Rebecca Makkai

Rebecca Makkai is a Chicago-based author of the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House. 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 book is the story collection Music for Wartime.

From her Q & A with Zhanna Slor at the Michigan Quarterly Review:

I noticed, with all of your books, that you write a lot about artists. Were you raised around a lot of them?

Yes, in a way. My parents were linguistic professors; but my dad was also a really talented amateur pianist, and my mother played the organ. My sister was a piano performance major at Oberlin and now she’s a piano teacher. Actually, I was really raised more around musicians. It was more that they had a lot of artistic friends. My dad was part of the ex-pat Hungarian community and there were a lot of artists there, painters and writers. I had an aunt who ran a ballet studio. As for the “write what you know” school of thought, I realized early on in my writing process that artists and intellectuals were who I was most comfortable writing about. I’m not the right person to write some gritty novel about life on the streets—I’m glad people are doing it, but I would be terrible.

The Hundred-Year House had all sorts of visual artists, but in this collection, there’s more focus on music and musicians. You also go into quite a bit of detail with the technical aspects of playing. Did you have to do some research for that?

Yes. I studied piano and voice in college, but I don’t know a lot about string instruments, so a friend of mine connected me with a professional violinist who read both “Cross” and “The Worst You Ever Feel.” She gave me a lot of feedback about little details. Like in “The Worst You Ever Feel,” the violinist is missing a finger, and originally I had it as his pinky, but she said that wouldn’t be missed as much as his ring finger, so...[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

Camille DeAngelis

Camille DeAngelis's latest novel is Bones & All.

From her Q & A with Dianne Wenz for Chic Vegan:

CV: Tell me a little bit about your new book Bones & All and what inspired you to write it.

CD: Bones & All is about a sixteen-year-old girl named Maren who eats (as in gobbles up, like an ogre in a fairy tale) anyone who gets too affectionate with her. When her mother abandons her on the day after her sixteenth birthday, Maren goes looking for the father she’s never met, and encounters other “eaters” (and potential victims) along the way.

Every novel grows from a seed of some sort, and in this case it was “cannibals in love.” This was a paradox I found quite hilarious, but of course, the whole vegan-writing-about-cannibals thing was even more so!

CV: Why would a vegan write a book about cannibalism?

CD: It seems counterintuitive if not downright insane, doesn’t it? But the more you sit with it, the more sense it makes. Most humans are (or used to be) flesh eaters, and as consumers of animal flesh, we are predators even though we probably didn’t slaughter our dinner ourselves. I wrote Bones & All to get readers thinking, “Am I okay with being a predator? Is that really who I want to be?”

Of course, many would argue that eating animals is a much lesser sin than eating other humans, that the latter is murder while the former is sustenance. But who are we to say which lives matter and which lives do not? Cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals...[read on]

Visit Camille DeAngelis's website.

Writers Read: Camille DeAngelis.

The Page 69 Test: Bones & All.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robyn Cadwallader

Robyn Cadwallader's new novel is The Anchoress.

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

Who would you say is your ideal reader?

My ideal reader is anyone who engages with my words in any way, and one of the true delights of having a book published is to discover the range of responses readers can have. A few years ago, when my collection of poetry, i painted unafraid, was released, some people preferred to read the narrative poems, some liked the ideas. In one review, the reviewer highlighted a poem as her favorite that I thought was one of the weakest of them all! Perhaps the very best response was from a friend who works in palliative care, who used a selection of the poems for meditation during a simple service about grief. He chose poems that I had not even dreamed would be suitable but he framed them with his own thoughts, and I realized that he had read them in quite new and startling ways from my own.

And since The Anchoress has been released in Australia and the UK, I’ve had messages from all kinds of people: some say that it’s too slow; some say they decided to read it over a length of time, not to rush it; some say they couldn’t put it down and had to stay up late—one woman even wrote to tell me she had it propped up while she was peeling potatoes for dinner! I hadn’t intended to write anything like a page-turner, so it made me look at the novel in a new way. And a few readers have written that my main character...[read on]

Visit Robyn Cadwallader's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Wisniewski

Mark Wisniewski's latest novel is Watch Me Go.

From his Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Race is one of the topics running through the book. Why did you decide to include that as a major theme?

A: I think race became a theme in Watch Me Go because, for a number of years now in this country, racists have made it a theme.

In other words, Watch Me Go is about race, yes, but to me it's long been about more than race. It's about injustice and power-playing and sexism and the near-impossibility of people climbing out of desperation via The American Dream.

I suppose one can say that, now, the insistence some haters have in being racist has made much of that injustice worse. I don't know. It's all rather tragic to me. I'd hoped maybe this book could help improve matters for some, but...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Sophie McManus

Sophie McManus's new book is The Unfortunates.

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

Is there a book you consider an ancestor of The Unfortunates?

I happened upon Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill” after recovering from a long illness. I could not admit to myself that I needed to read or think about illness; I’d spend a year trying not to. I told myself I’d only picked up the essay by coincidence and that I would write a short response simply as an hour’s exercise, an experiment with language. I took Woolf’s suggestion, that prose is inadequate at capturing the experience of illness, as a challenge. Woolf says illness can’t be written? I can do it. What youthful arrogance! I wrote a woman lying in a bed, looking out a window. I failed to convey any of what illness is like—to be taken out of the world yet feel the world more vividly, to be taken out of the body yet be nothing but body, to fall away from the mind and into the mind, all at once. Woolf was right. (Of course Woolf was right.) But I kept trying, and ten years went by. A novel emerged. I had no plan to write a book, and no idea that one evening with Woolf would lead to this very moment, and really to a whole life I wasn’t expecting to lead.

What’s the last book that made you cry?

If a book is going to makes me cry, it’s usually on the second-to-last page. But Making Nice by Matthew Sumell did it on page seventeen. It was only last week—I was on a crowded New York City subway, holding the bar with one hand and the book with the other, making that...[read on]

Visit Sophie McManus's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Guralnick

Peter Guralnick is the author of the critically acclaimed two-volume biography of Elvis Presley—Careless Love and Last Train to Memphis. His new book is Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock n’ Roll — How One Man Discovered Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley, and How His Tiny Label, Sun Records of Memphis, Revolutionized the World!

From Guralnick's Q & A with Isabella Biedenharn for Entertainment Weekly:

You knew Sam for years before you started writing his biography. How is it different writing about a friend, as opposed to someone you’d never met, like Elvis?

I knew Sam for about 25 years, and saw a great deal of him. It wasn’t that we started out as friends, but I saw him so much. Particularly when I was doing the Elvis biography, I would do these extensive interviews [with Sam] which could go on for five or six hours or more. In some ways, that’s what makes this book so different from the biographies of Elvis and Sam Cooke. And in this case, I knew Sam quite well, but I was also present at a lot of moments which were of some significance.

I would go to an event in Memphis honoring Johnny Cash, and Sam would be saying, “I believe if Jesus was to come back to earth—listen to me now! I believe if Jesus was to come back to earth—now hear what I’m saying! I believe if Jesus was to come back to earth, he would spend a night at the Hotel Peabody. No—he would spend two or three nights at the Hotel Peabody!” And so you have half the room just absolutely appalled at the irreligiously of it, even though Sam considered himself a religious person. And half the world, maybe the Brooklyn hipster half in Memphis, were absolutely delighted by it.

Sam believed in “individualism in the extreme,” he always said. And that was the life he lived. Whether it was a matter of calling Castro to tell him not to lose heart after the Bay of Pigs, or speaking of Jesus’s visit to the Hotel Peabody. He definitely made an impression. The point is, you could have made an epic movie by just spending one day with Solomon Burke, and similarly with Sam Phillips.

Ultimately, what you’re looking to do, whether you know the person or you don’t, is to be as honest as you possibly can. I guess these are my two aims: To tell the story as truly as I can, but at the same time, to...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday Martin

Wednesday Martin's new book is Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir.

From her Q & A with Caitlin Moscatello for Glamour:

Glamour: Much of what you describe in the book is a struggle for power and control. You show women on the Upper East Side jockeying for power with one another, then with their nannies, and their husbands.

WM: Well I think the issue is really that it is a rigidly hierarchical society. Like a lot of elite cultures in the world, there is definite clear stratification and anxiety about where you are on it and where you want to be…. There’s anxiety about getting there, about moving up and down. And the anxiety gets gendered, because it’s women who are doing the job of building the cultural capital for the couple.

Glamour: Speaking of capital, you wrote in The New York Times about what you call the "wife bonus," saying that some women in this group are evaluated and paid by their husbands for how well they perform certain tasks. People really reacted to that term.

WM: I think the reason people got so excited or outraged by the New York Times piece is because I was suggesting that it’s possible to be a woman married to a very wealthy, powerful man but to be relatively disempowered. Not just relative to him, relative to a middle class woman who works. And I think that idea doesn’t sit well.

Glamour: If a woman is being paid by her husband, it does create a boss-employee dynamic to a certain degree, no?

WM: What’s great and what surprised me and gratified me was...[read on]

Learn more about Primates of Park Avenue and the author at Wednesday Martin's website.

The Page 99 Test: Stepmonster.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Papernick

Jonathan Papernick's new novel is The Book of Stone.

From his Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:

There is always something haunting a writer that gives way to a novel. What was haunting you that gave way to The Book of Stone?

I think in some ways I am always haunted by something or many things. I think the most obvious answer for this question is that I was haunted by my experience living in Israel, in the sense that I wrote about Jewish extremists and violence in my first collection of short stories and still felt that I had not fully explored that issue. I wanted to dig deeper into the fanatic mentality and what it is that makes people into terrorists and The Book of Stone was a much broader canvas which allowed me to explore this fascination. I don’t know if it’s out of my system yet, but I certainly can move on to writing about other things.

Titles are notoriously difficult to get right, but yours seems perfection. Where did it come from and how hard was it to come by?

I’m a strong believer in the importance of titles, how a title should contain the entire DNA of a story or a novel and usually I do pretty well with my titles. The title for this novel was much more difficult to come up with and I spent many, many years working under a different title that I thought was the perfect title. In the end, I realized that it was too difficult for people to remember it reminded them incorrectly of a song that had nothing to do with novel. So as I got back to rewriting my novel I knew I needed a better title, something that was perfect. I did what are Ernest Hemingway supposedly did in his search for titles, and I...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Jillian Lauren

Jillian Lauren is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, which chronicles the 18 months Lauren spent as a teenage concubine in the harem of Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei. Her new book is the recently released memoir, Everything You Ever Wanted.

From her Q & A with Karen Halvorsen Schreck for The Rumpus:

Rumpus: Self-examination can be an exercise in navel gazing, but if you use self-examination to reach toward more universal themes, to reach toward a greater understanding not just of yourself, but of humanity—well, that’s the beauty of memoir, that’s the potential.

Some Girls presents a notably unique experience, as does Everything You Ever Wanted. And yet you’ve said that hundreds of women across the country wrote to say that Some Girls was, in essence, their story, too.

Lauren: Obviously most people didn’t live in a harem. What the women were saying was that I had touched on themes and narrative momentum that they related to, and that they were able to draw parallels to their own life. I’ve gotten a few similar responses to Everything You Ever Wanted, but as it just came out, all of them have been from my friends. So we can’t trust those. We have to just wait and see what the general response is going to be. The book does explore themes of identity, belonging, family, and trauma. I do imagine that it will appeal to mothers, but, theoretically, it also should have a broader reach.

Rumpus: In your recent TEDx talk, you said this about identity and its formation: “If we look more closely at how adoptees assemble an integrated sense of identity, we can see that who we are and where we belong in this world are not just a function of nature or nurture. Who we are and where we belong is an act of imagination . . . We are the stories we tell ourselves.”

I find this statement both startling and liberating.

Lauren: The idea of identity being a choice is an absolute obsession of mine. It’s my great passion as an adoptee and an adoptive mom. I have so many influences in my life, and...[read on]

The Page 99 Test: Some Girls.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anthony Grafton

Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University.

He is the co-editor of The Classical Tradition.

From his 2013 Q & A with Noah Charney for The Daily Beast:

I’ve asked this question of Stephen Greenblatt, Martin Kemp, and Christopher Celenza, and I’m curious of your response. I came across a note that stated that Leonardo da Vinci owned 118 books by the time he died, which was a very good number for the early 16th century, but I cannot find an itemized list. What do you think would have featured in the library of a well-read 16th-century Italian thinker and artist, and what “classical” texts would not have featured (because they were not yet known) that might surprise us?

That’s a really good question! Lots of things that now seem canonical would not have been accessible to Leonardo, who was not that proficient in Latin. There were many things only in Greek in his lifetime, or not all that readable in their first translations. I don’t know how many people really “got” Thucydides, reading it in Lorenzo Valla’s first translation. I do think that Leonardo was more of a reader than he is credited with being. I’ve always been fascinated with his idea that he wanted to create a version of Ptolemy’s Geography for the human body, and by the way in which he clearly had read Alberti’s work, and wrestled with it. It’s clear that it wasn’t just annotation of his own thoughts; he also was responding to...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue