Michael Paterniti

Michael Paterniti's new book is The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese.

From the author's Q & A with Alexandra Alter for the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog:

I was surprised how much of the book is about you and your struggle to write it. Did you set out to make the story as much about writing as cheese making?

I had no intention of having myself in there. I thought of the book originally as the legend of Ambrosio Molinos and this great cheese. The deeper in there I got, the more I realized that what was happening was really personal. The person who was changing the most in this story was me, and I had this obligation to show that. I was the emotional center of the story.

You describe in the book missing deadlines, getting a two-year extension, and missing it again. Why did it take you so long to wrestle the story to the ground?

When I started, I did not intend to take 10 years on this book. It became a totally different journey. When I went to visit the village, I realize the cheese represented this other way of life that was so different from our fast-paced American way of living. It’s a slow food tale gone awry. I thought, maybe this is good. Maybe...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy Shearn

Amy Shearn's first novel, How Far Is the Ocean from Here, was published in 2008. Her latest novel is The Mermaid of Brooklyn.

From the author's Q & A at Traveling With T:

Amy, how did the idea of The Mermaid of Brooklyn happen?

I was shopping with my grandmother for shoes to wear at my wedding when she told me the story of how a pair of shoes saved my great-grandmother’s life. My great-grandmother, a tiny, tough woman named Jenny Lipkin, was a virtuosic seamstress, a self-sufficient ball-buster, a strong mother of three girls, and the wife of a really awful man – and yet the tale my grandmother told spoke of such inner turmoil, vulnerability, even a touch of the poetic. This story stuck with me, and somehow combined in my mind with the idea of the rusalka, the malevolent mermaid of Eastern European lore. I was trying to write an essay interweaving the two ideas for the longest time, until one day when I was describing it to a friend in the hopes she could help me untangle it all, and she said, “Um, that’s a novel.” The final piece fell into place when I became a mother. I found myself fascinated by the parenting culture of Park Slope, Brooklyn – half-loving it, half-amused/repelled by it – and that was when I was ready to start writing the book.

Is Jenny Lipkin based on you, Amy? Or any mothers you know? Or is more of a collective idea of mothers everywhere?

I think every character in a novel is a little part of the writer. From the outside, Jenny’s life certainly looks like mine. I live in Brooklyn, I have two kids (although when I was writing the book I only had one), and when I was writing the first draft of this book we lived in a cramped walk-up apartment that was making me crazy. Like Jenny (and like many writers and bookish types, I think) I often find myself feeling like a bit of an outsider, observing everyone else, looking in.

That said, I based her character largely on...[read on]

Visit Amy Shearn's website.

The Page 99 Test: How Far Is the Ocean from Here.

Writers Read: Amy Shearn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Virginia Morell

Virginia Morell's latest book is Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures.

From her Q & A with Ed Battistella at Welcome to Literary Ashland:

EB: You’ve written about Africa’s natural treasures, about the Nile, and about the Leakey family. What brought you to the idea of animal minds?

VM: For my biography about the fossil-hunting Leakey family, I traveled to Tanzania to interview Jane Goodall in 1987 at Gombe Stream National Park, where she studies wild chimpanzees. (Louis Leakey had helped Jane launch this project.) While there, I joined Jane and her research assistants on their chimp-watching forays. So many of the chimpanzees’ behaviors, facial expressions, and gestures were similar to ours that I found myself slipping and calling them “people” when describing to other human-people what I’d witnessed. One chimpanzee also involved me in his political schemes; and with Jane’s assistance, a young chimp deceived her elder. (I tell both stories in ANIMAL WISE.) The chimpanzees were clearly thinking, as well as experiencing and expressing emotions—yet Jane could not say this about them. She had to use indirect expressions: “The young chimpanzee behaved ‘as if’ she were deceiving him.” There was a bias at the time against animals having minds, and being capable of thinking or feeling emotions, especially positive ones, such as love. That trip, my discussions with Jane about animal minds, and my own experiences with my dogs and cats led me to investigate the science of animal cognition.

In Ancestral Passions, my book about the Leakey family, I reviewed what was known about the physical evolution of humans. But what about our mental and emotional evolution? There isn’t an equivalent fossil record, but clues to the origins of these abilities can be found by studying other animals. Happily....[read on]

Learn more about Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Virginia Morell and Buckaroo.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alissa Nutting

Alissa Nutting's new novel is Tampa.

From her Q & A with Roxane Gay at The Daily Beast:

Are you nervous about this book in wide release or am I projecting?

Yes … realizing I’m running low on dish soap is enough to give me a panic attack, so you can imagine what the publication of my explicit novel about a taboo-breaking sexual psychopath does to my heart rate. It’s inevitable that the book will be misunderstood by many, and I know that will be hard. Writing transgressive literature opens you up to a double layer of criticism, because people are scrutinizing the subject matter as well as the actual writing. The target area for criticism becomes twice as large.

How do you define transgressive literature?

It’s literature that protagonizes the unaccepted, whether through character or form or style.

I love the explicitness, particularly from a woman. When she uses her own vaginal juices to mark her classroom, I knew this novel was going to be great. How did you come up with the idea for Tampa, and how did you commit to the explicitness?

This type of story is so often fetishized in the popular media, and that got me thinking about the lack of novels whose protagonists are female predators, particularly sexual predators. There’s a...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Alissa Nutting's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rhonda Riley

Rhonda Riley is a graduate of the creative writing program at the University of Florida.

Her recently released debut novel is The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope.

From the author's Q & A with Jaime Boler:

JB: Please describe The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope in ten words or less.

RR: Ten words! Okay, here goes: A woman finds a unique stranger who changes her world.

JB: How did you come up with the idea for The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope?

RR: I was writing nonfiction and poems trying to tell a few truths about my family. After several attempts, I gave up [on] truth and decided to make up stuff. That kicked the door wide open. Then, one day, I got an image of two hands touching in the mud, and I knew their contact involved some kind of transformation or transmission between two people. From there, I followed that single image. I didn’t imagine the whole book or even the entirety of Adam’s character in one swoop. It came about in increments.

JB: Many writers say they hear the voices of characters in their heads before a story takes shape. Was this true for you? If so, I’m curious as to whose voice you heard first: Addie, Adam, or Evelyn?

RR: I definitely heard Evelyn’s voice first. In fact, it was Evelyn’s voice and her character, not Adam’s, that drove me to write the story. Hers was the voice that obsessed me. I knew she was the teller of the story. Adam’s/Addie’s voice, in all its uniqueness, evolved.

I first got the idea for his voice from something that happened to a friend of mine. She was
...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Rhonda Riley's website and Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope.

Writers Read: Rhonda Riley.

My Book, The Movie: The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tiffany Hawk

Tiffany Hawk is writer living near Washington D.C. whose work has appeared in such places as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, National Geographic Traveler and on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Her debut novel, Love Me Anyway, is a darkly funny look into the emotional heart of the airline industry, with all its allure, loneliness, and ever-present temptations.

From the author's Q & A with Jocelyn Eikenburg at the Speaking of China blog:

In a blog post about Love Me Anyway, you mentioned: “I fear it would be a challenge to cast Tien, the married man who throws Emily’s life into a tailspin. Hollywood isn’t known for embracing Asian males as romantic leads (I could devote an entire post to that prejudice).” Was your own personal interest in seeing positive portrayals of Asian men — including as romantic leads — part of the reason you chose to have Emily and Tien fall in love?

Absolutely. The initial inspiration for the Tien character was less political and more personal – he was partially based on a great love of mine, who happened to be Asian. Or maybe he didn’t even “just happen” to be Asian, maybe I was drawn to him by his worldliness and his sexy accent and even his complicated, war-torn background. Either way, when it came to the book, I wrote a few different versions of the male lead, partly to disguise the real life muse and partly because other people were concerned about marketability. In the end, the Vietnamese character was much more compelling from a literary perspective, and then from a marketing perspective, I did begin to feel political. To anyone who won’t buy a book because it has an Asian lover – first, well, that’s pretty messed up. And, second...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Tiffany Hawk's website.

My Book, The Movie: Love Me Anyway.

The Page 69 Test: Love Me Anyway.

--Marshal Zeringue

Reza Aslan

Reza Aslan is the author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. From his Q & A with Christopher John Farley for the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog:

In the book you say that Jesus was “very likely” illiterate, and there’s “no reason to think” he could read or write. But a lot of Biblical scholars disagree. In Luke 4:16, we see Jesus reading. [“And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read.”] So where do you get that from, saying Jesus is illiterate when in the Bible he is seen reading?

Well, first of all, it may sound shocking to some people, but just because the gospels say something doesn’t mean it’s actually factual. The Gospel of Luke was written 60-70 years after Jesus had died, when Christianity was quintessentially a Roman religion and no longer a Jewish religion and the gospel writers were very interested in making Jesus someone who would appeal to a non-Jewish audience. But the facts of history speak for themselves. And I would say the vast majority of Biblical scholars would agree that the illiteracy rates in Jesus’s world were somewhere around 98 percent. 98 percent of Jesus’s fellow Jews could neither read nor write. The notion that a tekton, as Jesus is referred to in the Bible, a woodworker, which would make him the second-lowest rung on the social ladder in his time just above the slave and the indigent and the beggar, the notion that he would have had any sort of formal education, let alone the kind of education necessary to debate theological points with the scribes and the Pharisees, is difficult to reconcile with what we know of the history of the time.

But examining the broad sweep of historical trends of a particular time doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about an individual person.

It tells you everything about...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Pawan Dhingra

The sociologist Pawan Dhingra is the author of Life Behind The Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream.

From the author's 2012 conversation with Aarti Virani for the Wall Street Journal’s India Real Time:

WSJ: What sparked your interest in this particular demographic?

Mr. Dhingra: At first, I was caught by the numbers of it all: 40% of all motels in the United States are owned by Indians. After initial conversations with motel owners, I realized there was a lot more to learn: how they got started, how they afford motels, what happens to their children. There are so many layers, it becomes fascinating. I wouldn’t have pursued this project because of the numbers alone, but they were a key part of why I got started.

WSJ: What did you hope to accomplish with this book?

Mr. Dhingra: I wanted to give tribute to the owners. Of course, that doesn’t mean I could cast a blind eye—I had to be analytical and critical at times. But as I started learning about the process by which they came here, there was something about the sacrifices they made that struck me as impressive. I hope [the book] is a combination of sharing their successes, struggles and sacrifices along with seeing beyond their individual stories.

WSJ: What factors contributed to Indians—and Gujaratis in particular — dominating the American motel industry?

Mr. Dhingra: Dating back to the 1940s, the first...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Lippman

Laura Lippman's latest novel is And When She Was Good.

From her Q & A at Robb Cadigan's blog:

Hi Laura. Thanks for being here. Why don’t we start off with this: When did you know you wanted to be a writer? When did you know you were one?

Laura: I was four when I first attempted to write a book, I was 12 when I made a run at it, but I think I knew I was going to be a writer when I took some pretty tough criticism from a workshop leader who didn't like my work. I wasn't discouraged or deflated by the experience. (It helped that her predecessor, Sandra Cisneros, had been immensely supportive.)

Who or what inspired you as a child? … as a teenager?

I had some really good teachers as a kid. Mrs. Schapiro for 2nd and third grade, who shared her love of modern art; Miss Klemm in 8th grade, who was kinder to my untamed imagination than my previous year's teacher; Lynn Collins in high school. She taught math, but she was my homeroom teacher and she kept me from doing the stereotypical girl panic at mathematics.

Does the “Great American Novel” really exist (yet)? If so, what is it?

How can.....[read on]

Visit Laura Lippman's website and blog.

Laura Lippman's top 10 memorable memoirs.

The Page 69 Test: Another Thing to Fall.

The Page 69 Test: What the Dead Know.

The Page 69 Test/Page 99 Test: Life Sentences.

The Page 69 Test: I'd Know You Anywhere.

The Page 69 Test: The Most Dangerous Thing.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessica Anya Blau

Jessica Anya Blau's books include the nationally bestselling novel The Summer of Naked Swim Parties and the critically acclaimed Drinking Closer to Home.

Her new novel is The Wonder Bread Summer.

From the author's Q & A with Greg Olear at the Huffington Post:

The opening scene of The Wonder Bread Summer takes place in the dressing room of a dress shop, when a coked-up coed is made to display her breasts for the priapic pleasure of the store's owner, who happens to be 1) a drug dealer, and 2) hung like a horse. (In contrast to the movie star you saw en déshabillé, who was pinky-sized). We know that your work is heavily informed by autobiography. Please tell us that part is fiction.

(Jessica Blau): Well, sadly, it is based on my real life. When I was in college I got a job at a little clothing boutique in a dumpy area of Oakland where nobody would ever go to buy a dress. It turned out the shop was a front for a coke dealer. And he liked to pull out his dick while I was working. He would lay it out on his palm and show it to me. I was young, eager to make people happy, a good worker, and so didn't do the reasonable thing (like tell him to fuck off and put that thing away!) and just tried to laugh it off and suggest he tuck it back in before a customer came in. Of course customers rarely came in, so it wasn't a persuasive argument.

"I'm a big, big fan of Jessica Blau's first novel," writes blogger Kevin Sharp. "I've just finished her newest one, and what struck me was that I wouldn't have EVER guessed that this is the same author. The storyline, the voice, the syntax all seem completely new... this is quite a talent in my opinion." I agree with him. Your previous novels, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties and Drinking Closer to Home, are more overtly grounded in autobiography, as we've discussed previously. The Wonder Bread Summer is much trippier. It's in many ways a departure for you. Tell us a bit about your creative process, and what drove you to write this particular story, in this particular way.

The first chapter of this novel is the body of a short story I wrote that was published in The New York Tyrant. I liked writing about the time period (1983) and I liked the place (Berkeley, Oakland), and I liked the character -- the idea of dealing with someone who was bordering on adulthood but still incredibly vulnerable. I was reading a lot of thrillers at the time so...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Jessica Anya Blau's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Jessica Anya Blau and Pippa.

The Page 69 Test: The Wonder Bread Summer.

My Book, The Movie: The Wonder Bread Summer.

--Marshal Zeringue