Giancarlo De Cataldo

For The Rap Sheet, “Michael Gregorio” (the joint pseudonym used by husband and wife Michael G. Jacob and Daniela De Gregorio) interviewed Giancarlo De Cataldo, who "is many things, most notably a criminal court judge who works in Rome and ... the author of several novels that have topped the Italian bestseller lists" and the editor of Crimini, an anthology of short Italian crime stories.

Part of the interview:

MG: Which British or American thriller writers do you admire? And which of their books would you like to have written?

GDC: I admire a lot of people. The classic Conan Doyle, the contemporary Ellroy, and many other “old masters” such as [Dashiell] Hammett, [Raymond] Chandler, Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich, Lawrence Block. I admire James Lee Burke, Ed McBain, Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith, Elmore Leonard (who taught me how to thread “cool” elements into a dark story), the great Derek Raymond, David Peace (his Red Riding Quartet is absolutely terrific!), Robert Wilson (A Small Death in Lisbon and The Blind Man of Seville). I am a very keen reader, you know! And recently I have discovered Ian Rankin. He and I share a sense of atmosphere, I think. I recently read a novel of his (The Naming of the Dead) which has an amazing political and social plot, and takes place during the G8 meeting in Scotland in 2005. We have the same “take” on the mob underworld and their shady connections with the secret services and the corrupt side of power politics. That’s what I mean when I speak about great contemporary crime writing. You can find something similar in Italy in Massimo Carlotto’s books. And I vote for Inspector John Rebus as one of the most powerful fictional characters of the last 30 years!

MG: Which Italian crime story should every British or American reader be sure to read?

GDC: Apart from the Italian classics--Gadda’s Il pasticciaccio and Sciascia’s works--I strongly recommend Massimo Carlotto (Arrivederci amore ciao, Il corriere colombiano, Nessuna cortesia all’uscita), Carlo Lucarelli’s trilogy featuring Dr. De Luca of the Fascist Police, and, of course, Andrea Camilleri, regardless of your contrary opinion, Michael!

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

William Conescu

William Conescu is the author of Being Written.

From Conescu's Author Snapshot at January Magazine:

What question do you get asked about your writing most often?

“Was it difficult writing in the second person?”

Being Written alternates between third person chapters that show the perspectives of characters who aren’t aware they’re in a novel and second person chapters that show Daniel’s perception of being written into the book.

Was it difficult writing in the second person?

No, it was a lot of fun. The second person can give a sense of a character talking to himself, and it can work well for a character who has an unusual mindset or is in a strange situation. It was difficult writing about Daniel before it occurred to me to try the second person. Originally, I wrote his sections in the third person, but something was missing. Using the second person allowed me distinguish Daniel from the other characters and helped me show his unique perspective on how the universe works.

Read the complete snapshot.

Browse inside Being Written, and learn more about the book and author at William Conescu's website.

William Conescu was born in New York and raised in New Orleans. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned an MFA in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University. His short stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, Green Mountains Review, and other publications. Being Written is his first novel.

The Page 99 Test: Being Written.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kirsten Menger-Anderson

From an interview at Lit Scribbler with Kirsten Menger-Anderson, author of Doctor Olaf van Schuler’s Brain:

This is such a unique conceit for a story collection. How did it come about and evolve?

The book began as a single story, “Reading Grandpa’s Head.” I had been reading about phrenology; I was fascinated by the belief that we could determine personality from the shape of our heads alone. That got the whole thing going. I started to read medical histories, particularly the work of Jan Bondeson (A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities), and I kept getting excited by the medicine of by-gone eras. I wrote piece after piece. All set in different time periods, all concerning different medical techniques. The idea of the family came later, though once that was in place, it helped guide me to new times and new sciences.

The book is peopled with characters who largely don’t understand their own impulses—which rings very true to me. And the book’s succession of doctors and healers, espousing theories that to us seem crack-pot, is the perfect vehicle for that theme. Because although the science has improved, we humans are every bit the mystery we’ve always been.

We are mysterious creatures. We’re still struggling to understand how we work. When I wrote the pieces, I was thinking about truth—or accepted truth—and how that is defined by our times and our technologies. We might find Dr. Jan Steenwycks’s efforts to determine a patient truly dead (garlic, probes, etc) amusing, but we still struggle with that mystery today. I was reading an article about a new heart transplant procedure for infants. To preserve the heart, which can be damaged if left too long in a corpse, the surgeons were removing the transplant organ from dead infants before the time proscribed by the 2005 “dead donor rule” (which suggests that doctors wait between 2-5 minutes before declaring death). Note the year: 2005. And we’re still debating.

Read the complete interview.

Read an excerpt from Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain, and learn more about the author and her work at Kirsten Menger-Anderson's website and the "Regarding Dr. Olaf" blog.

The Page 69 Test: Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wally Lamb

Wally Lamb’s third and latest novel is The Hour I First Believed. From his Q & A with Kevin Howell for Publishers Weekly:

PW: Tell us about Oprah choosing your first two novels for her book club.

WL: I’ll tell ya, she called me up in December 1996 but I’ll always be honored that she called me four years earlier. One day in 1992 my son handed me the phone and a woman said, “This is Oprah Winfrey calling. You owe me two nights sleep because I couldn’t put your book down.” She was very funny and told me that she liked to call and thank authors when she read a book she liked. This was a big deal for me because after my first book, She’s Come Undone, was published, I used to send my kids to the mall and offer 25 cents to the first one who could find my book on the shelf. It was dismaying when 25 minutes later, they’d come out saying, “We can’t find it, but can we still get the 25 cents?”

Years later, I picked up the phone again and Oprah told me that she’d chosen She’s Come Undone as the fourth book for her Book Club. She said that if the popularity of her Book Club keeps going the way its been going, I needed to call my publisher that night—a Friday, after hours— so they could start printing more copies. I got hold of them and on Saturday morning they contacted their paper supplier and started printing. Oprah announced the selection the following week if memory serves. It was a wild rollercoaster ride.

In the summer of 1998, I Know This Much is True was about to be released and I was doing an interview in a hotel room. Oprah called and said, “Guess what? You’re going to be our Summer Book Club Pick.” I knew from the first time that it needed to be a well-kept secret before she announced it so I said, “Oh, that’s nice, ma’am. Can I call you back in 15 minutes after I finish this interview?” She laughed and said she’d call me back in 20 minutes. I finished the interview and walked the reporter to the elevator, and returned to find that I'd locked myself out of room. I raced downstairs to get another key and sat by the telephone waiting for her to call back, which she did about 45 minutes to an hour later. I couldn’t believe that lightning had struck twice.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Leslie T. Chang

From the BookBrowse Q & A with Leslie T. Chang, author of Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China:

There's been a lot written in recent years on the sweatshop conditions inside Chinese factories. Yet in Factory Girls, you describe a job on the assembly line in terms of adventure, opportunity, even liberation. Doesn't this contradict the reality of factory life?

Certainly conditions in the factories are tough. Most of the young women I got to know while researching this book worked thirteen hours a day, seven days a week when they first started out. Their wages were often late; many had no idea how much they would be paid from month to month, because the factory charged fees for all sorts of things over which they had no control. But you have to remember that the world looks very different when you're coming from a Chinese farming village. What we think of as miserable living conditions—bad food, tedious labor, living twelve or fifteen to a room—are a given to these workers. Their response is usually not to complain or protest, as a typical American might, but to look for any slight advantage that would lead to an improvement in their situations. I think that's the reason you see a lot less protest in these factories than you might expect. These workers are constantly calculating what is in their own best interest. Usually they decide that talking a boss into giving them a raise or jumping to a different job is a better option than challenging the factory directly.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rachel Resnick

From a Q & A with Rachel Resnick, author of Love Junkie:

How do you know if you’re a love junkie?

You can tell if you’re a love junkie if you meet someone new, and instead of a spark, you get the whole meteor shower. It’s like you’re shooting up that skin-tingling, electric feeling of love, right into your heart. And “love” wakes you up. Now this could maybe be a sign of chemistry between two people—if you’re healthy. But love junkies aren’t healthy. You’re a love junkie if you have a core of neediness and dependency that’s waiting to grasp onto someone. You want someone to rescue you, take care of you—the way your parents should have (and probably didn’t). You have a big gaping hole that the wind howls through, and that distorts our perceptions of the world and especially of the destructive lovers we choose.

For years I thought I was unlucky in love. I also thought I was extra-passionate. I didn’t realize I was using these super-intense relationships to avoid unresolved pain, anger and grief from my past. Some people have to get hit upside the head to wake up. I am one of those people. One thing that woke me up was a friend’s response. I called to complain about another relationship ending after months of agonizing e-mailing, clinging, hanging-on, fighting and apologizing. I told her, half-joking, “Maybe there’s something wrong with me.” I expected her to say, Don’t be silly. You’re great. He wasn’t the right guy. Instead she said bluntly: “Maybe there is something wrong with you.” I was mad as hell, but I couldn’t get her words out of my head. Those words eventually prompted me to go to my first twelve-step meeting for people who have addictive problems with love, sex, relationships and fantasy.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sheila Connolly

From Julia Buckley's interview with Sheila Connolly, author of One Bad Apple:

Your book One Bad Apple, [now out] from Berkley Prime Crime. In it a woman takes on a “crumbling colonial house and an orchard,” which become the backdrop of the mystery. Is the setting based on personal experience?

