you read & what you write will be enormously imbalanced. More reading compared to less writing. And yet--let me contradict myself--write more, too.

Read the complete Q & A.

Read--or listen to David Biespiel read--the poem, "Though Your Sins Be Scarlet."

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Kimmel

From Inside Higher Education:

Leaders of colleges for traditional-age students spend a lot of time worrying about the behavior of male undergraduates — and specifically the misbehavior of many through excessive drinking, hazing, and abusive behavior toward women. A leading sociologist and gender scholar, Michael Kimmel, has just published a new book that offers an inside look at this young male culture, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (HarperCollins). The book covers male development from ages 16 through 26, and features extensive discussion of campus life. Kimmel responded via e-mail to questions about his work.

Q: As colleges welcome a new crop of freshmen, what should they be aware of about their new male students that perhaps they aren’t aware of now?

A: What I call “Guyland” is both a developmental stage and a social space. Young adults, age 16-26, are taking about a decade longer to complete the transition to adulthood than did their parents and especially their grandparents. 30 is really the new 20. Guyland is also the world that young people — male and female — inhabit. After growing up with helicopter parents micromanaging every nanosecond, they enter a world in which colleges have backed away from the old “in loco parentis” model, so that young people increasingly define themselves through media images and peer groups. And on campus, guys rule.

Read the complete interview.

Learn more about Guyland and the author at the official Guyland website.

The Page 99 Test: Guyland.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Quick

From a Q & A with Matthew Quick, author of The Silver Linings Playbook:

GC: Your character, Pat Peoples, thinks his life is a movie produced by God, bound to end with a silver lining. What do you think of this very close connection, in fiction and your life, between the novel and the film? Have you found the silver lining?

MQ: When I decided to write full-time, after consulting with my wife for months, I quit a tenured position at a prestigious high school, sold my house, moved into my in-laws’ home, and wrote in their basement every day for three years. My parents thought I had gone mad. Some friends quietly disapproved. People kept asking what I was doing in the basement, and when I was going to get a ‘real’ job. And it was hard, because at times I wasn’t sure that I was doing anything productive at all. It’s a wild thing to write in your in-laws’ basement for three years, not knowing if you will ever publish. Two things gave me hope: my wife’s constant encouragement and—as stupid as it might sound—looking up at clouds during my daily sunset runs. Considering all I had sacrificed, all the work I had put into this process, the silver lining had to be coming, right? More than eighty agents rejected my pitch letter and sample chapters. Fifty more never even responded. The one referral I managed to finagle from a respected published writer went nowhere and ended in polite rejection. I was just about to give up; I was getting my C.V. together, soliciting letters of recommendation, and looking for a teaching gig when I got a call from Doug Stewart of Sterling Lord Literistic. And then the real-life silver lining began to manifest. The way things played out—especially given the title of the book—made me pause and reflect. I won’t suggest that it was some sort of divine plan, but maybe inevitability really does exist if you work hard and look at the world with the right eyes.

Read the complete Q & A.

Matthew Quick floated down the Peruvian Amazon and formed ‘The Bardbarians’ (a two-man literary circle), backpacked around Southern Africa, hiked to the bottom of a snowy Grand Canyon, soul-searched, and earned his Creative Writing M.F.A. through Goddard College.

Read an excerpt from The Silver Linings Playbook, and learn more about the novel and author at Matthew Quick website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Silver Linings Playbook.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dave Boling

Ali at Worducopia interviewed Dave Boling, author of Guernica and a journalist in the Pacific Northwest.

From the interview:

You've been a sports journalist for many years. Have you been writing fiction for a long time as well, or is this something new for you? I guess I'm wondering whether you see yourself as primarily a journalist who became inspired to write a novel, or are you a novelist with a day job as a journalist?

This was absolutely my first try at fiction. I hadn't even fiddled with it. I had some fellow journalists who turned into successful novelists (Jess Walter and Jim Lynch) and I just sort of decided it was time to see if I had a knack for it.

Seems you do have the knack. And you're certainly not the only ones to cross over successfully--Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe come to mind. One of the main differences I see between journalism and fiction is that journalism emphasizes the clear dissemination of facts, while in fiction, the facts are only included as they're relevant to story development. Was it tough for you to focus on sticking to the story, rather than presenting all of the interesting or important facts you collected in your research? I'm sure there was a lot you had to leave out.

Actually, I went back and forth quite a bit on how much history and politics and non-fiction to include. Initially, I think I included too much. I had a great deal of Basque lore, political explanations, and much more non-fictiony background on Picasso and Franco, who were both fully examined characters. I guess it was just a part of learning how to tell the story that I realized that it all would be better if the history rose more naturally from the characters.

Read the complete Q & A.

Learn more about Guernica at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

T. Lynn Ocean

From Jonathan Maberry 's ITW interview with T. Lynn Ocean about her new novel, Southern Poison:

Southern Poison continues the adventures of Jersey Barnes. Introduce us to this tough and sexy ex-MP.

If she were to knock on my front door and waltz into my life, we'd be best friends. Of course, she could kick my ass. But I'm having so much fun writing Jersey! The manuscript for Southern Fatality (first in the Jersey Barnes series) was written from the first person male POV. Having grown up as a tomboy, I thought it would be cool to write a book with a male lead character. But just as I was finishing the manuscript, the lead character woke me up in the middle of the night and told me that he was really a female. I'm like, cripes, you couldn't have said something SOONER? After I thought about it, the change made perfect sense. I did a complete rewrite and the character of Jersey was born. Take a hardcore military-trained dude, stuff him inside the body of a 5'8" tall female with a penchant for quality lingerie and a dry wit. Oh yeah, and strap on a weapon. She's having trouble leaving home without one--even in retirement.

Read the complete Q & A.

Read an excerpt from Southern Poison, and learn more about the author and her work at T. Lynn Ocean's website.

The Page 69 Test: Southern Fatality.

The Page 69 Test: Southern Poison.

--Marshal Zeringue