Alison Gopnik

Alison Gopnik's new book is The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children.

From her Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You write that “parenting is a terrible invention.” How would you define parenting, and why do you see it this way?

A: One thing people don’t realize is that the word “parenting” is really recent. There’s nothing until about 1960, and since then there’s been an enormous use.

The word comes with a particular picture of what the relationship between a parent and child should be: if parents get the best skills, they can shape how the child comes out, the way a carpenter makes a chair.

That kind of picture—if you get the right apps, books, toys, you get the tools to shape the child to be a better adult—is incredibly pervasive. But it’s actually recent.

Q: And why do you describe that as terrible?

A: It doesn’t fit well with...[read on]

Visit Alison Gopnik's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kate Merkel-Hess

Kate Merkel-Hess's new book is The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China. From her Q&A with Jeffrey Wasserstrom for the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Let’s begin with The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China, your forthcoming book. Can you tell our readers a bit about it? Who are some of the main figures in it? What’s the main thing you want readers to take away from reading it?

In The Rural Modern I describe an incredibly vibrant effort to mobilize China’s rural people in the 1930s and 1940s, an effort that contested the state’s prioritization of urban areas. When I describe it this way, at least some people will assume I’m talking about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which built a revolution against the ruling Nationalist (Guomindang) Party in China’s rural areas at precisely this time. But the CCP wasn’t the only rural reform organization in China during this period. In fact, there were thousands of other rural reformers – urban intellectuals, government officials, missionaries, educators, public health workers, agricultural outreach specialists, committed social activists – who started hundreds of rural reform projects in rural China and experimented with efforts to reach out to rural people that look a lot like the rural outreach programs the CCP adopted. In the course of my research, I even found individuals who started in some of these neutral or Nationalist-affiliated programs who then took their expertise to the CCP base areas – very direct evidence of the connections between these two seemingly separate groups of rural activists. The Rural Modern tells the story of what I call the second most important rural reform movement of the period (second to the CCP, that is). Describing the breadth and depth of this undervalued movement complicates the notion that the CCP rural strategy “succeeded” and everyone else’s “failed” and places the CCP reforms within a much broader context of efforts to remake the countryside – the milieu in which the CCP actually functioned at the time and from which it drew a lot of ideas, personnel, and strategies of rural engagement.

This is a story with fascinating, charismatic figures, like the Yale-educated literacy evangelist Yan Yangchu (known as James “Jimmy” Yen in the U.S.) who worked his Ivy League connections to fund his outreach project in Dingxian, southwest of Beijing, but also many others who have been forgotten or who...[read on]

--Marshal Zerinue

Erika Janik

Erika Janik's new book is Pistols and Petticoats: 175 Years of Lady Detectives in Fact and Fiction. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you get interested in the topic of female detectives, and why did you decide to write a book about them?

A: Even though I grew up reading some detective books and watching Sherlock Holmes movies with my Dad (Basil Rathbone for the win), this book really began when I ran across an ad from around 1900 for a female private eye in Chicago.

In the ad, she said she could solve any case but really marketed herself to other women, asserting, in part, that she would do a better job with women’s cases because she was a woman herself.

I was surprised to see that a woman was running her own agency (and that there weren’t outraged letters about it in the newspaper!) at that time so I started looking deeper into women in detection.

Something that motivates much of my work is...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen's latest novel is Purity. From his conversation with Isaac Chotiner at Slate:

Are there writers you envy?

I don’t feel that so much now that I am settled in who I am.

But in the cartoon universe of the writer’s imagination, every two years, three years, four years, five years, the entire nation should put down what it is doing and pay attention for several months to that writer’s new book. And it should be reviewed everywhere, and there should be endless packed houses wanting to hear what that writer has written, and it should stay atop the best-seller list for several years, and then all should fall quiet until the next book comes out. So no matter how well you are doing, if you don’t have a book out, and you are seeing somebody get attention, there is a little part of you that says, “Why are they paying attention to that person? Has everyone read my book?” It’s insane. It’s completely insane, what the writer secretly wants.

I actually, despite feeling over-rewarded, think, “Oh yes, but I didn’t get this prize nomination. What was that?” It’s not really envy, but in the writer’s imagination, there is a zero-sum game. Everything someone else is getting is being taken away from you. You can be very rational about it and say, “That’s insane, it’s a big tent, there’s room for lots of us.” But I don’t know. Maybe this is not a universal feeling. Maybe I am a very bad person....[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Teresa Toten

Teresa Toten is the author of the acclaimed Blondes series, as well as The Game, The Onlyhouse, among other books. Toten has twice been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award. Born in Zagreb, Croatia, she arrived in Canada 13 days later, and now lives in Toronto.

Toten's new novel is Beware That Girl.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Beware That Girl, and did you plot out the whole story before starting to write it?

A: I never plot or outline any of my novels! Every page, scene and chapter is propelled by what went on before and where the characters think they are heading. It’s a nerve-wracking way to write but it’s the only way I know how!

For Beware That Girl, I had that opening scene of the two blonde girls in the ICU, one in the bed comatose and the other in the chair covered in mud and blood for a long time. Page by page I discovered which girl was in which position and why as I wrote the book. I had...[read on]

Visit Teresa Toten's website.

The Page 69 Test: Beware That Girl.

Writers Read: Teresa Toten.

My Book, The Movie: Beware That Girl.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessica Anya Blau

Jessica Anya Blau's books include The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, Drinking Closer to Home, and The Wonder Bread Summer.

Her new novel is The Trouble with Lexie.

From Blau's Q&A with Jacob Budenz at jmww:

Jacob Budenz: Lexie is uncannily lifelike and relate-able even in the most absurd moments. Without incriminating yourself, or anyone you know, can you talk a little bit about where your inspiration for Lexie came from? Or your process for getting into the head of the character?

Jessica Anya Blau: Oh, I’m always incriminating myself in everything I write! My characters are all flawed in many of the ways I’m flawed. Lexie does some stupid things, and so have I. It’s interesting to me that the best reviews I’ve gotten for my books have almost universally come from male readers. Female readers can be much more critical and they are often critical about the same thing: the fact that my characters fuck up in big ways. But if our fictional characters aren’t behaving poorly, or aren’t getting in trouble, or aren’t making poor decisions, where is the story? We read books to live other people’s lives. That’s the joy in reading—to feel what it would be like to be someone else even if that person’s a fuck up. Or maybe, for me, there is more joy if they’re a fuck up, if they’ve done worse than I have.

I haven’t made any mistakes (yet, knock on wood!) as massive as a couple of the mistakes Lexie makes, but I certainly have thought about doing most of the things she does. In writing about Lexie, it was sort of an act of letting ideas and impulses inside me play out without having to let them play out in real life (where there would be major consequences). There are some ways in which Lexie is me exactly: the...[read on]

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

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.

The Page 69 Test: The Trouble with Lexie.

My Book, The Movie: The Trouble with Lexie.

Writers Read: Jessica Anya Blau.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicholas Guyatt

Nicholas Guyatt is the author of the new book Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation. From his Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You begin and end the book with the story of Edward Coles. Why did you choose him as a focal point for the book?

A: Edward Coles is a really interesting figure that most Americans will never have heard of. He was born in 1786 in a slaveholding dynasty in Virginia, but at college he decided that slavery was morally wrong. He kept his epiphany from his family, for fear that they’d prevent him from inheriting his father’s slaves (which he planned to free).

He became private secretary to President James Madison in 1811, following his boss to the White House and urging him to do more to promote the abolition of slavery. Then, in the summer of 1814, a few weeks before the British burned Washington to the ground, Coles became the only person ever to confront Thomas Jefferson on the slavery question with Jefferson’s most famous words: “All men are created equal.”

Jefferson was then in retirement at Monticello, but Coles thought that the former president should do more to promote the abolition of slavery. Wasn’t it time, Coles told Jefferson, “to put into complete practice those allowed principles contained in that renowned Declaration?”

Jefferson did his best to wriggle away from this challenge, and insisted that it would be impossible for slaveholders to free their slaves without also making arrangements to settle them outside the country — a plan that went under the name of “colonization.”

Coles initially seemed to take a different view: in 1819, he...[read on]

The Page 99 Test: Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607-1865.

--Marshal Zeringue

Iris Bohnet

Iris Bohnet is a behavioral economist at Harvard University, where she is a professor, Director of the Women and Public Policy Program, and Co-Chair of the Behavioral Insights Group at the Kennedy School of Government. Her latest book is What Works: Gender Equality by Design.

From the transcript of her interview with Fareed Zakaria:

ZAKARIA: Now, when trying to understand gender bias, one of the things you talk about is auditioning for orchestras, which would seem to be a very simple test. But you say that you could find gender bias there and that there was a solution?

BOHNET: There's actually a lot that we can learn from orchestras. In the '70s, many of our major orchestras realized that they only had 5 percent female musicians. And they came up with something quite creative. They introduced screens and had musicians audition behind the screen. It turns out that dramatically increased the fraction of female musicians. We now have almost 40 percent female musicians on our major orchestras. And these screens played an important role in doing so.

ZAKARIA: And this was basically people playing behind a black curtain so that you couldn't tell whether it was a man or a woman, or if somebody was black, white or Asian?

BOHNET: That's exactly right. In some instances, they even asked people to take off their shoes, so that we couldn't hear whether a male or a female was...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Dana Spiotta

Dana Spiotta's new novel is Innocents and Others. From the author's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Innocents and Others focuses on female friendship. Why did you decide to write about that topic, and how did you come up with your characters Meadow and Carrie?

A: I am interested in writing about nonromantic relationships, which are less addressed in fiction. In my previous book it was a sibling relationship, and in this one a life-long friendship between two women.

I like how a novel can track the ups and downs, the way how, over time, who has the upper hand changes and then changes again.

There is a line that Carrie says at one point:

“Unlike a marriage, which must be fulfilling and a goddamn mutual miracle, a friendship could be twisted and one-sided and make no sense at all, but if it had years and years behind it, the friendship could not be discarded. It was too late to change her devotion to Meadow, even if Carrie hardly ever felt it returned lately.”

I was curious about those kinds of connections. I value them, as there is...[read on]

Visit Dana Spiotta's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Spiegelman

Peter Spiegelman's new novel is Dr. Knox. From a Q&A at the author's website:

Q: When did you first get the idea or inspiration for Dr. Adam Knox?

A: The character of Dr. Knox had been percolating in my head for years before I wrote the first words of the book, and arose from my long interest in the parallels between the doctor and the fictional detective. There are the similarities in their observational and deductive skills, of course (recall that Dr. Joseph Bell was one of Conan Doyle’s inspirations for Sherlock Holmes), and also, I think, in their worldviews. Both are privy to some of life’s most grim and intense moments, and see human experience stripped of pretense and nicety. Because of this, they stand at a remove from the workaday world, and are both empowered and isolated by this distance. In Dr. Knox, my desire was to create a character who isn’t a traditional detective but has some of those same talents, and who shares something of the hardboiled P.I.’s perspective, world-weariness and stubborn appetite for justice.

Q: This new novel is set in Los Angeles. What drew you west?

A: My choice of setting for Dr. Knox, Los Angeles, has roots in my childhood. I lived in L.A. for several years in the late sixties, and saw the city through the eyes of a largely unsupervised child. To my gradeschool self, it was mysterious and impenetrable, and also vast, glamorous and frightening. To some extent, I still see the city through that lens—and so L.A. remains endlessly fascinating to me, equal parts...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Peter Spiegelman's website.

The Page 99 Test: Red Cat.

Writers Read: Peter Spiegelman (August 2011).

--Marshal Zeringue