In more ways than one. My husband and I spent fifteen years working on an abused Victorian, and I don’t think there was any part of the house that we didn’t repair or restore. Our current Victorian is less needy, but there’s always something going wrong. I’ve never worked on a colonial, but the house in One Bad Apple is very real-—it was built by my seventh great-grandfather, in western Massachusetts, and I’ve been able to stay there more than once. The house remained in the family for over two hundred years, and somehow that suggested to me a way to link a sense of belonging in a community, and the changes that any community must make if it’s going to survive.

My brother owned an orchard for years, until he and his wife both developed back problems from the endless pruning. Do you discuss some of the realities of orchard life in One Bad Apple?

Absolutely. Apples trees require a lot of work. In fact, in the second book of the series, Rotten to the Core (July 2009), I tackle the question of organic purity vs. chemical spraying. Consumers want perfect, large, shiny apples, but you don’t get that in nature.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicholas Drayson

From the BookBrowse Q & A with Nicholas Drayson about his novel, A Guide to the Birds of East Africa:

Would you describe yourself as a birder?

I'd describe myself as more of a naturalist—I like nature as a whole and in all its parts. I get just as much pleasure in watching a wasp hunting for spiders, a family of baboons, or the colors of the New England fall as I do in seeing a bird that I have never encountered before. The great thing about birds, though, is that they are easy to see and study. There are lots of them, they can be found nearly everywhere, most of them fly around happily in the daylight, and they make such great noises.

What made you decide to write this book?

Ten years ago I finished my Ph.D. and married the world's most beautiful Antarctic lexicographer, Bernadette Hince. Bernadette had just accepted a job as publications editor in an international agroforestry research center in Kenya, and we moved from Australia to Nairobi. I had done a lot of nature writing in Australia but, having no job and no work permit in Kenya, I decided to bite the literary bullet and write a novel. This situation also allowed me to spend a lot of time looking at Kenya's spectacular wildlife—including its birds. When we left Kenya a year and a half later, I took with me a manuscript (Confessing a Murder, Norton, 2002) and experiences that I knew would one day turn into another book.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Hollander

John Hollander is Sterling Professor of English Emeritus at Yale University. His books include A Draft of Light: Poems (2008) and Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse (2001).

From Paul Devlin's 2003 with Hollander in the St. John's University Humanities Review:

Paul Devlin: I know that artistic creation is never a mechanical process, but I was just wondering about when writing a poem, do you first have the idea for the "philosophical" content of the poem, and then fit the content into a verse form, or do you ever want to experiment with a verse form, and find ideas to fill it?

John Hollander: I’m not sure what " ‘philosophical’ content" might be; in any case, there are scores of things that you might say a poem is "about"—just for a start: an old story, a new one, something heard, something seen, something realized . . .and in all of these cases, some meaning to be discovered; an in all these cases, the "story" could be of persons, places, things—and the things themselves could be natural or crafted objects, or even structures or pieces of language itself . . . etc. Thinking about any of these could constitute the "start" or "origin" of a poem, often long before it begins to take shape. But that shape (size, scale, relation of sub-units to whole, aspects of its language, diction, syntax, relation of both of these to linear structure, the linear and strophic structures themselves—whether in or adapting a recognizable "verse form" or evolving a new one) can be among the "somethings" that a poem starts with. If I am in the midst of a sequence of poems with some evident relation to each other, with a formal or rhetorical bond among them, I may know what shape and what size the next one will be—perhaps just the way you know, in a stanzaic poem, something about he size and shape of each successive stanza. Sometimes the desire to do something with a particular size or shape may precede other points of departure. But in all cases, the poetic nature of what is finally done depends on a mutual interpretation of the "form" with what you call the "content" (a distinction often made, but which I don’t like to use).

Read the complete Q & A.

Read about Hollander's five best milestones among poetry anthologies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gillian Slovo

Gillian Slovo is the daughter of anti-apartheid campaigners Ruth First and Joe Slovo – her mother was murdered in 1982. Slovo’s novel Red Dust, a courtroom drama that explores the meanings and effects of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was made into a film directed by Tom Hooper and starring Hilary Swank and Chiwetel Ejiofor. A later novel, Ice Road, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

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

What music helps you write?

During Ice Road, I listened to Shostakovich. It perfectly fitted what I was writing. I was writing about Leningrad so I listened to the Leningrad Symphony.

* * *

What book do you wish you’d written?

There are many. Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. It’s incredibly wise and beautiful.

What does it mean to be a writer?

It’s an enormous privilege to be able to inhabit a world you’ve partly created.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue