Sarah Hall

Sarah Hall is the author of Haweswater, which won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel, a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award, and a Lakeland Book of the Year prize.

In 2004, her second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia region), and the Prix Femina Etranger, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Her third novel, The Carhullan Army, was published in 2007, and won the 2006/07 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, a Lakeland Book of the Year prize, and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. Her fourth novel, How To Paint A Dead Man, published in 2009, was longlisted for the Man Booker prize and won the 2010 Portico Prize.

Hall's latest book is the short story collection The Beautiful Indifference.

From her Q & A with Boyd Tonkin for the Independent:

Choose a favourite author, and say why you admire her/him

Cormac MacCarthy. Very few novelists have the ability to terrify me – and he does. It isn't so much the violence in his books as the menacing quality that comes from the dark possibilities that lie within human beings. He taps into that in a non-Gothic and highly realistic way. It's very real, and very frightening.

* * *

Which fictional character most resembles you?

I'd like to think it would be someone like Ree Dolly in [Daniel Woodrell's] 'Winter's Bone': looking after a family, and being tough and practical. She has durability, and I would like to think I have that.

* * *

Who is your hero/heroine from outside literature?

I'm always impressed when I come across a story of an ordinary person who does something extraordinary: a random passer-by who has jumped into a frozen river to save someone else, or a pensioner who wallops a mugger.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy's new book is Walking with the Comrades, an account of her travels into the forest with India’s Maoist indigenous communities at war with the government.

From her Q & A with Parul Sehgal at Publishers Weekly:

How did you earn the guerrillas’ trust?

When the Indian government declared war against the Maoists, Indian liberals, for the most part, took a very safe, neutral position: “The government is bad, the Maoists are bad, the poor people are sandwiched in the middle.” I am no Maoist, but I thought that was a profoundly dishonest position. It elided the fact that the government had secretly sold lands belonging to indigenous tribes to mining and infrastructure companies. This is illegal and unconstitutional, and yet it was being done brazenly. Hundreds of thousands of paramilitary police were closing in on forest villages to clear the land for the corporations. About 600 villages had been emptied; some 300,000 people had fled their homes and had either moved to police camps or were hiding, terrified, in the forest. Many had joined the guerrilla army and were fighting back. The government and the media, campaigning for corporations, labeled them terrorists and called for them to practice Gandhian nonviolence. I wrote that Gandhian nonviolence was political theater that could be effective provided it had a sympathetic and empowered audience; how could people in remote forest villages, far from the gaze of the media or a hostile middle class be Gandhian while they were being raped and murdered? How could the starving go on hunger strike? How could those with no money boycott goods? My writings made their way into the forest, and one day a note was slipped under my door, inviting me to walk with the comrades.

What surprised you most about them?

I believed that when people take up arms, the violence would inevitably turn against the women in the community. In the forest I was...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Greil Marcus

Greil Marcus's new book is The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years.

From his Q & A with Jeff Makos at Publishers Weekly:

Your full-length appreciation of the Doors flies in the face of many of your fellow music critics, who have not been kind to the band since lead singer Jim Morrison died in 1971.

Well, it’s an interpretation, not a reinterpretation—it’s the first real thinking by me about their music. I had always remembered Jim Morrison saying that the Doors first album was “only a map of our music.” That was an extraordinarily eloquent thing to say about any album. As I began listening again to their reissued CDs with alternate takes and studio conversations, as well as countless bootleg concert recordings, I thought more about that “map,” and the book made itself—the project chose the book.

Unlike most books about Jim Morrison and the Doors, you don’t focus on anything biographical about the band.

I never had the idea of using anything except their music, which really told their true story. The Doors had a seriousness of intent during the 1960s. You could not be a thinking person during that time and not be overwhelmed with dread, with fear, with terror. And to be at a Doors concert was to be in the presence of a group of people who accepted the present moment at face value. The best of their music, especially live, confronted that moment. Morrison himself said that a Doors concert “is...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Hannu Rajaniemi

Hannu Rajaniemi is from Finland and lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he is a director of a think tank providing business services based on advanced math and artificial intelligence. He holds a Ph.D. in string theory and is a member of the same writing group that produced Hal Duncan. He wrote The Quantum Thief in English.

From his Q & A at the Guardian:

Who's your favourite writer?

In terms of contemporary science fiction, I am in awe of Ian McDonald. Other names I could mention are Michael Chabon, Haruki Murakami and the Finns Mika Waltari and Tove Jansson.

What are your other inspirations?

The Quantum Thief drew heavily upon some of the strange architectural ideas in Geoff Manaugh's wonderful blog BLDGBLOG – both for strange futuristic cities and architectural ideas applied to the mind. Frances A Yates's book The Art of Memory, on the method of memory palaces, was also an important influence.

Writers tend to be like thieves or magpies – inspirations are stolen and accrete around some core concept until they snowball into something that starts moving on its own. For my next book, The Fractal Prince, the loot so far includes The Arabian Nights and Douglas Hofstadter's ideas on consciousness.

Give us a writing tip.

One of the most useful tips for me was...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo's novels include Falling Man, Libra and White Noise. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Jerusalem Prize. In 2006, Underworld was named one of the three best novels of the last twenty-five years by The New York Times Book Review, and in 2000 it won the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the most distinguished work of fiction of the past five years.

From his Q & A with Rafe Bartholomew at Grantland:

Can you explain how Underworld came together? The prologue was first published as a novella, "Pafko at the Wall," in Harper's Magazine in 1992, but Underworld wasn't released until 1997. When you wrote Pafko were you already planning to use that scene as the beginning of a long novel?

One day in October 1991, I learned from a newspaper story that this day marked the fortieth anniversary of a famous baseball game played in New York, in the old Polo Grounds, Giants vs. Dodgers. The event was located somewhere at the far reaches of memory, mine and many other people's. But some lingering aura persisted and finally sent me to the library, where I discovered news that startled me: on that same October day, the U.S. government announced that the Soviet Union had recently exploded an atomic bomb. The two events seemed oddly matched, at least to me, two kinds of conflict, local and global rivalries. In time I went to work on what I believed would be a long story and at some point well into the enterprise I began to suspect that the narrative of the ballgame and the atomic test wanted to be extended — well into the last decades of the Twentieth Century. I was eager to make the leap.

When I was working on the novel, I decided that each part's title would derive from an already existing cultural artifact — painting, book, film, musical composition, etc. So I exchanged "Pafko at the Wall", now the novel's prologue, for the title of a Bruegel painting referred to in the text — "The Triumph of Death."

Do you remember where you were on October 3, 1951, during Game 3? Were you a Dodgers or Giants fan (or Yankees, since you're from the Bronx)? What do you recall about the pennant race, that game, Bobby Thomson's home run, and the feeling in New York that day?

I was at the dentist's office. Dr. Fish....[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker's new book is The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

From his Q & A with J.P. O'Malley at the Christian Science Monitor:

What made you want to write a book exploring the subject of violence?

It was an interest in human nature. I had written two books previously on human nature, and I faced criticism that any acknowledgment of human nature is fatalistic. I always thought this objection was nonsense. For one thing, even in theory, human nature comprises many motives and even if we have some motives that incline us to violence, we also have some motives that inhibit us from violence, and so just positing human nature doesn’t force you to claim that one side or another must prevail.

You equate Marxist ideology with violence in the book. Do you think that capitalist values have contributed to the decline of violence?

I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than a 100 years, because it was built into its ideology: mainly that progress comes through class struggle, often violent, and it lead to the widespread belief that the only way to achieve justice was to hurry this dialectical process along, and allow the oppressed working classes to carry out their struggle against their bourgeois oppressors. However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone just wants i-Pods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution.

How do you view democracy in terms of how much violence it creates?

Democracy is...[read on]

Read about Pinker's five best books on the decline of violence.

--Marshal Zeringue

Frances Wilson

Frances Wilson's books include Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers and The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life, which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize.

From a Q & A about her latest book, How to Survive the Titanic: The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay, with Randy Dotinga of the Christian Science Monitor:

Q: What drew you to Ismay's story?

A: I'm drawn as a writer to complicated people and to trauma, and what struck me about Ismay was the extraordinary strangeness of his behavior, that he behaved in the exact opposite of the way that other men of his background were expected to behave.

I wondered what it was like it for him, why he made that snap decision to save his own life.

Q: What did he do when the ship sank?

A: His version of events is rather different from other people's versions. Ismay says he helped to load eight lifeboats on the starboard side of the ship, filling the last lifeboats with women and children. When the deck was completely empty, he jumped in.

What some other people say is that he fought his way in, had to battle his way in. People say he got into first lifeboat and didn't help fill any lifeboats. And some people say he was ordered into a lifeboat.

What interested me was not judging him. He was very judged at the time. I was trying to understand how he judged himself, in the story he told himself about whether he justified his actions.

Q: What was the American public's reaction to his survival?

A: The American reaction was...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

John Grisham

John Grisham's new novel is The Litigators.

From his Q & A with Christopher John Farley at the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog:

How did you come up with the characters in “The Litigators”?

Certainly Wally and Oscar are compositions of many lawyers. I got the idea for the guys from watching all this really sleazy TV advertising done by lawyers. It’s epidemic all over the country. You see these guys on television appealing for injury cases and all these drug cases and most of them are not the least bit attractive or good on television but they think they belong there. They just think because they’re lawyers they should be on TV begging for cases.

Did you come away with more sympathy for ambulance-chasing lawyers after writing this book?

I don’t think there’s a lot of sympathy. Because I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the unrestrained ambulance chasing that you see today in the law. I finished law school thirty years ago and I only practiced for ten years. But when I finished there was still this stigma against lawyers who actively solicited cases. This was before advertising on TV, before billboards, before all the crap you see now. But there were lawyers who were known to go out and aggressively pursue case. And thirty years ago, we didn’t like those guys. We had a certain ethical structure to the practice of street law as I call it. Over time that’s been completely eroded. Now it’s just this non-stop TV advertising that to me is just so unseemly and so sleazy I can’t stand to watch it but it’s getting worse every day. That and the frenzy when there’s a new bad drug, it’s like a bunch of vultures or sharks. Everyone starts advertising. When the BP oil spill happened last summer, in Mississippi and Louisiana, the advertising by the lawyers was disgusting. They were...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides's new novel is The Marriage Plot, a complicated college love story set in the early 1980s.

From his Q & A with Carolyn Kellogg of the Jacket Copy blog:

JC: You have such tremendous skill for really evocative detail – I was wondering how you access those memories. In one scene, I don’t even know whose point of view it is, somebody looks and the pull on a shade is like a life preserver --

JE: It’s Mitchell, when he’s seeing the priest for the catechism. I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.

JC: You’ve said in interviews that writing autobiographically, you put too much in.

JE: I put too much in in the one section about Mitchell in India. Because that’s the part that I actually lived. My memories were competing with the fictional story of Mitchell -- it made it difficult to write, because I had many more episodes that I remembered that seemed significant to me. When I looked at it as a novel, I realized those things didn’t need to be there; they were just there because they happened to me. Whereas when I was writing the Leonard or Madeleine section, even though some of the things that happened to them would come from my life as well, I knew...[read on]

Read why Eugenides decided to use his alma mater, Brown, as a setting.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen King

Stephen King's new novel is 11/22/63 [the date of the JFK assassination]. From his Q & A with Alexandra Alter at the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog:

You’ve never written historical fiction before. What took you in this direction?

I like doing different things because they keep what I do fresh and you get out of the rut a little bit. There’s a real challenge — I started to say there’s a real danger, but there’s no danger sitting in a room, the only danger is when the critics start to sharpen their little claws — there is a real challenge in trying to keep the story in front of the history. It’s exciting to take a real person like Lee Harvey Oswald and say, I want to give him some dimension, put some flesh on his bones, and I want him to be a real character.

Are you hoping this novel will attract new readers, maybe historical fiction fans?

I do hope for it….I always thought this might be a book where we really have a chance to get an audience who’s not my ordinary audience. Because you’d always like to say to people, ‘Well, if you try this you might like it.’ They’re a little bit like children with their vegetables. I ran into a lady in the supermarket in Florida. Old lady. There’re lot of old people in Florida; it’s like the law. I was coming up the house wares aisle and she said, “I know who you are, you’re that writer, you write those horror stories,” and I said, “Yes, ma’am, I guess,” and she said, “I don’t read that kind of thing. I respect what you do but I don’t read those. I like uplifting things like that ‘Shawshank Redemption.’” I said, “I wrote that one, too,” and she goes, “No, you didn’t,” and...[read on]

Also see: Top 10 works of literature: Stephen King.

--Marshal Zeringue