M. Gigi Durham

Meenakshi Gigi Durham is an associate professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. For more than a decade, she has been conducting research on adolescent girls and the media.

Katharine Mieszkowski of Salon.com interviewed Durham about her new book, The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What You Can Do About It.

The first exchange from the Q & A:

Why is grown-up sexuality being marketed to younger and younger girls?

I don't think that anybody can pinpoint the single reason, but I think there are a number of trends that can give us some clues about it. The '90s were prosperous. In the mid-'90s there was a lot of disposable income floating around and tweens became a very important niche market for a number of industries. One research firm Euromonitor posits tweens spending $170 billion in 2006. So, this is a wealthy little group of people.

Marketers realized they could create cradle-to-grave consumers by marketing products to kids very early. Then, they would develop brand loyalties, and consumer practices that they would sustain throughout their lifetimes. It was very profitable to start marketing these products to very young kids.

Also, as women have made tremendous gains politically and in the workforce, grown women are moving away from this traditional model of femininity where women are supposed to be docile and passive. And little girls still conform to that very traditional ideal of femininity. So I think that increasing attention is being focused on little girls as embodying ideal femininity.

Read the entire interview.

The Page 99 Test: The Lolita Effect.

--Marshal Zeringue

Zoë Ferraris

Zoë Ferraris moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. She lived in a conservative Muslim community with her then-husband and his family, a group of Saudi-Palestinians. In 2006, she completed her MFA in Fiction at Columbia University. Her debut novel, Finding Nouf (published as Night of the Mi'raj in the UK) won the First Prize for mystery fiction at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and is now being published in fifteen countries.

From a Q & A at her website:

First of all, I think people would like to know your connection to Saudi Arabia, so they don’t think you’re making this all up.

Well, actually, I made it up. But there’s also a lot of real Saudi Arabia in the book.

When I was nineteen, I got married to a Saudi-Palestinian Bedouin. We met in San Francisco, and I fell completely in love with him. He was hilarious and brilliant and over-the-top zany. He had come to America to study English. He told his parents that once he was fluent, he would go back to Jeddah. So he never became fluent. Learning English – actually, he called it “Languish” – was just going to have to take forever.

We got married and had a daughter. The day she was born, he decided that we had to visit his family in Jeddah. Just a short visit, you know, to show off his new wife and kid. We wound up staying for almost a year. It turns out that you can’t just visit for a week or two. You have to stay until his mother stops having heart episodes every time you go to the airport.

So you didn’t get along with your mother-in-law?

Not after... [read on]

Read an excerpt from Finding Nouf, and learn more about the book and author at Zoë Ferraris' website.

The Page 69 Test: Finding Nouf.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carrie Vaughn

Carrie Vaughn is the author of four novels about a werewolf named Kitty.

From a Q & A at sffworld.com:

Q: For the benefit of those of us new to your work, without giving too much away, give us a taste of the story that is KITTY AND THE MIDNIGHT HOUR and its sequel.

Carrie Vaughn: Here's my one-sentence tagline for the book: Kitty is a werewolf who starts a talk radio advice show about the supernatural. I get a lot of raised eyebrows with that description. The stories themselves are about Kitty coming to terms with being a werewolf, learning to stand up for herself, and dealing with social and political dynamics surrounding the various supernatural and non-supernatural elements in her life. In the second book, the stage gets bigger--she's the country's first werewolf celebrity and has to deal with that as well.

Q: Have you always had an interest in the paranormal?

Carrie Vaughn: [read on]

Learn more about the author and her work at Carrie Vaughn's website and journal.

The Page 99 Test: Kitty and the Silver Bullet.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kerry Cohen

Kerry Cohen received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon and an MA in counseling psychology from Pacific University. A practicing psychotherapist and the author of the young adult novel Easy, her new book is Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity.

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

Q: What is a loose girl?

A: A loose girl is a girl who has been badly emotionally hurt and attempts to ease that hurt through male attention and sexual behavior. She yearns to feel worthwhile, which she usually defines as worth loving. She is not wantonly or gratuitously trying to get sexual attention. She doesn’t simply “want it.”

Q: What sparked your intense need for attention, and why do you think sex seemed like the way to fulfill it?

A: It began with not getting enough attention at home, a circumstance that stemmed from my parents’ unique personalities and limitations, and also from broader factors like my parents’ divorce and my mother’s moving to the Philippines to pursue her career. These events coincided with my sexual awakening—I was 11 and 12—so I was keenly tuned in to what seemed to make me feel better emotionally. Sex and male attention were right there. They came after me, really. It would have taken more effort to resist than to give in and feel for awhile like I was loveable.

Q: At what point did you realize that you had a different relationship with male attention than other women did?

A: [read on]

Visit Kerry Cohen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jill Bialosky

Jill Bialosky's collections of poems are Subterranean (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001) and The End of Desire (1997). Bialosky is also the author of the novel House Under Snow (2002) and The Life Room (2007) and co-editor, with Helen Schulman, of the anthology Wanting A Child (1998).

Her third collection of poems, Intruder, is due out in October.

From a Q & A at her website:

Q: The Life Room opens with an epigraph from Anna Karenina, and the careful reader of your novel will find many allusions to Tolstoy's classic throughout. Could you discuss The Life Room's relationship to Anna Karenina the novel, and Eleanor's relationship to Anna Karenina the character?

A: When I was a young reader first embarking on a literary education the models in literature for women protagonists who had to struggle between passion and domestic responsibility were Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Edna Pontellier, and Lily Bart, among others. Passion was terminal; female protagonists swept up in love affairs ended up killing themselves. The message was that abundance of feeling led to tragedy. If women in novels were not killed off by their creator, they struggled like Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady to define themselves against erotic desire and the confines of marriage. I wanted to create a contemporary hero who does not have to die for her passions. We live in a time where adultery seems commonplace, certainly not a crime that would allow a woman to lose her social standing, her children. And yet, internally what are the risks? Are they any less? In The Life Room I set out to create a character that struggles with her sense of morality but ultimately does not have to relinquish her sense of self.

Tolstoy's masterpiece was in the back of my mind when I embarked on writing The Life Room. At the onset of the novel Eleanor Cahn has been invited to attend a conference and present a paper she's written on Anna Karenina. Before she goes to Paris her life is one way. Once in Paris, among other things, she reconnects with an old love from her past and her worldview is suddenly altered. She discovers that her assumptions about Anna Karenina have been false. Now she sees Anna's plight through a different light. I'm interested in the conceit of how perceptions of a work of art change depending on the reader or viewer's perspective. In Anna Karenina Tolstoy explored spiritual questions. Similarly, when Eleanor's domestic life as a wife and mother is jeopardized, she finds herself in a spiritual crisis. As far as other similarities between the two novels, I can't claim much. Tolstoy's novel is a tragic epic. The Life Room is an interior exploration of selfhood.

Read the entire Q & A.

Visit Jill Bialosky's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Maraniss

David Maraniss' new book is Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World.

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

Q. What is especially compelling about the 1960 Summer Olympics?

A. What attracted me to Rome, what made it special in my mind, was the uncommon combination of legendary athletes, the tension of the cold war, the beauty of the setting, and the issues that arose during the 18 days of competition. With the entire world on the same stage at the same time, I saw the opportunity to weave the drama on the playing fields with the political and cultural issues that were emerging then.

Q. You say in the book that the 1960 Summer Olympics marked the passing of one era and the dawning of another. What do you mean by that?

A. In so many ways, the 1960 Olympics marked a passing of one era and the birth of another. Television, money and doping were bursting onto the scene, changing everything they touched. Old-school notions of amateurism, created by and for upper-class sportsmen, were being challenged as never before. New countries were being born in Africa and Asia, blacks and women were pushing for equal rights. For better and worse, one could see the modern world as we know it today coming into view.

Read the full Q & A.

Visit David Maraniss' website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michelle Gagnon

Michelle Gagnon's debut thriller The Tunnels was published in the United States and Australia, and was an IMBA bestseller. Described as "Silence of the Lambs meets The Wicker Man," the story involves a series of ritualized murders in the abandoned tunnel system beneath a university.

The following book in the series, Boneyard, depicts a cat and mouse game between dueling serial killers in the Berkshires.

From a Q & A at Gagnon's website:

Q: How did you come up with the title Boneyard?

A: While researching serial killers, I read a few books on Ted Bundy (if you ever want to catch some strange looks, spend an hour in the OB's office eight months pregnant, highlighting passages of a book on raising serial killers. The receptionist quickly learned to move me to the front of the line so I wouldn't disturb the other expectant mothers). One of the books referenced a nickname given to the location where they found the remains of Bundy's earliest victims; they called it a "boneyard." The minute I saw that I thought, Dang, that's a great title.

Q: Why serial killers?

A: Now that I've written two books centered on serial killers, I guess I do seem a little obsessed! I think that when it comes down to it, crimes of passion or for money are sadly things that most people can relate to. We've all experienced those intense emotions, or have been in a difficult situation, so that sort of homicide makes sense to us (though it's obviously still tragic). But for someone to snatch a total stranger, torture and then kill them—that's [read on].

Visit Michelle Gagnon's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Tunnels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Martin Clark

Martin Clark’s first novel, The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Stephen Crane First Fiction Award. His second novel, Plain Heathen Mischief, prompted The Charlotte Observer to call him “a rising star in American Letters.”

From a Q & A about his new novel, The Legal Limit:

Q: Can you tell us a little about the title of this book? It seems “The Legal Limit” has multiple meanings here?

A: Several friends and early readers have noted that this title is not as rococo or obviously colorful as my prior choices—The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living and Plain Heathen Mischief—and while it isn’t quite as flashy, I do think it provides a very good three-word summary of the book’s bigger themes. Without giving away too much, it’s fair to say the story deals with the rift that sometimes occurs between hidebound, black-letter law and simple justice. It touches on the fact that the court system is ill equipped to handle certain difficult situations, and it asks readers to make a fundamental judgment about how we want our courts and juries to decide issues that dramatically affect peoples’ lives. On another level, the title references .08, the legal limit for DUI in Virginia, and the resolution of a borderline drunk driving case is a fairly important part of the novel.

Read the entire Q & A.

Visit Martin Clark’s website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rick Shenkman

Rick Shenkman is the editor and founder of George Mason University's History News Network, and author of the recently released Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter. From a Q & A with the author at U.S. News and World Report:

What made you first ask the question, "Just how stupid are we?"

There's been no issue more important in the last generation than 9/11 and the Iraq war, and Americans didn't understand basic facts about it. I found that very disturbing, and I wanted to explain how to account for that and then how to have an intelligent conversation about this. It's a very sensitive subject. I want us to be able to sit down, calmly review the evidence, and one, like alcoholics, admit we have a problem; and, two, try to figure out how we remedy that problem.

What evidence most concerned you?

Even after the 9/11 Commission, a majority of Americans believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq even after the Commission said there weren't. Only a third of Americans understood that much of the rest of the world opposed our invasion. Another third thought the rest of the world was cheering our invasion, and a third thought the rest of the world was neutral. If you're going to get that much wrong about the most important issue facing us, it's hard to have much confidence in our democracy.

Read the complete Q & A.

The Page 99 Test: Just How Stupid Are We?.

--Marshal Zeringue

Duane Swierczynski

Last year, Duane Swierczynski, author of The Blonde as well as "other books about crime and vice and exploding heads," interviewed Jamie Malanowski, author of The Coup.

Turnabout being fair play and all that, Malanowski has now interviewed Swierczynski about his latest book, Severance Package.

The introduction and first exchange:

Fans of crime novels who don’t know the name Duane Swierczynski would do well to make the acquaintance. Duane has just published his latest novel, Severance Package, a funny and exciting tale of mayhem that updates the Ten Little Indians idea, subtracting some of the whodunit, adding several vats of plasma, and, most interestingly, adding in lots of anxieties about modern office culture. It was a fun read, perfect for the pool, a tad less perfect for your cubicle, and I'm delighted to recommend it. Duane took some questions from us last week.

PLAYBOY: You've written an excellent crime novel (The Wheelman) and an excellent, uh, mad scientist mass murderer novel (The Blonde), both of which took place on the scenic beaches and mountains of Philadelphia. Severance Package also takes place in Philly, but almost entirely within the confines of a single office building. Where did you get the idea for this novel? Is there a part for Steve Carrell?

DUANE: You’ve just pinpointed why I love setting novels in Philly—all of the beaches and mountains! Actually, this bastard child has many fathers. One was the Valerie Plame case. I wondered what it would be like to work for a company that was a front for a spy ring… and you had no idea. (Because that would be me. Totally.) Also, I’ve had the unfortunately experience of having to fire someone, and it struck me how much it was like a professional hit—you pick the time, the place, the method, then BLAM. A person’s life is changed forever. So I thought, gee, what if this whole thing were a bit more literal? And… okay, I admit it. It’s a naked plea for Steve Carrell’s attention. (Steve. Call me.)

Read the entire Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue