Zoë Sharp

Zoë Sharp, author of Second Shot, was recently questioned by the committee of writers at Elaine Flinn's Evil E.

Here's her exchange with Jason Starr:

Jason Starr: How do you get such a great sense of America in your writing?

Publishers often throw around the ambiguous term ‘the big book’. What do you consider a ‘big book’?

Sharp: Wow, I take it as a big compliment that you think I’ve got a sense of America in my books, Jason. Thanks you! We’ve spent a lot of time in America over the past seventeen years - I think the tour last September was our 35th visit. And we’ve been to some fairly off-the-map areas, which gives you a real feel for different places. I think being a photographer helps. I do a lot of location shoots for the magazines I work for, which I have to find very quickly qonce we arrive in a particular place, so I’m used to driving around looking out for interesting backgrounds. Plus I get bored quickly if I have to read great swathes of description, so I try not to write it. I’m always aiming to capture a place or a person in as few words as possible. A snapshot rather than a portfolio.

‘Big book’ is an interesting concept, isn’t it? I think it’s something that captures the spirit of the moment. I have been having a conversation similar to this with Ali Karim recently, and we kicked around the idea that a breakout book is something that really plugs into a zeitgeist. And we all know how long it takes to plan and write a book, and then for it to go through the production process, there really is a huge amount of luck involved in striking just the right note at the right time when it finally hits the shelves. I would also take a guess and say it usually falls outside a series, a more weighty, character-based novel, and has a theme that can be summed up in a few words rather than half a page. A real ‘high-concept’ idea, to borrow a phrase from the movie industry. Does that sound about right? If you find out the answer, can you let me know?

Read the full Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kyle Mills

Kyle Mills is the author, most recently, of Darkness Falls, which deals with an ecoterrorist trying to destroy the world's oil supply.

From his Q & A with Powells.com:

Share an interesting experience you've had with one of your readers.

A little background: I didn't research my first novel as well as I should have, because after hearing about how hard it is to get published, I didn't think anyone would ever read it.

One day, I received a letter from a guy who said he hoped I wouldn't be mad and then went on to list my mistakes page by page — missing only one obscure error relating to the construction of crack pipes. Not only was I not mad, I immediately printed off a copy of the book I was working on and mailed it to him with a note saying, "See what you can do with this one."

Read the full Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rupert Thomson

Rupert Thomson is the author of eight novels, among them The Five Gates of Hell (1991), The Insult (1996) and Divided Kingdom (2005). His latest novel, Death of a Murderer, has been shortlisted for the 2007 Costa Novel Award.

Anna Metcalfe of the Financial Times asked him a few questions.

Two exchanges from the interview:

What is the last thing you read that made you laugh out loud?

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, the greatest office novel ever.

* * *

Which literary character most resembles you?

It’s arrogant, but the cat in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.

Read the full Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Oliver Sacks

Author and neurologist Oliver Sacks was interviewed for the The Bat Segundo Show, a literary podcast featuring interviews with today's contemporary writers.

Here are some of the subjects covered and a brief transcript from the interview:

Subjects Discussed: Musicophilia, emotional responses in patients with dementia and Tourette’s, an amazing musical rendition from Alzheimer’s patient Woody Geist played by Dr. Sacks on his CD player, the relationship between music and the auditory cortex, the memory of performance, responding to rhythm, the overpotent stimulant qualities of music, earworms, music as “advertisements for toothpaste,” being bombarded with tunes in interior environments, the dangers of iPods, neurological speculation upon having a “soundtrack to one’s life,” musical hallucinations vs. brainworms, musical perception and “intercranial jukeboxes,” musical dreams and the hypnopompic state, the dangers of being oversaturated with sounds, pattern recognition, blind children and absolute pitch, famous blind musicians, septo-optic dysplasia, amnesia and the case of Clive Wearing, Chomsky and speculation upon a hypothetical innate musical theory, congenital amusia and those who sing out-of-tune, associating a song with a sound, and recent developments in melodic intonation therapy and the right hemisphere.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Really, what’s the difference between, for example, this innate idea of music and the kind of cognition in Clive’s head?

Sacks: Say that again.

Correspondent: I’m sorry. The difference between the innate rules of music versus the cognitive processes that cause him to sing and perform quite well. What causes him to perform as well as he does?

Sacks: It is memory. It’s procedural memory. The memory of how to do things. And that — I don’t know if one needs to bring Chomsky into this.

Correspondent: You mentioned “anticipation is not possible with music from a very different culture or tradition.” So I didn’t know if you were making a comparison to Chomsky with this kind of proviso of…

Sacks: Listen, I think this Chomsky thing is a red herring. And I don’t know how to answer it properly.

Correspondent: Okay, no problem. We’ll…

Sacks: So let’s — and I think the business of Chomsky and implicit rules doesn’t have anything obvious to do with Clive’s memory.

Correspondent: Okay.

Sacks: You know, otherwise we will get into a knot from which we cannot explicate ourselves.

Listen to the full interview.

Learn more about Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.

--Marshal Zeringue

Diana Abu-Jaber

Diana Abu-Jaber is the author of Crescent, which was awarded the 2004 PEN Center USA Award for Literary Fiction and the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award and was named one of the twenty best novels of 2003 by The Christian Science Monitor, and Arabian Jazz, which won the 1994 Oregon Book Award and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Her most recent novel is Origin.

Luan Gaines interviewed Abu-Jaber for Curled Up With A Good Book. Two exchanges from their Q & A:

Luan Gaines: What was your inspiration for Origin?

Diana Abu-Jaber: I woke up one morning, quite literally, with this woman’s voice in my head. I knew that she was someone without parents and that she believed she had this mystical connection to the animal world. It all grew out of that voice and that myth of origins.

* * *
What would you like readers to take away from Origin?

Probably my first aim is always to entertain, but a close second is that I try to evoke a sense of meaningful connection to and insight into another person’s experience. I love Forster’s dictum to “only connect.” And finally, I also have some thematic strains running through this story about conservation of the earth’s wild places and animals.

Read the full interview.

The Page 99 Test: Origin.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carolyn Hart

Carolyn Hart is a mystery writer who has won multiple Agatha Awards.

Her books include the popular "Death on Demand" mystery series, the "Henrie O" mystery series, and Letter from Home.

Part of an exchange from Hart's interview with Publishers Weekly:

PW: When you wrote your first Death on Demand novel, why did you have your amateur sleuth, Annie Darling, own a mystery bookstore?

CH: That goes back to the whole heart of what happened to me as a writer. When Death on Demand came out [in 1987], it was my 15th published book and I was really invisible as a writer. I’d sell a mystery here and there, and it would be published and immediately disappear into the black holes of publishing. I think New York at that time felt that mysteries were the province of the dead English ladies and hard-boiled American private eyes. So I got to the point that I thought, This is really stupid. I am going to write one more book, and this time I am not going to give any thought to the market. I’m not going to care about the fact that nobody seems to like mysteries. By setting it in a mystery bookstore, I can, through my protagonist, celebrate the mysteries I love, both present and past.

Read the full interview.

The 18th "Death on Demand" mystery is due out in Spring 2008.

Read more about the author and her books at Carolyn Hart's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pat MacEnulty

Pat MacEnulty is the author of four books as well as numerous short stories, essays, poems and plays. She is also a teacher, workshop leader, writing coach and freelance editor.

Her latest novel is From May To December.

From a Q & A at her publisher's website:

What do you consider to be the most important moment in literary history?

When Virginia met Leonard Woolf.

What is your favourite quotation?

In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.

Which writer (living or dead) would you most like to have dinner with?

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. We could have cocaine for dinner.

What book are you reading at the moment?

Scaramouche.

Who is your favourite character (from a book)?

Huck Finn.

Read the full Q & A.

Read another interview at Pat MacEnulty's website.

The Page 99 Test: From May To December.

--Marshal Zeringue

J.T. Ellison

In September 2006 Julia Buckley interviewed J.T. Ellison, author of All the Pretty Girls.

One exchange from their Q & A:

Why do you like mysteries? Who is your biggest mystery influence?

When I started reading mysteries, I was devouring authors like Sandra Brown, Tami Hoag and Patricia Cornwell. I bought every James Patterson book. As I grew as a reader, I discovered some amazing voices, people like John Sandford, Lee Child, John Connolly, Michael Connelly, Robert Crais. I aspired to write like Sandford and Connolly, and hope that I achieve that goal. I adore some of the new authors out there. Robert Fate and Cornelia Read have been my two favorite wonderful discoveries this year, and I adore Tasha Alexander and Alex Sokoloff. There’s just a bunch of great new fiction out there. I wish I had more time to read so I could rejoice in the written word of others more.

I think I’m drawn to mysteries because the authors right the wrongs, the black hats lose (or the story portrays black hats with such amenable action that we root for them). I like to feel swept away, breathless, uncertain what might happen next. I’m always so disappointed when I figure out “who done it.” I’m not as well read as a lot of people, so I still can get fooled pretty easily. Kudos to the authors who do that for me; you’re guaranteed sales for life.

Read the full interview.

The Page 69 Test: All the Pretty Girls.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Langan

Nicholas Kaufmann interviewed Sarah Langan for Fear Zone.

Their opening exchange:

Both your novels deal a lot with the economic issues of living in a small, Northeastern town. In The Keeper, Bedford is in an economic depression because the old paper mill, which was the main employer in town, closed. In The Missing, Corpus Christi's comfortable economic bubble is on the verge of bursting. What attracts you as a writer to these kinds of settings? They're definitely different from a lot of what we see in modern horror novels, where economic issues are rarely mentioned, let alone allowed to play a role.

I've always liked epic novels drawn on wide canvases. The models for those kinds of books, for me at least, were written by Brits. Dickens, Waugh, Maugham, Austin, Forster, etc. These guys lived in time when you could wind-up in debtor's prison, and so their characters were threatened by that possibility just as much as the authors. Maybe they were incensed by the society in which they lived, because they'd been brutalized by it. Dickens worked ten hour days in a boot factory by the age of twelve. Maugham and Forster were gay, and in their early twenties witnessed the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for sodomy. Austin never married, and as a consequence was never safe from the specter of poverty. Waugh, well, I think he was just mean and self-righteous. But I still love him. Anyway, they wrote big stories because they wanted to change the world, or at least show its inequities, so that others might become incensed, too.

The modern American inheritors of that tradition include Richard Russo, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, Russell Banks, Joyce Carol Oates, Don DeLillo, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, and Dorothy Allison. But even while the gap between the middle class and the rich widens into a chasm, the epic has gone out of style. It's been replaced by more nuanced, intimate stories, and that's a real shame.

The reasons are myriad: Epics are harder to write. They take more time, and involve researching not just a culture, but several characters' perspectives. Also, their size daunts readers, who might not have the time or back muscles to lug a 1,000-page opus. More insidiously, I think our culture has gotten more narcissistic. It's more fun to write about hot chicks in New York drinking cosmos, because they enrich our fantasy lives. I don't contest the skill of these novels, but put in a different context: What if Forster had written a tell-all memoir about growing up gay at Cambridge, instead of that haunting cave scene in A Passage to India? What if Austin's heroines had spent the length of their novels learning to dress better and lose weight? Sure, it would be inspiring to every body out there who needs to shed a few, and make their man treat them right, but it also would have been a grave loss. A corruption of the reader and author both. Because there's a whole big world out there, once you get your head out of your navel.

Epics can change your life. They can keep you up reading long past midnight. They can bring you to tears and laughter, both. They invite you to sit down a long while, and they tell you every detail, so that when the payoff comes, it really pays off. We felt sorry for the criminals in Capote's In Cold Blood, and as a consequence questioned the death penalty, even for cold-blooded murderers. We changed an industry because of Sinclair. Dickens advocated social reform. Austin let us know that perhaps old maids chose poverty over a marriage without love. That kind of bravery deserves compassion, not pity. Tom Wolfe made us laugh, and then weep, at the glittering, hollow world of Sherman McCoy.

Anyway, I think what drives me to write about class issues is that they're present. Money makes the world go 'round. I'm at a loss as to why more authors don't spin their tales around class issues. More and more, they're relegated to science fiction and satire, meanwhile consumerism replaces churches, and a third of our population has no health care. So, I guess my long-winded answer is, class issues are inextricably linked to an honest reflection of any world I might create. They're life, warts and all.

Read the full Q & A.

The Page 69 Test: The Keeper.

My Book, The Movie: The Missing.

--Marshal Zeringue

J. Kingston Pierce

Novelist Declan Burke interviewed J. Kingston Pierce, editor of the indispensable crime fiction website The Rap Sheet and author of a highly anticipated novel-in-progress.

Their opening exchange:

What crime novel would you most like to have written?

Is there any self-respecting author or enthusiastic reader who could offer just one title? It’d be like asking me to choose the single book I would take with me to a deserted island. Hell, I’d drown myself in the ocean before I ever reached that frickin’ island, if I knew I was going to be stuck there with just one book to read for the rest of my foreseeable days. But back to your actual question: what book I’d like to have penned. It would be a toss-up between Ross Macdonald’s THE CHILL (1964), Peter Lovesey’s WAXWORK (1978), Raymond Chandler’s THE LONG GOODBYE (1953), Rennie Airth’s RIVER OF DARKNESS (1999), and maybe Elmore Leonard’s LABRAVA (1983). Oh, and I would go to my grave a happy man, indeed, if I could ever produce something even remotely as brilliantly disturbing as Robert Wilson’s A SMALL TOWN IN LISBON (1999).

Read the full interview.

--Marshal Zeringue