Jeff Wasserstrom

Two exchanges from Jeff Wasserstrom's Q & A at Urbananatomy Shanghai:

Contemporary writer in any medium who you never miss?

Pankaj Mishra. There are other people I try to read whenever they publish something new. In the China field, for example, I try to keep up with Geremie Barmé (not easy, given how prolific he is!), and I’ve never been disappointed by anything Evan Osnos has done for The New Yorker. I always learn something new (about the world or just about language) from book reviews by Perry Anderson, and the same goes for those of Pico Iyer. But Pankaj still stands out. I loved his first novel, The Romantics, and all the short pieces of his I’ve seen on topics ranging from contemporary Chinese writers to nineteenth century European novelists, from U.S. policy toward Pakistan to the allure of Western popular music when he was growing up in India. He’s the one person for whom I’ve set up a 'Google Alert' account, so that I’d get an automatic e-mail telling me whenever he had something new come out. (I ended up doing away with that, incidentally, as I kept getting messages about other Pankaj Mishras, who were mentioned in news stories about disaster relief, had written about cricket and so on — turns out, he just doesn’t have a very unusual name.)

* * *
What are you working on now and when is it out?

I’m very glad you asked. I just sent in the manuscript of a new book, China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, which will come out early in 2010 and be part of a series that Oxford University Press is doing (all the works in it have the same subtitle). It is a very short book in a question and answer format. In it, I try to give concise, sensible, and I hope engagingly written replies to the sorts of queries I get after giving public talks. Why is China still governed by a Communist Party, after so many other similar regimes have fallen? Is Chinese nationalism something to worry about? Why is China holding an Expo so soon after hosting an Olympics? Those sorts of things.

It’s aimed at general readers not fellow academics, and I see it as the kind of thing that would be ideal to pick up at the airport bookstore en route to China for the first time, or that an expat might want send to a brother or sister about to come over to visit as a present. It has a lot on sources of misunderstanding between the U.S. and China, as that’s something I’ve thought a lot about and something that should concern people who are neither American nor Chinese, given how important the relationship between the two countries has become. (Too bad it won’t be out in time for someone to suggest that Obama read it before heading to China!). I won’t brag about the text, as that would be unseemly, but I can say it has...[read on]

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. His publications include China's Brave New World and Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai. He is a regular contributor to academic journals and has also written for a variety of general interest periodicals, including Newsweek, The Nation, the TLS, New Left Review, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor. He also writes at The China Beat.

The Page 69 Test: China's Brave New World.

The Page 99 Test: Global Shanghai, 1850–2010.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephenie Meyer

Stephenie Meyer is the author of the best-selling "Twilight Saga" series.

Last summer Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg interviewed her for the Wall Street Journal. Part of their Q & A:

WSJ: Do you consider your books to be character-driven or plot driven? Where do you put your emphasis most?

Mrs. Meyer: Absolutely character driven. The plot comes from the characters. If you have interesting personalities, the stories write themselves. Some writers love intricate plotting, some love the beauty of language. For me it's all about the people -- always.

WSJ: Why do you think certain books emerge as cultural totems?

Mrs. Meyer: I don't know. I read books that are amazing that nobody has heard of. Bookstores can be overwhelming. Word of mouth is a huge part of it. Publishing isn't about big commercials on TV. With "Twilight" it was people passing books onto their friends. That's how it started. Now it's out of control. People want to know what other people are talking about, and it gets bigger and bigger.

WSJ: "Breaking Dawn" closes the series, at least as told through Bella's eyes. Were you able to tie up all the storylines?

Mrs. Meyer: I was very satisfied with the end, but I wouldn't say it's completely tied up. Life doesn't work that way. The characters seem real to me, so you can't say that's the end. Nothing is really final. Readers will get the sense of closure. But they'll still want to know what happens next. There are always more stories.

WSJ: The books have some heavy breathing, but they are ultimately chaste. What do you hear from your readers on this subject?...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen Solomon

Karen Solomon is the author of 2007’s The Cheap Bastard’s Guide to San Francisco (Globe Pequot Press) and contributing author to Chow! San Francisco Bay Area: 300 Affordable Places for Great Meals & Good Deals (Sasquatch Press). Her recent book is Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It.

From her interview with Megan Zabel of Powells.com:

Megan: You said in the introduction to Jam It that the book isn't meant to answer the question, "What's for dinner?" You write, "I'm a crafter, and food is my medium of choice." I really love the idea of kitchen crafts. Was food always your medium, or did it take you awhile to find your niche?

Solomon: Not always. It did take a while. My partner and I both work, and we had a kid about two and a half years ago. When you're living that life, dinner happens in about 22 minutes. What you eat every night — we call it "people chow" — is a stir fry or a quick-ass pasta, something that's sustenance. We're not big fans of eating out every night, so it got to be that every meal being eaten, Monday through Thursday, wasn't the kind of cooking that I love to do. I love to take time and make something wonderful and beautiful that tastes fantastic, and that just wasn't happening. I started thinking, Okay, what can I do on the weekends that's going to satisfy that creative kitchen urge, and also yield something really wonderful that I can enjoy throughout the week, or throughout the month? So that's how the book got started.

Megan: You cover a lot of ground in the book — from jam, pickles, and pastas to curing bacon and smoking trout. What inspired you to learn all these somewhat varied kitchen skills?

Solomon: I was doing a lot of...[read on]

Visit the official Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Juliet Marillier

Juliet Marillier's historical fantasy novels are published internationally and have won a number of awards.

Her new book is Heart’s Blood.

From her Q & A at Writer Unboxed:

Q: What’s the premise of your new book?

JM: The major theme of Heart’s Blood is acceptance: learning to see beyond people’s outward flaws to their inner qualities. Parallel with that is learning to accept yourself. Acceptance lies at the heart of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, on which Heart’s Blood is loosely based. It means coming to terms with the past, good and bad. Communication and miscommunication form another theme. Heart’s Blood contains extracts from diaries, letters and journals, which weave the stories of past generations into the main narrative. And then there are the mirrors …

Q: What would you like people to know about the story itself?

JM: The first person narrator, Caitrin, is a skilled scribe. Running away from home, she ends up at Whistling Tor, the crumbling fortress of reclusive chieftain Anluan, where she is hired to sort and transcribe a disordered collection of family documents. As she works through these, Caitrin uncovers a dark story spanning four generations. At the same time, her presence triggers profound changes in Anluan’s eccentric household.

This is not simply a fairy...[read on]

Visit Juliet Marillier's website to learn more about her books and works in progress, and read her "author's spotlight" essay at the Random House website.

Writers Read: Juliet Marillier.

--Marshal Zeringue

William Ferris

From a conversation with William Ferris, author of Give My Poor Heart East: Voices of the Mississippi Blues (University of North Carolina Press, November 2009):

Q: In the introduction to Give My Poor Heart Ease, you mention that "While I may live and work in other places, my real home is the farm. It is my spiritual compass." How so? And what was it that ultimately led you away from your family's farm and down Highway 61?

A: Growing up in an isolated rural community with the black and white families who lived near my home shaped me in deep, lasting ways. Stories told by my grandfather, books read aloud by my mother, and hymns sung at Rose Hill Church are memories that to this day are incredibly vivid. These voices shaped my identity in deep, lasting ways.

What ultimately led me away from my family's farm was education: first to Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts, then to Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, to Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and finally to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Earl MacCormac, my philosophy professor at Davidson College, later told me that I had "more degrees than a thermometer."

While these schools were far from my family's farm, each in their own way helped me tack a course back down Highway 61. While at Brooks School in the late fifties, I began a pattern of recording and photographing musicians each time I returned to the farm. As a graduate student in folklore at the University of Pennsylvania in the late sixties, this work became the focus of my dissertation. It was also at the University of Pennsylvania that I began to use film to document the blues worlds in which I found myself increasingly immersed.

Q: You began collecting images and recordings for this book at a very young age. How old were you when you began? What time span does the book cover?

A: I began taking photographs at the age of...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson is the author of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1985. Her second novel, The Passion, won the John Llewllyn Rhys Prize in 1987, and was followed by Sexing the Cherry, which won the 1989 EM Forster Award. Her other works include The Powerbook, Written on the Body, Arts and Lies, Boating for Beginners, The World and Other Places, and a collection of eassays, Art Objects. Her latest book is The Battle of the Sun.

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

What book changed your life?

The Bible shaped me; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando shaped my imagination; and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities gave me the courage to write whatever I wanted.

* * *
Who would you like to be stuck in a lift with?

Meryl Streep.

* * *
What book do you wish you’d written?

Tom Jones. I love the bounce of the writing and I’m drawn to orphan stories.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Martin Amis

Linda L. Richards interviewed Martin Amis in 2000 about his memoir, Experience.

Part of their dialogue:

Was it difficult writing a memoir?

It's a great surprise to some, because people think that writing is a cerebral business but, in fact, your whole body is involved. That really came home to me when I was writing Experience. I thought I had suddenly succumbed to some ravage of age, because while I was writing the book my sleep patterns changed completely. I suddenly needed about 14 hours of sleep a night. I was like one of my teenaged sons on a weekend, staggering out of bed at four o'clock in the afternoon and wanting more sleep and finding that dozing state incredibly delicious. So, I thought: I'm really slowing down, soon I'll be up for a couple of hours a day and then be going back to bed again. But the minute I stopped writing the memoir, I went back to how I was before. My whole metabolism switched. Because it was front brain emotion rather than the novel which is much more subliminal. You're using a different part of the brain.

With the novel you're creating. With the memoir you're sort of dredging.

Yeah. And you're also writing directly about the things you really care about. I suppose it partly was also a cognitive stretch of grieving for the father. But it wasn't just that.

Why a memoir? Why now?

For the reasons given in the first chapter, really. It was all public already, so I didn't feel I was revealing anything. I was just trying to get rid...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Derek Nikitas

Derek Nikitas teaches creative writing at Eastern Kentucky University. Pyres, his first novel, was an Edgar nominee. His new novel is The Long Division.

From his 2008 interview with New Mystery magazine:

Given your academic pedigree (the MFA, published stories in Ontario Review), what drew you to crime fiction?

I got psyched about crime fiction while at UNCW. I took a crime fiction class and a saw a lot of film noir, so there was never any razor-wire fence between my academic and my aesthetic stomping grounds.

Yeah, there's some truth to the divide between academic "literary" fiction and beach "commercial crime" fiction, since nobody would accuse James Patterson or the Kellermans of being "literary," and nobody would call Dom DeLillo or Lorrie Moore "commercial." But my heroes shred that line: Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, James Ellroy, Michael Chabon, Denis Johnson, Tom Franklin. These folks tell page-turning tales of crime and mayhem, but they've got deep character, rich language, and rebel story structures. So I'm looking to these guys for my inspiration, generally.

Still, I was surprised when an actual police detective entered Pyres. I'd written a hundred pages before I realized I'd be tossing around that particular convention. I resisted some, but Investigator Hurd is tougher than I am.

But do you think there's still a bias in academia to exile genre fiction to some kind of literary ghetto?

I can’t speak for all of academia, but...[read on]

Read an excerpt from The Long Division, and learn more about the book and author at the official Derek Nikitas website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Long Division.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sophie Hannah

At Poe's Deadly Daughters, Sandra Parshall interviewed Sophie Hannah, a bestselling crime fiction writer and poet. Her psychological thrillers include Little Face, Hurting Distance, and The Wrong Mother (UK title: The Point of Rescue).

Part of their dialogue:

Q. You wrote several non-genre novels before turning to suspense. What lured you over to the dark side?

A. I've always been obsessed with mystery fiction, since I was a kid. My parents bought me one of Enid Blyton's Secret Seven mysteries when I was about five or six, and I remember reading it and thinking, “Stories with mysteries in them are so much better than those without -- why don't all books have mysteries in them?” I've never really changed my mind on that point. I read all of Enid Blyton, then discovered Agatha Christie and read all her books, then Ruth Rendell... I'm a mystery addict, really! I think it's because I'm quite nosy. In real life, I'm always desperate to know something -- what someone's thinking, what's going on behind the scenes in people's lives that they don't talk about -- and the great thing about suspense fiction is that you know your nosiness is going to be satisfied at the end of the book.

Q. Why did you choose to write suspense rather than traditional whodunnits told primarily from the sleuth’s or police detective’s POV? What is it about the suspense form that you find rewarding as a writer?

A. Well, each of my books combines two narrative perspectives. I always have a female protagonist in some kind of nightmarish situation, and half of each book is narrated in the first person by the heroine of that particular book. But then the other half is in...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Sophie Hannah's website.

The Page 69 Test: Hurting Distance.

The Page 69 Test: Little Face.

My Book, The Movie: Little Face and Hurting Distance.

The Page 69 Test: The Wrong Mother.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edmund White

Edmund White's novels include Fanny: A Fiction, A Boy's Own Story, The Farewell Symphony, A Married Man, and Hotel de Dream. He is also the author of a biography of Jean Genet, a study of Marcel Proust, The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris, and his memoir, My Lives. His new book is City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s.

From his interview with Thomas Rogers at Salon:

I'm assuming you read the Gore Vidal interview in the Times of London. He says a number of very nasty things about you -- but he also makes accusations that you "gayed-up" his relationship with Tim McVeigh in your play "Terre Haute."

He signed off on it. Now, late in the day, he's decided he doesn't like it, or maybe he forgot -- he drinks a lot. The tension for the [Gore-inspired] character is that he doesn't actually approve of what McVeigh did, but he's attracted to McVeigh as a man and as a personality -- whereas Gore actually approves of what McVeigh did and thinks he's a great freedom fighter.

That's complete lunacy. Gore wanted me to rewrite it to show a lot more sympathy toward McVeigh, but I thought that would lose about 99 percent of the audience. I don't approve of killing hundreds of people in the name of some abstract ideal. I think Gore is a complete lunatic, and it doesn't bother me what he says about me. He's an awful, nasty man. Now he can't write. He's wheelchair-bound, and he's in pain. He lost his lover of many years. The last time I talked to him I said, "Come to dinner, and I'll have some cute boys for you to meet." "Oh, I don't want to meet any of them!" You know, he's just an old grouch.

He's been nice to me over the years, but he's always like this seething volcano and you're always wondering when he's going to go off.

I don't know what he's famous for anywhere, really, because I think those historical novels are complete works of taxidermy. Nobody can read those. "Myra Breckinridge" was funny but light. The essays are what everybody defends -- but a friend of mine who did a volume of the best essays of the 20th century said they're all so topical that they've all aged terribly. I don't know where his work is. You have to have one or two books that are actually good if you're going to have a lasting career, and I don't think...[read on]

Read about Edmund White's most important books.

--Marshal Zeringue