Stephenie Meyer

Stephenie Meyer is the author of the best-selling "Twilight Saga" series.

Last summer Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg interviewed her for the Wall Street Journal. Part of their Q & A:

WSJ: Do you consider your books to be character-driven or plot driven? Where do you put your emphasis most?

Mrs. Meyer: Absolutely character driven. The plot comes from the characters. If you have interesting personalities, the stories write themselves. Some writers love intricate plotting, some love the beauty of language. For me it's all about the people -- always.

WSJ: Why do you think certain books emerge as cultural totems?

Mrs. Meyer: I don't know. I read books that are amazing that nobody has heard of. Bookstores can be overwhelming. Word of mouth is a huge part of it. Publishing isn't about big commercials on TV. With "Twilight" it was people passing books onto their friends. That's how it started. Now it's out of control. People want to know what other people are talking about, and it gets bigger and bigger.

WSJ: "Breaking Dawn" closes the series, at least as told through Bella's eyes. Were you able to tie up all the storylines?

Mrs. Meyer: I was very satisfied with the end, but I wouldn't say it's completely tied up. Life doesn't work that way. The characters seem real to me, so you can't say that's the end. Nothing is really final. Readers will get the sense of closure. But they'll still want to know what happens next. There are always more stories.

WSJ: The books have some heavy breathing, but they are ultimately chaste. What do you hear from your readers on this subject?...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen Solomon

Karen Solomon is the author of 2007’s The Cheap Bastard’s Guide to San Francisco (Globe Pequot Press) and contributing author to Chow! San Francisco Bay Area: 300 Affordable Places for Great Meals & Good Deals (Sasquatch Press). Her recent book is Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It.

From her interview with Megan Zabel of Powells.com:

Megan: You said in the introduction to Jam It that the book isn't meant to answer the question, "What's for dinner?" You write, "I'm a crafter, and food is my medium of choice." I really love the idea of kitchen crafts. Was food always your medium, or did it take you awhile to find your niche?

Solomon: Not always. It did take a while. My partner and I both work, and we had a kid about two and a half years ago. When you're living that life, dinner happens in about 22 minutes. What you eat every night — we call it "people chow" — is a stir fry or a quick-ass pasta, something that's sustenance. We're not big fans of eating out every night, so it got to be that every meal being eaten, Monday through Thursday, wasn't the kind of cooking that I love to do. I love to take time and make something wonderful and beautiful that tastes fantastic, and that just wasn't happening. I started thinking, Okay, what can I do on the weekends that's going to satisfy that creative kitchen urge, and also yield something really wonderful that I can enjoy throughout the week, or throughout the month? So that's how the book got started.

Megan: You cover a lot of ground in the book — from jam, pickles, and pastas to curing bacon and smoking trout. What inspired you to learn all these somewhat varied kitchen skills?

Solomon: I was doing a lot of...[read on]

Visit the official Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Juliet Marillier

Juliet Marillier's historical fantasy novels are published internationally and have won a number of awards.

Her new book is Heart’s Blood.

From her Q & A at Writer Unboxed:

Q: What’s the premise of your new book?

JM: The major theme of Heart’s Blood is acceptance: learning to see beyond people’s outward flaws to their inner qualities. Parallel with that is learning to accept yourself. Acceptance lies at the heart of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, on which Heart’s Blood is loosely based. It means coming to terms with the past, good and bad. Communication and miscommunication form another theme. Heart’s Blood contains extracts from diaries, letters and journals, which weave the stories of past generations into the main narrative. And then there are the mirrors …

Q: What would you like people to know about the story itself?

JM: The first person narrator, Caitrin, is a skilled scribe. Running away from home, she ends up at Whistling Tor, the crumbling fortress of reclusive chieftain Anluan, where she is hired to sort and transcribe a disordered collection of family documents. As she works through these, Caitrin uncovers a dark story spanning four generations. At the same time, her presence triggers profound changes in Anluan’s eccentric household.

This is not simply a fairy...[read on]

Visit Juliet Marillier's website to learn more about her books and works in progress, and read her "author's spotlight" essay at the Random House website.

Writers Read: Juliet Marillier.

--Marshal Zeringue

William Ferris

From a conversation with William Ferris, author of Give My Poor Heart East: Voices of the Mississippi Blues (University of North Carolina Press, November 2009):

Q: In the introduction to Give My Poor Heart Ease, you mention that "While I may live and work in other places, my real home is the farm. It is my spiritual compass." How so? And what was it that ultimately led you away from your family's farm and down Highway 61?

A: Growing up in an isolated rural community with the black and white families who lived near my home shaped me in deep, lasting ways. Stories told by my grandfather, books read aloud by my mother, and hymns sung at Rose Hill Church are memories that to this day are incredibly vivid. These voices shaped my identity in deep, lasting ways.

What ultimately led me away from my family's farm was education: first to Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts, then to Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, to Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and finally to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Earl MacCormac, my philosophy professor at Davidson College, later told me that I had "more degrees than a thermometer."

While these schools were far from my family's farm, each in their own way helped me tack a course back down Highway 61. While at Brooks School in the late fifties, I began a pattern of recording and photographing musicians each time I returned to the farm. As a graduate student in folklore at the University of Pennsylvania in the late sixties, this work became the focus of my dissertation. It was also at the University of Pennsylvania that I began to use film to document the blues worlds in which I found myself increasingly immersed.

Q: You began collecting images and recordings for this book at a very young age. How old were you when you began? What time span does the book cover?

A: I began taking photographs at the age of...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson is the author of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1985. Her second novel, The Passion, won the John Llewllyn Rhys Prize in 1987, and was followed by Sexing the Cherry, which won the 1989 EM Forster Award. Her other works include The Powerbook, Written on the Body, Arts and Lies, Boating for Beginners, The World and Other Places, and a collection of eassays, Art Objects. Her latest book is The Battle of the Sun.

From her Q & A with Anna Metcalfe at the Financial Times:

What book changed your life?

The Bible shaped me; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando shaped my imagination; and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities gave me the courage to write whatever I wanted.

* * *
Who would you like to be stuck in a lift with?

Meryl Streep.

* * *
What book do you wish you’d written?

Tom Jones. I love the bounce of the writing and I’m drawn to orphan stories.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Martin Amis

Linda L. Richards interviewed Martin Amis in 2000 about his memoir, Experience.

Part of their dialogue:

Was it difficult writing a memoir?

It's a great surprise to some, because people think that writing is a cerebral business but, in fact, your whole body is involved. That really came home to me when I was writing Experience. I thought I had suddenly succumbed to some ravage of age, because while I was writing the book my sleep patterns changed completely. I suddenly needed about 14 hours of sleep a night. I was like one of my teenaged sons on a weekend, staggering out of bed at four o'clock in the afternoon and wanting more sleep and finding that dozing state incredibly delicious. So, I thought: I'm really slowing down, soon I'll be up for a couple of hours a day and then be going back to bed again. But the minute I stopped writing the memoir, I went back to how I was before. My whole metabolism switched. Because it was front brain emotion rather than the novel which is much more subliminal. You're using a different part of the brain.

With the novel you're creating. With the memoir you're sort of dredging.

Yeah. And you're also writing directly about the things you really care about. I suppose it partly was also a cognitive stretch of grieving for the father. But it wasn't just that.

Why a memoir? Why now?

For the reasons given in the first chapter, really. It was all public already, so I didn't feel I was revealing anything. I was just trying to get rid...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Derek Nikitas

Derek Nikitas teaches creative writing at Eastern Kentucky University. Pyres, his first novel, was an Edgar nominee. His new novel is The Long Division.

From his 2008 interview with New Mystery magazine:

Given your academic pedigree (the MFA, published stories in Ontario Review), what drew you to crime fiction?

I got psyched about crime fiction while at UNCW. I took a crime fiction class and a saw a lot of film noir, so there was never any razor-wire fence between my academic and my aesthetic stomping grounds.

Yeah, there's some truth to the divide between academic "literary" fiction and beach "commercial crime" fiction, since nobody would accuse James Patterson or the Kellermans of being "literary," and nobody would call Dom DeLillo or Lorrie Moore "commercial." But my heroes shred that line: Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, James Ellroy, Michael Chabon, Denis Johnson, Tom Franklin. These folks tell page-turning tales of crime and mayhem, but they've got deep character, rich language, and rebel story structures. So I'm looking to these guys for my inspiration, generally.

Still, I was surprised when an actual police detective entered Pyres. I'd written a hundred pages before I realized I'd be tossing around that particular convention. I resisted some, but Investigator Hurd is tougher than I am.

But do you think there's still a bias in academia to exile genre fiction to some kind of literary ghetto?

I can’t speak for all of academia, but...[read on]

Read an excerpt from The Long Division, and learn more about the book and author at the official Derek Nikitas website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Long Division.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sophie Hannah

At Poe's Deadly Daughters, Sandra Parshall interviewed Sophie Hannah, a bestselling crime fiction writer and poet. Her psychological thrillers include Little Face, Hurting Distance, and The Wrong Mother (UK title: The Point of Rescue).

Part of their dialogue:

Q. You wrote several non-genre novels before turning to suspense. What lured you over to the dark side?

A. I've always been obsessed with mystery fiction, since I was a kid. My parents bought me one of Enid Blyton's Secret Seven mysteries when I was about five or six, and I remember reading it and thinking, “Stories with mysteries in them are so much better than those without -- why don't all books have mysteries in them?” I've never really changed my mind on that point. I read all of Enid Blyton, then discovered Agatha Christie and read all her books, then Ruth Rendell... I'm a mystery addict, really! I think it's because I'm quite nosy. In real life, I'm always desperate to know something -- what someone's thinking, what's going on behind the scenes in people's lives that they don't talk about -- and the great thing about suspense fiction is that you know your nosiness is going to be satisfied at the end of the book.

Q. Why did you choose to write suspense rather than traditional whodunnits told primarily from the sleuth’s or police detective’s POV? What is it about the suspense form that you find rewarding as a writer?

A. Well, each of my books combines two narrative perspectives. I always have a female protagonist in some kind of nightmarish situation, and half of each book is narrated in the first person by the heroine of that particular book. But then the other half is in...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Sophie Hannah's website.

The Page 69 Test: Hurting Distance.

The Page 69 Test: Little Face.

My Book, The Movie: Little Face and Hurting Distance.

The Page 69 Test: The Wrong Mother.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edmund White

Edmund White's novels include Fanny: A Fiction, A Boy's Own Story, The Farewell Symphony, A Married Man, and Hotel de Dream. He is also the author of a biography of Jean Genet, a study of Marcel Proust, The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris, and his memoir, My Lives. His new book is City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s.

From his interview with Thomas Rogers at Salon:

I'm assuming you read the Gore Vidal interview in the Times of London. He says a number of very nasty things about you -- but he also makes accusations that you "gayed-up" his relationship with Tim McVeigh in your play "Terre Haute."

He signed off on it. Now, late in the day, he's decided he doesn't like it, or maybe he forgot -- he drinks a lot. The tension for the [Gore-inspired] character is that he doesn't actually approve of what McVeigh did, but he's attracted to McVeigh as a man and as a personality -- whereas Gore actually approves of what McVeigh did and thinks he's a great freedom fighter.

That's complete lunacy. Gore wanted me to rewrite it to show a lot more sympathy toward McVeigh, but I thought that would lose about 99 percent of the audience. I don't approve of killing hundreds of people in the name of some abstract ideal. I think Gore is a complete lunatic, and it doesn't bother me what he says about me. He's an awful, nasty man. Now he can't write. He's wheelchair-bound, and he's in pain. He lost his lover of many years. The last time I talked to him I said, "Come to dinner, and I'll have some cute boys for you to meet." "Oh, I don't want to meet any of them!" You know, he's just an old grouch.

He's been nice to me over the years, but he's always like this seething volcano and you're always wondering when he's going to go off.

I don't know what he's famous for anywhere, really, because I think those historical novels are complete works of taxidermy. Nobody can read those. "Myra Breckinridge" was funny but light. The essays are what everybody defends -- but a friend of mine who did a volume of the best essays of the 20th century said they're all so topical that they've all aged terribly. I don't know where his work is. You have to have one or two books that are actually good if you're going to have a lasting career, and I don't think...[read on]

Read about Edmund White's most important books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brenda Cooper

Brenda Cooper is the co-author of the novel Building Harlequin's Moon, which she wrote with Larry Niven. Her novel The Silver Ship and the Sea, volume one of a trilogy, won the 2008 Endeavour Award. The third book in The Silver Ship trilogy, Wings of Creation, releases this month.

Cooper was interviewed by Lynne Jamneck at suite101.com. Part of the Q & A:

If you could be any fictional character for a day, who would it be, and why?

This is going to sound weird and retro, especially given that I'm a girl and all, but the whole time I was growing up I wanted to be Jubal Harschaw from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. He wrote full time, had a cadre of smart people around him, had the smarts to stick it to the government...and I guess I'm half-way there. I write part time, have smart people around me, and I work for the government (which is not the same as sticking it to them, but being one of them may actually be more effective). Today? I think I'd be someone in the midst of an epic adventure like Frodo or Luke Skywalker. Somebody living hard but with right and wrong a bit simpler.

Five books that will always stay with you...

Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein

Dune, by Frank Herbert

Think on These Things, Jiddu Krishnamurti...[read on]

Visit Brenda Cooper's website and her LiveJournal.

The Page 99 Test: The Silver Ship and the Sea.

The Page 99 Test: Reading the Wind.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand's books include as The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (1987), How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built (1994), The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (1999), and, most recently, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

From his Q & A with James Mustich of the Barnes & Noble Review:

James Mustich: Your last book, The Clock of the Long Now, which explored the ideas between the world's slowest computer, was subtitled Time and Responsibility. Your new book, Whole Earth Discipline, engages both of those themes, albeit in less theoretical ways. An "eco-pragmatist manifesto," it is equally concerned with responsibility and time, but far more urgently.

Stewart Brand: I have two jobs. I work for Global Business Network, where we do strategic planning for large organizations, like governmental departments and corporations and so on. That's half of my time, and I'm paid. The other half of my time I work for the Long Now Foundation, where I'm not paid. My work there led to my book, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility.

The book I just finished, Whole Earth Discipline, draws on the Global Business Network a lot more than it does Long Now, because it is really immersed in clear and present problems; it's full of very strong opinions on issues that are quite controversial. While the issues may have some of the same frames of thinking that Long Now has been engendering, I play down the Long Now aspect in the new book, in part because one of our rules at Long Now is we take no sides. That's how you keep an organization alive over centuries: you don't get in fights, because even if you win most of them, you only have to lose one, and then it's over. So it would be foolhardy for me to act as though the President of the Long Now Foundation is espousing these opinions. As the President of the Long Now, I have an interest in good information on all sides of the issues, but do not express a strong view. As somebody trained as a biologist years ago, and who has worked in the environment in various ways for a half-a-century, I have very strong opinions, and that's who wrote the book.

I draw on the Global Business Network experience because we got involved early in looking at climate issues for the Secretary of Defense's office, and that was part of what alerted me to the greater level of seriousness of those problems. Likewise with nuclear --we've been a little bit involved in some studies that gave me another perspective on that than I got from my fellow environmentalists. So the frame of reference...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Carla Buckley

Carla Buckley is the author of the forthcoming debut novel, The Things That Keep Us Here (February 2010).

From a Q & A at her website:

Why did you choose to write about an avian influenza pandemic?

A: Being married to a scientist allows me unfiltered access to some pretty amazing information. At the time, my husband was conducting research into bird flu and regularly bringing home frightening reports. One night, I had a nightmare so vivid that I called my sister the next morning to share. After I was done speaking, there was silence. Then she said, "This is the story you need to write." That story became THE THINGS THAT KEEP US HERE.

Do you keep emergency supplies on hand?

A: When I realized the only thing I could do to prepare was stockpile food and water, I went to the grocery store and loaded up my cart. Twice. I also made sure to stock up on pet food, batteries, flashlights, a first aid kit, including respiratory masks, and things to keep my kids entertained if we ended up being quarantined—books, paper, craft supplies. I figured if we didn't end up needing any of it, we could recycle through them, and I could replenish when flu season returned.

Does the current H1N1 pandemic worry you?

A: I've done too much research for THE THINGS THAT KEEP US HERE to be complacent. In fact,...[read on]

Visit Carla Buckley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ellen Hart

Ellen Hart's latest Jane Lawless mystery (Volume 17), The Mirror and the Mask, releases in November 2009.

From a Q & A at her website:

Q: You've been compared to P.D. James, Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell and Amanda Cross. You're a five time winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Mystery, and a three time winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Best Crime Fiction. With 24 books under your belt, let's take a moment and look back. What made you first want to write a mystery?

A: The short answer is, I've always loved a good crime novel. When I was a kid, my parents bought me the entire Sherlock Holmes canon and—because I have a terrible memory—I could read the stories again and again, never remembering who did what to whom. The longer answer is that, for most of my adult life, I've wanted to try my hand at writing a novel. Actually, if I'd chosen a profession early in life, I probably would have done something with music. But living, as it often does, took me elsewhere. I ended up at a religious college in California majoring in theology. And what does a woman do when she has a degree in theology from a fundamentalist church? She marries a minister. Since that wasn't a option for me, I finally decided to go to school to become a chef.

I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that many people who love to read also secretly want to write—and that was exactly my situation. The problem was that although academic writing might have come easily for me, creating fiction (sustaining plot, character, tension, etc., for 65,000 plus words) was an entirely different matter. I'd never taken a creative writing class, but in 1987 I got an idea for a novel—a mystery. I wrote about 200 pages before I realized I didn't have a clue what I was doing. At that point, I knew I needed help. Intuitively, I made a good decision. I started reading mysteries voraciously, taking the books apart, seeing how the characters were developed, how plots were constructed, how clues were dropped, how tension was built. I teach mystery writing now and I tell my students to do the same thing. By reading mysteries, you begin to digest the format. Mysteries have a very specific architecture. They're very tight. As a matter of fact, someone once said the mystery is to fiction what the sonnet is to poetry. I believe that's accurate.

Q: What writers influenced you?

A: Well, P. D. James—first and foremost. I think she's a master and I truly admire her work. Then there's...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Chelsea Cain

Chelsea Cain interviewed Chelsea Cain for The Oregonian. The Q & A opens:

O: Tell us a little bit about the book [Heartsick, her first novel featuring Portland detective Archie Sheridan and Gretchen Lowell, a beautiful and brutal serial killer].

CC: It’s a thriller about a Portland detective who led the hunt for a beautiful serial killer for ten years. She captured him and tortured him for ten days before mysteriously turning herself in and saving his life. Now it’s two years later. She’s in jail and he’s addicted to pain pills, and there’s another serial killer on the loose, and the detective is called off medical leave to lead the search for the new killer.

O: Sounds funny.

CC: I know. It’s a departure.

O: Do you worry that fans of your gentle and nostalgic Sunday column in this paper will be put off by how dark and violent the book is?

CC: A little, yeah. The book’s got a very different tone. But the characters are witty and I hope that Oregonians will enjoy reading a book with corpses that wash up in familiar surroundings.

O: One of the killer’s victims is a student at Cleveland High School and several scenes in the book take place there. What do you have against Cleveland?

CC: Nothing. I participated in Literary Arts’ Writers in the Schools program several years ago, and I served a two-week residency at Cleveland. I loved it. I had this group of incredibly smart students that could writer better than I can. When I needed a high school for the plot, I chose Cleveland because I’d spent time there and could conjure some details. For the record I also kill students from Lincoln and Jefferson.

O: At one point in the book you describe torturing a victim by pulling out her intestine with a crochet hook. Do you worry about contributing to the culture of violence?

CC: I would worry about the war we’re fighting in Iraq and Saw III and the 24-hour news channels, before I blamed our culture of violence on books.

O: You’re evading the question. You have a...[read on]

Learn more about the author and her work at Chelsea Cain's website and blog, and at iheartgretchenlowell.com.

The Page 99 Test: Sweetheart.

The Page 69 Test: Evil at Heart.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessica Brody

Jessica Brody is the author of two adult books from St. Martin’s Press (Love Under Cover and The Fidelity Files) and two forthcoming young adult books from Farrar, Straus & Giroux (The Karma Club and My Life Undecided).

The Fidelity Files is now in development as a television series from the producer of the Academy Award-winning Best Picture, Crash.

From a Q & A at Brody's website:

How did you get the idea for The Fidelity Files?

The concept for this book came to me when I was attending a happy hour at a bar in Los Angeles. I was there with a friend and a bunch of her colleagues, some of which were married. I found myself curiously observing the interactions between the single and non-single co-workers as their behaviors gradually declined from professional to something else entirely. Something hardly capable of being described as “appropriate.”

Some of the disturbing things that I witnessed as I watched alcohol cloud people’s judgment and the bar environment offset any trained workplace behavior upset me on a profound level. I secretly wished that someone would tell the “conveniently” absent significant others about what their husbands/wives/boyfriends/girlfriends/fiancés really did while attending these “obligatory” and supposedly “uneventful” work-related functions. But I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to do it. I was brave enough to think it…but not exactly brave enough to go knocking on people’s doors with bad news. You know what people tend to do to “the messenger.”

So instead I created a character whose job and purpose in life was to do just that. To reveal the truth to anyone who wanted to know. To knock on all the doors that I never had the courage to knock on. An invincible superhero-esque woman whose quest is to fight against the evils of infidelity. But of course, she soon finds out…she’s not as invincible as she once thought.

In a sense, the “Ashlyn” character of the book is the mask that I always wanted to wear. A façade behind which I could hide as I watched my fantasies of exposing the truth come to life on the page. I believe we are all afraid of feeling vulnerable on some level. We all fear the painful emotions that come with betrayal. My greater purpose in writing The Fidelity Files was to explore these fears so that I could offer a message of faith and hope despite them. Because if someone who makes their living as a fidelity inspector can believe in love despite everything she’s seen, it shouldn’t be...[read on]

Watch Brody's award-winning book trailers and visit her online at www.jessicabrody.com.

Writers Read: Jessica Brody.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Zelvin

Elizabeth Zelvin is the author of Death Will Get You Sober and Death Will Help You Leave Him.

From her Q & A at Lost in Books:

Q. First, thanks for agreeing to answer my questions. I want to start off with the protagonist, Bruce Kohler, who narrates the books. Many mystery writers have protagonists who struggle with alcoholism, but you have one who is a recovering alcoholic. Why did you approach the character from this point?

A. Apart from being a writer for my whole life and loving mysteries, my primary reason for writing these books was and is that I have something to say about recovery, which is a remarkable process of transformation that takes great courage and honesty on the part of those who recover. The first book, Death Will Get You Sober, is dedicated to them.

Q. You are a psychotherapist in addition to being a writer. How much do you draw upon your experiences for the books while still maintaining client confidences?

A. Besides being a psychotherapist, I spent fifteen years working in and then directing alcoholism treatment programs. My private practice, both in a conventional therapy office (more than fifteen years) and now as an online therapist (almost ten years), has included many clients who have been affected by addictions, codependency, and compulsive behaviors such as eating disorders and compulsive spending, either in themselves or people they love, as well as adult children of alcoholics, sexual abuse survivors, and survivors of other kinds of family dysfunction. My characters are fictional. I would never write about a real particular client. But a lot of recovering people have written to say how much they appreciate my getting it right. Recovery is my briar patch—if you remember Brer Rabbit, that’s...[read on]

The Page 99 Test: Death Will Get You Sober.

The Page 69 Test: Death Will Help You Leave Him.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lisa Patton

Lisa Patton is a Memphis, Tennessee native who spent four years as a Vermont innkeeper--until three sub-zero winters forced her back to the South. Her new novel is Whistlin' Dixie in a Nor'easter.

From a Q & A at her website:

What was the inspiration for Whistlin’ Dixie in a Nor’Easter?

I really was an innkeeper in Vermont. Even better, a Southern innkeeper in Vermont! After surviving three sub-zero winters and discovering Vermonters don’t bury their dead in the winter, suffering from vampire bugs bites on the back of my neck, and enjoying a four-week summer where I still had to wear a coat at night, I knew I had a story to write.

How has your personal life experience influenced this book? What similarities do you have with Leelee Satterfield?

The first thing that comes to my mind is the way southern girls are brought up, at least in my era. We were taught to be agreeable and polite. I’ve heard people criticize southern women for not saying what’s on their mind. That’s because we are taught from a young age to be great hostesses and make everyone feel comfortable. It might not be the best way, but it’s what we’ve learned. Sure, there’s a bit of me in Leelee. I get caught up in the same trap of sacrificing my needs for everyone else’s and wanting people to like me. Like Leelee, I’m a work in progress. Then again, so are most of my closest friends.

The best thing about Leelee is her fun side. Leelee gets herself into all kinds of messes – largely because of the choices she makes. She’s Lucy Ricardoish. I’m the same way and while that sometimes makes for a crazy personal life, it sure produces some...[read on]

The Page 69 Test: Whistlin' Dixie in a Nor'easter by Lisa Patton.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dean Koontz

From a Q & A with Dean Koontz at his publisher's website:

Your books are full of details about how things work in the real world—like life in a monastery in Brother Odd, the management of a great Bel Air estate and the intricacies of police work in The Face. Your Heart Belongs to Me is rich with details about medical conditions and heart transplants. Since you don't specialize in one kind of novel, how do you learn about all these different things? Do you engage in a lot of Internet research?

I never go on-line. My writing schedule and other obligations keep me busy 18/7. The other six hours, I sleep. I know that I am a potentially obsessive personality and that it's easy to become obsessed with one aspect or another of the Internet, until hours a day are consumed by it. Therefore, I stay away. I do most of my research from books and publications, and by conducting interviews with specialists in whatever fields my story will touch upon. One of my assistants is on-line, and in a pinch, if I can't turn up a fact I need, she can get it for me. As a high-school and college student, I hated research and libraries. I always shamelessly made up the facts in reports that I wrote, and cited nonexistent books by nonexistent writers in my footnotes. And I always got away with it! But as a novelist, I've been surprised to find that I greatly enjoy doing research. I think the difference is--in school, they told me what I had to learn, and I bristled at authority; when I chose the subject, I proved to be an industrious autodidact.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kate Mosse

Kate Mosse’s first novel, Eskimo Kissing, was published to great acclaim in 1996, followed in 1998 by the bio-tech time-travel thriller, Crucifix Lane. Her short stories and articles have appeared in a range of print media including France magazine. Her Labyrinth was a New York Times bestselling novel and a popular and critical success on an international scale. It won the Best Read category at the British Book Awards 2006, was #1 in UK paperback for six months — selling nearly two million copies — and was the biggest selling title of 2006. Sepulchre, the second in Mosse's Languedoc Trilogy, followed in Labyrinth’s footsteps and was an international bestseller, hitting the #1 spot in the UK and bestseller charts in several countries.

From "One Minute With: Kate Mosse" in the Independent:

Choose a favourite author, and say why you like her/him

Agatha Christie for stamina, professionalism, puzzles, characterisation and sense of place. T S Eliot for his lyricism, his mysticism, the beauty of his language and his enduring ability to capture a moment with the bare minimum of literary fuss.

* * *
Which fictional character most resembles you?

I'd like to say Nancy Drew for her energy or Edith Wharton's Antonia for her courage and steadfast nature or Sarah Waters' Sue Trinder or Scherazade. But in truth, I'm more the bookish librarian or quiet Mum rather than a leading literary lady.

Read the complete Q & A.

The Page 69 Test: Sepulchre.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lee Horsley

At The Rap Sheet, novelist Megan Abbott interviewed Lee Horsley, Senior Lecturer in English at the Lancaster University. Her publications include the newly released The Noir Thriller, Political Fiction and the Historical Imagination (1990), and Fictions of Power in English Literature 1900-1950 (1995) as well as recent articles on crime fiction published in Clues and Modern Fiction Studies. Part of the interview:

MA: You point out that in the 1930s novels, noir characters’ fates are consistently dictated by economic hardship, while in the post-World War II period, fate is determined by difference--characters feeling out of place or alienated. In contrast, you write, in 1980s and ’90s noir, rather than being lured into an enticing underbelly, protagonists are seduced by the promise of a commodity-rich lifestyle (e.g., Bret Easton Ellis, Elmore Leonard, Charles Willeford’s Hoke Mosley novels). What is the role of economics in more recent noir? Has there has been another shift?

LH: Again, you’re effectively prompting me to think through my arguments. In my reading of 21st-century noir, I was most struck by a pervasive preoccupation with the performance of gender roles. But if I revisit the texts I chose to discuss there, I can also, of course, see prominent economic themes running through all of them. In Charlie Huston’s Caught Stealing, Hank [Thompson]’s ordeal is set in motion by money--a quest for a “fabulous object” modeled on The Maltese Falcon--and Huston ultimately allows money to transform things for his long-suffering protagonist. In your own Queenpin, the spectacular female performances are part of a power struggle, but the novel is also a potent tale of the protagonist’s desperation to escape impoverished origins.

So--yes, the role of economics is still strongly apparent, as it has been (in one way or another) through the whole of literary and cinematic noir. But the emphasis does shift, and I think that probably, in the new millennium, crime writers have to some extent become less preoccupied with the Thatcher-Reagan era and its impact on the economic life of both Britain and America. In talking to one of my postgraduates about his dissertation this summer, I thought he’d come up with an interesting observation about some of the political novels of the ’90s, in which he argued that there was a Gothic sense of entrapment by the economic crimes of the ’80s. Novels like [Iain Banks’] Complicity and [Ellis’] American Psycho are particularly striking in this respect, with violence spiraling out of an economic context that is also harshly satirized.

It is this satire of economic perfidy, I think, that is largely absent from the 21st-century noir I have read. Greed and savage competition are taken for granted as part of the circumstances governing life, but our attention isn’t focused on the metaphoric significance of the various forms of consumption, acquisitiveness, and materialism represented. At its most extreme, satire of this kind can be seen, for example, in the Swiftian tactics of Ellis’ novel, profoundly disturbing in its accumulation of commodities and consumers, anti-aging eye balm and honey almond body scrub, Soprani jackets, Ralph Lauren shirts and “a tie from Agnes B. still covered with flecks of someone’s blood.” However ... given that I’ve just come across a Neutrogena/Nivea advertising feature on Amazon called “So you’d like to ... have the American Psycho facial treatment,” one has to wonder yet again about...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue