Elmore Leonard

James Mustich asked Elmore Leonard about his new novel Road Dogs ... and a few other subjects. An excerpt from the Q & A:

JM: For a writer who has plied his trade in what are conventionally seen as well-defined genres, Westerns and crime, your books aren't really plot-driven, even though the plots are extremely entertaining.

EL: No.

JM: They're character-driven, and the characters are very much creatures as of their speaking voices as anything else.

EL: Well, they have to be able to talk!

JM: But it's more than that; even though your plots are intricate and ingenious, it's language that's shaping them because of the prominence of the voices.

EL: Yes, I agree with that.

JM: Did you have that impulse from the beginning? Did your start out writing that way?

EL: In the early '50s,...[read on]

Visit Elmore Leonard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Henning Mankell

Henning Mankell is a Swedish author who gained bestseller stardom with his series of crime novels featuring inspector Kurt Wallander. The books have been published in 33 countries and consistently top the bestseller lists in Europe, receiving major literary prizes and generating numerous international film and television adaptations.

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

Who is your perfect reader?

Probably myself. I only write books I’d like to read myself, so when I’m writing I’m also reading.

What book changed your life?

Robinson Crusoe, the first book I read. My grandmother taught me to read when I was six. It’s a miracle when the letters stop jumping around and you can read sentences.

Where do you write best?

I’ve never had the privilege of having “that table” so I’ve forced myself to write anywhere, in any circumstance. In Africa I sometimes write outside if it’s hot.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bridget Asher

From a Q & A with Bridget Asher about her new novel, The Pretend Wife:

Random House Publishing Group: Your fiction explores unconventional twists on relationships-in The Pretend Wife, for example, your heroine decides to spend the weekend with an old flame as his spouse even though she is already married. Where do you get your ideas, and what's your personal view on family dynamics?

Bridget Asher: I never thought I'd be a wife, frankly. Never dreamed of my wedding day. And so the term "the pretend wife" has come to me over the years quite naturally. I sometimes still don't feel like a wife-the term itself is so wifey! But I've always been fascinated by love and the construct of marriage. I married for love but it's fascinating how we watch our friends and family sometimes marry for some other reason-safety, normalcy, acceptance. But the idea of love doesn't go away in these cases. It still exists. I wanted to explore the true love that got away. I wanted to write a love story about that love, and that's where The Pretend Wife came from.

Plus, we all have the beau who got away ... and have always wondered: What if?

I'll also confess: I've never wanted to have a fling, but I have wanted to have whole other lives. Maybe I'm not alone in this. Maybe this is part of the pleasure of writing and reading novels-we get to know what it is to live other lives.[read on]

Visit Bridget Asher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Auster

From Paul Auster's Q & A with Anna Metcalfe of the Financial Times:

Who are your literary heroes?

Shakespeare, Montaigne, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Hawthorne and Melville.

* * *

What novel would you give a child to introduce them to literature?

I gave my daughter Wuthering Heights when she was 11 or 12.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Louise Penny

Jeri Westerson interviewed Louise Penny, the Macavity Award-winning author of A Rule Against Murder and three previous novels in the Three Pines mystery series.

Part of their dialogue:

Your first book Still Life began your Three Pines series and won the first of your many awards. When I interviewed Julia Spencer-Fleming, we discussed a certain amount of “world-building” that goes into creating a small, closed community. Even though we might be well-acquainted with small towns and it might be inspired by someplace close, there is still a lot of invention that goes into it, not just geography but people. Tell us about Three Pines and its inhabitants.

Three Pines is a tiny, bucolic village in Quebec, close to the border with Vermont. It's part French and part English, as is Quebec. And when I came to create it all my decisions were selfish. I knew it would take about a year, and the chances of getting published were tiny so the writing of the book needed to be fulfilling enough on its own. So I decided to create a community I would choose to live in, with people I would choose as friends. Since I was going to spend so much time there, I wanted to enjoy it. More than that - I wanted to love it. Wanted it to become a sort of 'safe place' - a venerable old village with stone homes and a village green, that had survived disasters, and wars, loss and sorrow, and still turned its face to the sun.

The first thing I created was the new and used bookstore, and its owner Myrna. Then the bistro, with it's open fireplaces and mullioned windows and gay owners. Sarah's bakery and Monsieur Beliveau's General Store. And the B&B. None of the stores, none of the people, were created for dramatic purposes or with the thought they'd have to be able to carry a series. It was just dumb luck. Writing under the influence of gummi bears helps too. Mind altering. Just don't try to snort them. Trust me.

How heroic does a hero need to be? And how do you define “heroic” when it comes to Inspector Gamache?

He's a man with a moral centre. A man who, while flawed, will always try to do the right thing, not the easy thing. As we know, it's...[read on]

The Page 69 Test: Still Life.

My Book, The Movie: A Fatal Grace.

The Page 99 Test: The Cruelest Month.

The Page 99 Test: A Rule Against Murder.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alissa Hamilton

Alissa Hamilton is the author of Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice.

From her interview on the New Yorker's "Book Bench" blog:

In your Introduction, you write that most orange-juice drinkers are “misinformed about what it is they are drinking.” Is it the “processed” part that most consumers are misinformed about?

That’s part of it. Most are surprised to hear, for instance, that the big brands, which market their product as “pure” and “simple,” add flavor packs to their juice to make it fresh. But people are also misinformed about the growing of juice oranges. A flight attendant once told me that he gets far more requests for orange juice on flights to Florida, because there’s still a strong association of oranges with the state. Yet most of the juice he’s serving now comes from Brazil, where there are fewer environmental regulations, and labor and land for growing oranges are cheaper.

Woah. Back up to the flavor packs. Why doesn’t orange juice taste fresh naturally, especially if it’s “not from concentrate”?

Flavor packs are fabricated from the chemicals that make up orange essence and oil. Flavor and fragrance houses, the same ones that make high end perfumes, break down...[read on]

Visit the Squeezed website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Todd Kashdan

Kathryn Britton interviewed Todd Kashdan about his new book, Curious?

Their opening exchanges:

Kathryn Britton: What prompted you to write your new book on curiosity?

Todd Kashdan: I wanted to write about curiosity because it has been neglected, even though there are few things in our arsenal that are so consistently and highly related to every facet of well-being — to needs for belonging, for meaning, for confidence, for autonomy, for spirituality, for achievement, for creativity. The only books out there are getting dusty on academic library shelves. I think scientists should write books themselves to get the science out to the masses.

Kathryn: What inspiration kept you going while you were writing it?

Todd Kashdan: I have always been an anxiety researcher, especially social anxiety - people that have profound levels of shyness and fear about being evaluated. Then I started seeing people who had energizing and profoundly meaningful social interactions. I started asking them about their motivations and feelings in the midst of social interaction. What kept arising was “I felt interested” or “I was curious.” I realized that curiosity is the counter-motivation to anxiety.

When people are dealing with new people, and new challenges, they’re...[read on]

Browse inside Curious?, and learn more about the book and author at Todd Kashdan's website and blog.

The Page 99 Test: Curious?.

--Marshal Zeringue

Xujun Eberlein

From a Q & A with Xujun Eberlein about her debut story collection Apologies Forthcoming, winner of the 2007 Tartt Fiction Award:

Q. About half of your stories in Apologies Forthcoming are set during China’s Cultural Revolution, and another half in its aftermath. What sets you apart from other English fiction about this period?

A. So much of what I see in English literature about China is “victim literature,” which tells horror stories of victims during the Cultural Revolution. While that is needed, it gives only a partial picture, and a partial picture hinders understanding. As Milan Kundera once noted, man tends to look for clearly distinguished good and evil, as he has an irrepressible desire to judge before understanding.

An astounding fact, one that is largely either ignored or unseen by Westerners, is that the Cultural Revolution was an "all-people movement." By this I mean virtually everyone in China, at various stages of that movement, participated. There was often no clear divide between victims and victimizers, and people took turns to be in both positions. At any given point during that decade-long period, as well as immediately before and after, victimizers were turning into victims and vise versa. For some, it was only after they themselves became victims, that they recognized their own part in victimizing others. For others, that recognition never arrived. The Cultural Revolution was a period of history that inflated politically-based hatred and conflict to the extreme. We are talking about non-personal hatred here. In all the conflicts, there was a great tragic sameness – violence of one group of people against another, which we still see around the world today.

Another controversial perspective that I bring out in my stories is the strong idealism of the young generation of Chinese that became the Red Guards. Yet the fact remains that the Red Guards did commit numerous acts of violence. An important issue is thus the relationship between idealism and violence.

It is my intention to tell stories from more than one perspective, showing what actually happened during the period when I was a young witness. Several stories in this collection can be called participant stories instead of victim stories. It is not my concern to point fingers, rather I strive to portray reality in the full variety it has, and hope that brings a deeper understanding to readers.

Read the complete Q & A.

Visit Xujun Eberlein's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steve Luxenberg

Laura Wexler, author of Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America, interviewed Steve Luxenberg about his new book, Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret. Their exchange begins:

Q. You say several times in Annie’s Ghosts that you were working to balance your roles as a reporter and as a son. Can you discuss how you navigated these roles, and describe any situations that challenged the balance you created?

A. The secret first emerged during a time when my mom was quite sick, and my siblings and I were trying to figure out how to deal with her frequent trips to the hospital emergency room and her resulting anxiety. That initially put me in the role of son, and as a son, I believed what Mom had told her doctor and what was reported to us: That she had no idea what had happened to her sister. Of course, that turned out not to be true.

Once I set out to write the book, I wanted to tell the story fully, without holding back. I’ve been a journalist for so long that it wasn’t hard for me to slip into the role of questioner and observer. I sometimes wonder if that’s one reason why I chose journalism. It’s one of the few professions that sometimes demands immersion in difficult and emotional subjects, while allowing the reporter to set aside, or even submerge, his or her own feelings.

A book puts the writer into a more complex relationship with the material. I wanted to apply the discipline of journalism to ferret out the story, but I didn’t want to push aside my feelings—they were part of the story, too. Sometimes I found myself taking notes on my own reactions, and that felt strange at first.

Q. At some points in the narrative, I see you holding back your personal reaction to avoid influencing the person you’re interviewing. Can you talk about that?

A. The most difficult...[read on]

Read the prologue to Annie’s Ghosts and visit Steve Luxenberg’s website, where you can see photos and documents relating to the book and read his blog.

The Page 99 Test: Annie's Ghosts.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joe Meno

Joe Meno's new novel is The Great Perhaps.

From his interview with The Millions:

The Millions: I had this sensation when reading The Great Perhaps that its form was continually unfolding and revealing itself to me. For instance, we've got an elevated third person narrator that also manages to swoop deeply into various characters' perspectives; we've got short narratives about various Casper ancestors; we've got Jonathan's father Henry writing letters to himself about his past - and so on. This sensation of formal evolution was exhilarating, perhaps because it never felt inaccessible. Did you plan to write a book that shifts in these formal ways? And why these particular narrative choices?

Joe Meno: When I first started writing the book I had no idea what it was about or how to tell it, other than I wanted to try and tell the story of a family in the weeks leading up to the 2004 election. After I finished the first draft, I realized the book was about complexity, and the need for it, and how terrified we, as Americans, seemed to have become of anything complicated or uncertain. As I started rewriting and organizing the book I realized that in order to get to the complexity of the character's lives, I would need a structure that was also complex, so I started using different forms for each character as a way to develop who they were - Jonathan, a paleontologist, has various abstracts from his published scientific journals, his wife, Madeline, an animal behaviorist, has her chapters structured like field notes, their daughter Amelia, a budding Marxist, has excerpts from her angry anti-capitalist rants in the school newspaper, their other daughter, Thisbe, has these very violent prayers she has made up, and their grandfather, Henry, has these letters he writes to himself as a way to rid himself of his connections to the past.

TM: There's a notion in your novel that cowardice and failure can be inherited. Do you think the book supports or disproves this theory - or does it do both?

JM: Actually, ....[read on]

Visit Joe Meno's website.

--Marshal Zeringue