Gillian Flynn

From James Rocchi's Rolling Stone Q & A with author Gillian Flynn about her novel, Gone Girl:

You wrote a very gracious acknowledgment to your husband in the novel. When he read your draft, were you going, "Honey, it's all make-believe ..."? What inspired this examination of relationships in the first place?

Well, you know, I was a newlywed when I started writing it — because of the way my mind works, I am a worst-case scenario-ist. I spent a lot of time thinking about what marriage meant, and how marriage can go wrong. No one sets out to have a toxic marriage, yet you see them all the time, so what exactly happened? I had this basic underlying thought about how much of relationships are sort of a con game, in the early days, and we're all kind of con artists: We're trying to trick someone into loving us in a way, and we're not showing all our cards, we're not showing the real person you are going to get two or three years down the line when the mask starts slipping. I started thinking, what if I blow that up to a much bigger idea?

My husband is a very confident guy, and he didn't really blink. He just said "Don't censor yourself: write the book you need to write, and we'll worry about it later on." And then...[read on]

See six domestic chillers for "Gone Girl" fans and ten must-read books if you loved "Gone Girl".

--Marshal Zeringue

Rebecca Makkai

Rebecca Makkai is a Chicago-based writer whose first novel, The Borrower, is a Booklist Top Ten Debut, an Indie Next pick, an O Magazine selection, and one of Chicago Magazine's choices for best fiction of 2011. Her short fiction has been chosen for The Best American Short Stories for four consecutive years (2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008), and appears regularly in journals like Harper's, Tin House, Ploughshares, and New England Review.

Makkai's new novel is The Hundred-Year House.

From her Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Why did you decide to have the action in The Hundred-Year House go backward chronologically?

A: When I started writing this, it was all set in the present day (with the plot of what's now the 1999 section -- '99 still feels like the present to me, but wow, I guess that's historical fiction now).

I thought of leaving a lot of the mysteries of the past unexplored, a lot of questions unanswered. I was brushing my teeth one morning when I realized the narrative should actually go back into that past. And since I'd already written much of the first section, it seemed natural that this journey should happen in reverse.

I've always loved backwards narrations, from Martin Amis's Time’s Arrow to the backwards episode of Seinfeld -- and I was amazed at...[read on]

Learn more about the author and her work at Rebecca Makkai's website, Facebook page and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: The Borrower.

The Page 69 Test: The Hundred-Year House.

My Book, The Movie: The Hundred-Year House.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gary Krist

Before turning to narrative nonfiction with The White Cascade and City of Scoundrels, Gary Krist wrote three novels--Bad Chemistry, Chaos Theory, and Extravagance--and two short-story collections--The Garden State and Bone by Bone.

Krist's new book is Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans. From his Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:

Q: How did New Orleans become New Orleans in the first place?

It started out as a French city in the early 1700s and for the first 100 years, it was a little piece of France on the North American continent. But it also had Latin and Caribbean influences and developed more permissive attitudes regarding sex, vice, and race.

It was fundamentally different than the other cities of America. It had a greater recognition of human nature: Sometimes you can’t really change human nature. You have to roll with it rather than confront it.

They had this permissive attitude for much of the 19th century. But when Anglo-American elites came down from the North, they wanted to clean up the town. They thought, "We can’t abide this, or we won’t attract Northern capital." They tried to normalize it compared to the rest of the South.

Q: How did the race conflict evolve after post-Civil War reconstruction?

The local white population realized that their federal overseers were gone and they could start asserting white supremacy.

There’s this cascading wave of legislation that took away whatever rights blacks had in New Orleans. Intermarriage was...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Gary Krist's website.

The Page 69 Test: The White Cascade.

Writers Read: Gary Krist (May 2012).

The Page 99 Test: City of Scoundrels.

The Page 99 Test: Empire of Sin.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steph Cha

Steph Cha is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School. She lives in her native city of Los Angeles, California. She is author of Follow Her Home and Beware Beware.

From her Q & A with Sabra Embury at The Rumpus:

Rumpus: Korean culture is well represented in Beware Beware without being too heavy-handed. Was balance an issue when it came to avoiding stereotypical characterizations—e.g., Korean males are chauvinistic or Korean parents are strict? Did you feel like a gatekeeper into a somewhat exclusive yet prolific community?

Cha: Yes! Oh man. This is a good question. I have nothing against identity novels (and am likely to write one some day), but I really wanted to write a book that was essentially Korean-American while being about something else. I wanted all the Korean stuff in the background, but I knew I had to get it pretty right since I wasn’t going to devote tons of space to contemplation on the culture, the stereotypes, etc. Some of my Korean characters do fit certain stereotypes (Lori is a bad driver; both Song’s and Lori’s mothers are strict in their own ways), but I feel like I have so many of them that I feel comfortable with that. I think that’s an easy way to avoid flat or lazy representations—to show a wide range of human traits and behaviors. And yes, I do feel a little like a gatekeeper, or at least like I have some responsibility to do things correctly. Korean-American Los Angeles doesn’t get much play in fiction.

Rumpus: You’re a graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School, is that right? What made you decide you wanted to flip off your Ivy League education in law to become a writer of crime fiction? Was it tough to make that shift overall?

Cha: Yes, I did go to those schools. I’ve always been decently book smart, as things go, but as I’ve grown older I’ve learned that...[read on]

Visit Steph Cha's website and Twitter perch.

Coffee with a Canine: Steph Cha and Duke.

My Book, The Movie: Follow Her Home.

The Page 69 Test: Follow Her Home.

Writers Read: Steph Cha (April 2013).

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian Staveley

Brian Staveley's new book is The Providence of Fire: Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne (Volume 2).

From his Q & A with Amelia Rosch in The Dartmouth:

How were you involved in writing at Dartmouth?

BS: I spent most of my time divided between doing a lot of writing and doing a lot of rock climbing. Those were kind of the two main, main foci of my time there, and it was great. I mostly wrote and studied poetry, and, obviously, I’m now writing epic fantasy, which is kind of a different end of the literary spectrum. I went through pretty much the full slate of creative writing courses. Even the poetry classes were really good training for the kind of work that I’m doing now, not because I learned how to write fantasy or how to create epic plots and authentic worlds, but because I got really comfortable handling language. I spent a long time writing poetry before I shifted over into writing genre fiction. Poetry and epic fantasy are pretty different.

What caused the shift?

BS: It’s impossible or almost impossible to make a living just writing poetry. Even very well-respected, well-regarded poets teach at the same time, which is great. I taught high school for over ten years. I really enjoyed that job, but I wanted to try to make a career out of writing, and I thought I’m probably not going to do that publishing small books of poetry. So I went back to fantasy, which was a love of mine when I was a kid. I thought that’s a genre with more commercial possibility but it’s also one that I’m excited about and that I know really how, where I can contribute a little something and sort of take part in this long big tradition of fantasy and English....[read on]

Visit Brian Staveley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tessa Harris

The Lazarus Curse is the fourth novel in Tessa Harris’s award-winning Dr Thomas Silkstone Mystery series. It deals with the theme of slavery in an increasingly liberal 18th century England.

From a Q & A at the author's website:

Tell us about Dr. Thomas Silkstone, your protagonist.

Thomas Silkstone is a Philadelphian in his twenties, who comes to London to study anatomy in 1774, just before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. He is the voice of enlightened reason in a world in turmoil. Young, good-looking and with a razor-sharp mind, he’s neither superstitious, nor overtly religious and he prides himself on behaving logically. That’s why, when he meets the first love of his life, Lady Lydia Farrell, he is thrown off balance for a while, experiencing emotions like love and jealousy which have been alien to him until now.

He’s also a polymath, a bit of a rarity in these days of specialisms. He’s an anatomist, a surgeon, a physician and a scientist, challenging old ideas and embracing new discoveries and techniques. But above all, he’s a philosopher at the dawn of a new age. As an American in England, he is treated as an outsider, and this enables him to see events and people with a cool and reasoned detachment, although he is deeply compassionate at heart and his main aim is to alleviate his patients’ suffering.

Can you tell us a bit about the real-life anatomist upon whom Silkstone is based?

Before the Revolution, there were several young men who came from New England to study anatomy in England and in Scotland. Some of them returned to found great medical schools, like John Morgan, founder of the first medical school in Colonial America , or Philip Syng Physick, the so-called ‘father of American surgery.’ Thomas Silkstone is perhaps most like William Shippen Jr, who came from a wealthy Philadelphian family. He was rather a ladies’ man and was considered extremely good-looking and very accomplished. He loved dancing and the theatre and cut a dashing figure on the London social scene. He was befriended by Benjamin Franklin who...[read on]

Visit Tessa Harris's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Devil's Breath.

The Page 69 Test: The Lazarus Curse.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paula Hawkins

Paula Hawkins is the author of The Girl on the Train.

From a Q & A at her publisher's website:

A real strength of The Girl On The Train is the realistic depiction of alcoholism. What kind of research did you do to create such a compelling portrait of the disease?

We live in a booze-soaked culture in the UK, so you don’t have to go far to experience the havoc that heavy drinking can wreak. Nor do you always find alcohol dependence in the most obvious of places: there are plenty of high-functioning, successful people who teeter on the brink of the abyss into which Rachel has slipped.

I did some reading on black outs induced by drinking – why they occur in some people and not others and what exactly is happening in the brain when they do occur is not fully understood. I know anecdotally that memory loss is often something which afflicts heavy drinkers, but the interesting thing is that it doesn’t necessarily happen in a uniform or predicable way. In some instances, a drinker’s recall of experience is recoverable, in others, it seems that no memory has been formed at all.

A lot of readers have described the book “as exciting as Gone Girl” – how do you feel about those comparisons?

I am a huge fan of Gone Girl. I thought it was an extraordinary book and in Amy I think Flynn created a character that people will be talking about for years, so to be mentioned in the same breath as that book is a huge compliment as far as I’m concerned. I can see why people draw comparisons, but...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq's new novel is Soumission (Submission). It is set in France in 2022, where with the help of the French Socialist party and the centrists, Mohammed Ben Abbes defeats the far-right Front National and becomes president.

From the author's Q & A with Sylvain Bourmeau at The Paris Review:

Where did you get the idea for a presidential election, in 2022, that came down to Marine Le Pen and the leader of a Muslim party?

Well, Marine Le Pen strikes me as a realistic candidate for 2022—even for 2017 … The Muslim party is more … That’s the heart of the matter, really. I tried to put myself in the place of a Muslim, and I realized that, in reality, they are in a totally schizophrenic situation. Because overall Muslims aren’t interested in economic issues, their big issues are what we nowadays call societal issues. On these issues, obviously, they are very far from the left and even further from the Green Party. Just think of gay marriage and you’ll see what I mean, but the same is true across the board. And one doesn’t really see why they’d vote for the right, much less for the extreme right, which utterly rejects them. So if a Muslim wants to vote, what’s he supposed to do? The truth is, he’s in an impossible situation. He has no representation whatsoever. It would be wrong to say that this religion has no political consequences—it does. So does Catholicism, for that matter, even if the Catholics have been more or less marginalized. For those reasons, it seems to me, a Muslim party...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

K. V. Johansen

K. V. Johansen is the author of The Leopard (Marakand, Volume One) and Blackdog and numerous works for children, teens, and adults.

Her latest novel is The Lady (Marakand, Volume Two).

From Johansen's Q & A at The Book Plank:

BP: Where did you come up with the idea for the story of The Leopard and The Lady?

KVJ: The fact that the gods of this world are so vulnerable and fallible opened up interesting possibilities to explore. I knew that the Voice of Marakand was killing wizards, but I had several different possible reasons for it, so exploring the Voice and the Lady and how they fit into the world gave me the central idea. The nature of the Lady and her history and paranoia, her motivations, together with the idea of a people rebelling against their goddess -- in contrast to the people in Blackdog who fight to defend theirs -- lie at the heart of the story. The assassin Ahjvar, damned to a living hell of possession, is equally a contrast with the very different two-souled nature of the Blackdog in much of the earlier book. There are two stories interwoven throughout The Leopard and The Lady, that of Ahjvar and Ghu, and that of the underground resistance movement in Marakand which is sparked into a bloody uprising by Ahjvar’s actions in the city, and which draws in Holla-Sayan and Ivah, characters from Blackdog. The uprising in Marakand was the plot that grew out of seeds in Blackdog; Ahjvar’s half of the story developed from his initial role as catalyst to that action, the murder he’s sent by his goddess to commit being the spark that...[read on]

Visit K. V. Johansen's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Leopard.

Coffee with a Canine: K.V. Johansen & Ivan.

The Page 69 Test: The Lady.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anne Rice

Anne Rice's latest novel is Prince Lestat, her first new Vampire Chronicles novel in more than a decade. From the author's Q & A with Rosanna Greenstreet at the Guardian:

When were you happiest?

In some respects, I’m happier now than I’ve ever been.

What is your greatest fear?

Death, of ceasing to exist.

What is your earliest memory?

A birthday party for a cousin when I was about two and a half. I wanted to put a little metal Christmas tree on the cake as a decoration.

Which living person do you most admire, and why?

The writer George...[read on]

Interview With The Vampire, the first of the Vampire Chronicles, is among Jonathan Hatfull's ten best vampire novels ever, Ryan Menezes' top five movies that improved the book, Will Hill's top 10 vampires in fiction and popular culture, and Lynda Resnick's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue