Kyria Abrahams

Kyria Abrahams was a regular columnist for Jest Magazine for several years, where she was featured alongside performers and writers from The Daily Show and Chappelle’s Show. Her memoir is I'm Perfect, You're Doomed: Tales from a Jehovah's Witness Upbringing.

From a Q & A with Abrahams at Failure Magazine:

Have you found that readers are sometimes misinterpreting what you’ve written?

Yeah, definitely. Specifically, a lot of people have said they wanted to reach into the book and smack me. But I want to reach into the book and smack me, too. That’s kind of the whole point.

Also, people have said it’s unclear how much of my life was created by being a Jehovah’s Witness. I think it’s great that people are unsure about that, because that’s the core of the book. Was I messed up by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or was I just a brat? The [Frederick Perls] quote at the beginning sums it up best: “Many factors come together to create this specific unique person which is I.”

I was hoping that people would have a dialogue about that, and was surprised when people were annoyed that I didn’t answer the question for them. That’s when I realized that my book is Mumblecore. I know that sounds really pretentious, but what I mean is, people sometimes won’t like a movie because that movie has an unlikable character. I’ve noticed some people have reacted the same way to my book.

What is your stance on organized religion?

It’s...[read on]

Read an excerpt from I’m Perfect, You’re Doomed, and learn more about the book and author at Kyria Abrahams' website and blog.

The Page 99 Test: I'm Perfect, You're Doomed.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Cody Epstein

Jennifer Cody Epstein's acclaimed novel The Painter from Shanghai is a re-imagining of the actual life of Pan Yuliang and her transformation from prostitute to post-Impressionist painter.

From a Q & A with Epstein at Shortcut:

You are an American writer, based in New York. How did you hear about Pan Yuliang and what were your intentions in writing about her?

It actually began at the Guggenheim Museum, about ten years ago. My husband and some relatives and I were at an exhibition on Modern Chinese Art, and there was just one image by Pan Yuliang on display. But it drew me over immediately. It was a typical Pan Yuliang in that it was very evocative of Matisse and Cezanne, and the bright, bold colors and distinctly Western setting (as compared to the huge propaganda-style images and much more subtle ink paintings around it) really stood out for me. I went over to see more and when I read about Pan’s story (prostitute-concubine-Post-Impressionist icon; really?!) it just blew me away. I’d never heard of her before—but I couldn’t, at that moment, understand why---it struck me that everyone should know about her. I guess I hoped that by writing this novel I’d both educate myself about how that transformation happened(not just factually, but emotionally—in a way only fiction can really get close to) and also spread the word about a woman I consider to be—at least in the West—an unsung feminist hero.

What is the perception of Pan Yuliang today in China? Do Chinese women perceive her as a role model or as a failure?

I think that within the context of women artists in general she’s...[read on]

Learn more about The Painter from Shanghai and its author at Jennifer Cody Epstein's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Painter from Shanghai.

My Book, The Movie: The Painter from Shanghai.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anthony Neil Smith

Anthony Neil Smith is the editor of Plots With Guns and the author of Pyschosomatic, The Drummer, Yellow Medicine, and Hogdoggin'.

From his Q & A with Jedidiah Ayres:

What about crime or noir then? Was that always what you were going to write?

Oh yeah. I was hooked by The Hardy Boys in second grade before moving on the superior Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators Series. Plus, I really loved the covers and titles of all the adult crime fiction in the library. I just liked the idea of detectives, of solving crimes. Of course eventually I didn't care so much about the solving any more and just wanted to read about bad people doing terrible things, but with reasons.

I tried writing other things along the way--comedy, teen angst, Christian fiction when I was a holy roller, but it always came back to crime and noir. The "lightbulb" moment was picking up James Ellroy's WHITE JAZZ in the store, reading a few pages, and then picking my jaw off the floor. I thought "I didn't know you could write crime fiction like this". So that was the moment I also realized that instead of just studying Literature, I needed to find some Creative Writing classes.

Even in grad school, I would sometimes toss a crime story into workshop just to see what would happen (and I tried to write them so they weren't obviously genre stories). Eventually, at my dissertation defense, my professor Frederick Barthelme told me not to worry about the literary vs. genre debate. He said I obviously cared about the crime genre, and so I should go after what I liked. And I did. Maybe that'll change one day, but for now I just write the types of stories I would most want to read. And studying literary fiction and craft definitely helped me think about more interesting ways of going about it.

Is it an issue for you still? Is there a level of literary respect/credibility that you want to acheive?

Ha! I want...[read on]

Visit Anthony Neil Smith's website and MySpace page.

"My Book, The Movie" -- Pyschosomatic.

The Page 69 Test: Yellow Medicine.

The Page 69 Test: Hogdoggin’.

--Marshal Zeringue

David J. Williams

Jeff VanderMeer interviewed David J. Williams about his latest novel, The Burning Skies. Part of the Q & A:

Amazon.com: How was writing your second novel different from writing your first?

David J. Williams: The toughest thing about it was that I had six years to do the first and only a year to do the second. To draw an analogy from the music world: there's a reason so many second albums underperform--you take a band that's had a lifetime to write the first album, and then you lock them in the studio and say, okay guys, the clock's ticking and we need forty more minutes of classic riffs! Fortunately, I had the whole thing mapped out at a high level, so it was really just a matter of following the gameplan I'd already developed. And in The Burning Skies, we have the opportunity to see a lot more of the world of the early 22nd century. The bulk of the narrative is set in orbit; the book centers on the space station known as the Europa Platform, the site of the secret summit conference between the U.S. president and the leaders of the Eastern bloc. But the elite terrorist group Autumn Rain crashes the party, and things go out of control from there...

Amazon.com: How difficult is it to write about the President of the United States? Did you have any examples in fiction that you thought worked particularly well?

Williams: What I didn't want was...[read on]

Read an excerpt from The Burning Skies, and learn more about the author and his work at the official website of David J. Williams.

David J. Williams is a former programmer for the Homeworld videogame series and a graduate of the Clarion workshop. The Burning Skies is the sequel to his acclaimed debut novel The Mirrored Heavens.

The Page 69 Test: The Burning Skies.

--Marshal Zeringue

J. Robert Lennon

J. Robert Lennon is the author of four novels including Mailman and The Light of Falling Stars. His stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, the Paris Review, Granta, Harper’s, and the New Yorker.

His latest novel is Castle.

From a March 2007 Q & A at Corduroy Books:

I’m curious about how much Castle is/was, fundamentally, a sort of political act for you, a way to maybe try to exorcize the really, really awful ‘intelligence’/military policy issues of the previous administration. That’s actually not that clear: the book seems, overtly, to be about exactly that, about working out the deception at the center/heart of our lives, and so maybe the question is, how much of that was intentional and planned? Is Castle your attempt to forgive/close this really really atrocious part of our recent past?

I wanted, very specifically, to write a novel about the collective damage that our torture policy has done to the American psyche. That was my original intent. I struggled for the better part of a year with a novel about an Iraq War vet in a fugue state who falls in with domestic terrorists, but it all seemed too contrived, and it wouldn’t get off the ground. Then my wife told me about an article she’d read about a guy who discovered an abandoned castle in a state forest in New Jersey, and Castle suddenly sprang into focus. I had the whole thing in my head a few weeks later, though it took a lot of revisions to get to the finished product.

I don’t see any fogiveness or closure here, though. I mean, I am very happy with President Obama so far, but even he isn’t departing very far from Bush’s claimed privileges, particularly on the issue of so-called extraordinary rendition. What I’m writing about is a chronic national sickness that is not going to be cured in my lifetime. A few reviews of Castle have called its political message awkward or clumsy, but my obsession with politics had become so intense that to address these things any less directly would have been a kind of hypocrisy. It’s the novel I needed to write at the time.

Read the complete Q & A.

Learn more about the book and author at J. Robert Lennon's website.

The Page 69 Test: Castle.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson's acclaimed novel Spin won the Hugo Award in 2006. He won the Philip K. Dick Award for his debut novel A Hidden Place; Canada’s Aurora Award for Darwinia; and the John W. Campbell Award for The Chronoliths.

His new book, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, releases later this month. From his Q &A with Brian Francis Slattery at the Tor website:

Brian Francis Slattery: One of the things about Julian Comstock that I really enjoyed was that, in many ways, you wrote a pre-20th century novel—which, of course, totally matches the content in several important ways. But why did you decide to do this? I ask in part because there’s a certain bravery in going back to the 19th and 18th centuries for literary inspiration, given that your readers are reared on 20th-century expectations; also, by choosing such a specific style, certain stylistic and thematic doors close—and others open. What did the style—and your narrator in particular—allow you to do that you might not have been able to do otherwise?

Robert Charles Wilson: I came at the idea sideways, in a sense. When I first considered writing a novel set one hundred and fifty years into a radically depleted future, I tried to get a feeling for what a century and a half really means in terms of change (and not just technological change) in America. So I started immersing myself in mid-19th century American popular literature as a kind of depth gauge. Basically asking the question: What’s the cultural distance between then and now, and can I build a comparable degree of change into my book?

I’m not talking about classic literature but long-forgotten topical and popular novels—the kind of thing you have to hunt down at ABEbooks.com or read in PDF at archival sites. Weird stuff like George Lippard’s creepy The Quaker City, or Eugene Batchelder’s A Romance of the Sea Serpent, a novel in verse about a monster that attacks shipping in Boston Harbor and subsequently gets invited to a Harvard commencement. Seriously.

But the real galvanizing moment for me was when I stumbled across a series of six boys’ books written just as the Civil War was winding down, the so-called Army-Navy series by Oliver Optic. (Oliver Optic, a.k.a. William Taylor Adams, was a hugely successful writer in his day, author of over a hundred books and a household name for many American families. The better-remembered Horatio Alger was an Oliver Optic wannabe.) Read those books and you get the impression of a genuinely kindly, well-meaning, often naïve author trying to introduce young readers to the world they would inhabit as adults—and a pretty ugly world it was. Internecine warfare, slavery, rampant racism, mob justice: Have fun, kids!

For instance, in one of the books, during a naval battle, the 17-year-old narrator says, “A cannonball nipped off the head of the man standing next to me. This was so irregular that I did not know quite what to do.” It’s funny and ghastly at the same time. It’s like Guernica repainted by Norman Rockwell. And I thought it would be a great way to tell a story about a post-collapse 22nd-century America.[read on]

Visit Robert Charles Wilson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gary R. Bunt

From a Q & A with Gary R. Bunt, author of iMuslims: Rewiring the House of Islam:

Q: Who in the Muslim world has resisted the Internet and who has embraced it, and why?

A: Again, this can be a contextual issue, and one has to consider which specific application of the Internet is being considered. Scholars might say that what is permitted (halal) in everyday life is halal online, and that what is forbidden in everyday life (haram) is haram online, and of course there are recognized points in between these two poles. Many Muslims will say that if the Internet encourages religiosity and facilitates participation in political, cultural and/or religious aspects of Islamic life, then it has to be a good thing. Understanding of the Internet has become more refined, and -- as in many other contexts -- fear of the Internet has been replaced by pragmatism. Similarly, as with other aspects of human life, there are areas of the Internet that are seen as a challenge to traditional Islamic values (however they are defined) or have required interpretation to determine their appropriateness and validity.

Good examples of platforms and individuals who have embraced the Internet include Muslim political platforms and special interest groups, and also some religious authorities and scholars, including those from non-traditional backgrounds seeking to present alternative perspectives on Islam. This latter category, reliant in the pre-digital period on the printing press and the fax machine, has benefited immensely from the immediacy and interaction of the Internet as a cost-effective and dynamic space that is difficult for authorities to censor. A great deal of technological innovation is occurring in the name of Islam, in order to maximize the perceived benefits of the medium. [read on]

Read more about iMuslims: Rewiring the House of Islam.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anne Fine

Anne Fine has written more than fifty books for young children, teenagers and adults.

Her latest novel is Our Precious Lulu.

From Fine's Q & A with Anna Metcalfe at the Financial Times:

What book changed your life?

Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children. I read it in my early 20s, when I’d just got married. There’s a fierce honesty to the emotions in it. It opened my eyes to how much an author can do, especially about what goes on in families.

What is your daily writing routine?

I make tea in the early morning, then sit in bed and write for a couple of hours with a pencil, a rubber and a pad. Then I walk the dog and move to my computer.

Who are your literary influences?

Antonia White, Rebecca West, Sue Miller. And I have a passion for Angus Wilson. It’s generally people who deal in great depth with the refractions of emotions within families.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elinor Lipman

Elinor Lipman, according to Fay Weldon, "is a far more serious novelist than she pretends to be or is allowed to be by reviewers.... Up there at the top is where this enchanting, infinitely witty yet serious, exceptionally intelligent, wholly original and Austen-like stylist belongs..."

Lipman's new novel is The Family Man.

From a Q & A with the author at Powells.com:

What fictional character would you like to date?

I developed quite a crush on Anthony Rubin, boy next door and Jewish high school hockey player in Frederick Reiken's The Lost Legends of New Jersey.

What is your favorite literary first line?

"I have never begun a novel with more misgiving."
—W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge

Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.

When I first read...[read on]

Read an excerpt from The Family Man, and learn more about the author and her work at Elinor Lipman's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Family Man.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Amster-Burton

From a Q & A with Matthew Amster-Burton, author of Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father's Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater:

Who are you, Matthew Amster-Burton, and why are you qualified to write about kids’ eating habits?

I am the world’s foremost expert on child development. Okay, that may be a slight exaggeration, but I have one child, Iris, who is now four and a half, and she has taught me a lot about how to eat. Before Iris was born, I was working as a restaurant critic for a daily newspaper in Seattle, going out to eat several nights a week and not paying for any of it. You probably think this is the world’s best job. I’m not going to deny it. But after Iris joined me and my wife, Laurie, at the dinner table when she was nine months old, I started thinking about a new line of work. Now I make dinner for the family almost every night and write a lot about home cooking and feeding kids.

What exactly is a “hungry monkey”?

It’s what I started calling Iris one day when...[read on]

Visit the Hungry Monkey website.

--Marshal Zeringue