Kenneth Robert Janken

Kenneth Robert Janken is the author of The Wilmington Ten: Violence, Injustice, and the Rise of Black Politics in the 1970s. From his Q&A Hannah Lohr-Pearson at the UNC Press blog:

Hannah Lohr-Pearson: Who are the Wilmington Ten and why are they important?

Kenneth Robert Janken: The Wilmington Ten were Ben Chavis, Reginald Epps, Jerry Jacobs, James McKoy, Wayne Moore, Marvin Patrick, Ann Shepard, Connie Tindall, Willie Earl Vereen, and Joe Wright. They were nine black men in their teens and early twenties, many of them still in high school, and a white woman in her thirties, who participated in conflict and protests over the desegregation of the public schools in Wilmington, North Carolina, and were punished with the full force of the law for standing against discrimination. The case of the Wilmington Ten amounts to one of the most egregious instances of injustice and political repression from the post–World War II black freedom struggle. It took legions of people working over the course of the 1970s to right the wrong. Like the political killings of George Jackson and Fred Hampton, the legal frame-up of Angela Davis, and the suppression of the Attica Prison rebellion, the Wilmington Ten was a high-profile attempt by federal and North Carolina authorities to stanch the increasingly radical African American freedom movement. The facts of the callous, corrupt, and abusive prosecution of the Wilmington Ten have lost none of their power to shock more than forty years after the fact, even given today’s epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct. Less understood, but just as important, the efforts to free the Wilmington Ten helped define an important moment in African American politics in which...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Sari Wilson

Sari Wilson is the author of the novel Girl Through Glass. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Are there any novels about dance that are particular favorites for you?

Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead is so good and so well-crafted, kaleidoscopic. The Crane’s Dance by Meg Howrey, who was a professional dancer, is wry and moving, and has a real insider’s perspective.

I also really loved Dancer by Colum McCann, which uses the life of Rudolph Nureyev as base for all kinds of exploration into post-World War II Cold War history. I recently read Terez Mertes Rose’s new novel Outside the Limelight and loved its heart and craft. Outside the Limelight got an indie choice in Kirkus. I also have Zadie Smith’s Swing Time on my night table.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for this novel?

A: Well, I started out trying to write a memoir about my childhood ballet experience. Ballet was my great young love. After I stopped training that whole part of my life became locked in a very private place.

One day, I sat down and wrote what is now the entire first part of the novel—and then I cried. So I knew I had something. But...[read on]

Visit Sari Wilson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read woman writer in Turkey. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages.

From her Q&A with Kate Kellaway at the Guardian:

You were born in Strasbourg, raised by a single mother – how did this affect you?

It had a huge impact. I didn’t see my father much. I met my two half-brothers in my mid-20s. I had to deal with being the other child. My father was a very good father to his sons but a very bad father to me. It took me a long time to accept that someone could succeed in many areas and fail in one. When my mother went back to college, my grandmother raised me. I called her Anne – mother in Turkish – and my own mother Abla, big sister.

And your mother became a diplomat…

This was unusual but she had studied hard, she was a linguist. She never married again. And she was able to do this because my less-educated grandmother supported her.

When did you realise you would become a novelist?

I started writing early because I was a lonely child. My life was boring, the world I created much more colourful. I’m aware of the pull of story land. Stefan Zweig writes about the urge to retreat into writing when the world is going crazy. I understand that but...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Lucinda Rosenfeld

Lucinda Rosenfeld's new novel is Class. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Class and for your main character, Karen?

A: The book was very much inspired and informed by my experience, first, exploring the public school system in Brooklyn, New York, where I live, in search of a kindergarten for my older daughter to attend; and, second, being a parent for the past six years in a mixed-race, mixed-income public school in a gentrifying--or, really, already gentrified--neighborhood.

Which is not to say that Class is an autobiographical work. But my angst and irritation over what I found to be a very inequitable school system--combined with an otherwise socially conscious parent population that seemed strangely apathetic about those inequities--definitely led me into the project.

I wanted Karen to stand in for the many well meaning, white, avowedly liberal mothers out there who, despite their belief systems, tend to act on fear when it comes to their own children.

But by making Karen Kipple a do-gooder by trade--she raises money for a hunger relief charity--I upped the ante slightly, since this is a woman who has devoted her life to helping those less fortunate than herself. Yet when it comes to her own daughter, Ruby, she can’t...[read on]

My Book, The Movie: The Pretty One.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric H. Cline

Eric H. Cline is the author of Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology. From his Q&A with Debra Liese for the Princeton University Press blog:

When did you become interested in archaeology? What inspired you to become an archaeologist?

EC: As I say at the beginning of this book, when I was seven years old my mother gave me a biography written for children called The Walls of Windy Troy. It was about Heinrich Schliemann, the man who discovered ancient Troy. After reading it, I announced that I was going to become an archaeologist. When I graduated from college with a degree in Classical Archaeology, my mother gave me the same book again.

How many digs have you been on and where?

EC: I’ve been going on digs since I was a sophomore in college. So far I’ve participated in more than thirty seasons of archaeological excavations and surveys, mostly in Greece and the Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. Most of them were at places that nobody but archaeologists have ever heard of, like Ayios Dhimitrios in Cyprus and Palaiokastro in Crete, which are both Bronze Age sites dating back to the second millennium BCE, but ten of those seasons were spent digging at Megiddo in Israel, which people have heard of because it is biblical Armageddon. I’ve also dug a bit in...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Ellen Umansky

Ellen Umansky's new novel is The Fortunate Ones.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Why did you decide to center your novel around a painting by the artist Chaim Soutine, and what do you think the book says about the importance of art?

A: Years ago, a friend asked me to go to an exhibit of Soutine’s paintings at the Jewish Museum with him. I had never heard of Soutine before, and truthfully, I was much more interested in the brunch that my friend promised me afterward.

But I went and I was floored. Soutine is rightly famous for his landscapes and his still lifes but I found his portraits mesmerizing. There was something about the way he captured the humanity of his subjects--people who were often overlooked, like cooks, waiters, or in my novel, a bellhop--that was deeply moving to me.

The exhibit delved into his biography too: he was born dirt-poor, the 10th of 11 children in a tiny Jewish Lithuanian village, and somehow made his way to Paris, where he worked as an artist. When the Nazis took over, he fled to the countryside, and he died during the war.

He was by many accounts difficult and awkward, a perennial outsider, like many of the people he painted. That awkwardness and longing is readily apparent in his art, and I was drawn to it. I found myself looking and wondering, what it would be like to look at one of his paintings for years on end? What could it mean to someone?

As to the second half of your question: I come to art as a novice, but I’m really interested in...[read on]

Visit Ellen Umansky's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Garry Kasparov

Garry Kasparov is a Russian pro-democracy leader, global human-rights activist, business speaker and author, and former world chess champion. His books include Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped.

From Kasparov's Q&A with Alexander Bisley at Vox.com:

Alexander Bisley: “For somebody who was inconsistent in almost everything, being so consistent in defending Putin raises my suspicions,” you said last time we spoke. Now Rex Tillerson, who is a big business partner of Putin’s, as secretary of state?

Garry Kasparov: I still want to know who suggested Tillerson’s name, if not one of Trump’s Russia contacts, perhaps someone with the Kissinger group that is working with both sides. Tillerson is a serious guy, not a lightweight or crony like so many of Trump’s nominees. If he is actually dedicated to serving the United States, he could be a moderating force on Trump, because he won’t let Trump push him around and his leaving would be a huge embarrassment after such a battle to confirm him.

Maybe I’m too optimistic, of course, and he’s just there to facilitate oil deals and lift sanctions for Putin and Exxon Mobil. If the worst case is true, the circumstantial case for Trump being compromised by Russian intelligence will be incredibly strong. Don’t forget Wilbur Ross for secretary of commerce, who has big dealings with Putin oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.

GOP politicians are putting party over principles by supporting Trump so loyally, and by so doing, they reveal they don’t actually have any principles at all.

Alexander Bisley: What do you think of the controversial Steele dossier, which alleges that Russia has been “cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least five years”? (The British author, former M16 agent Christopher Steele, has reportedly gone into hiding, “terrified.”)

Garry Kasparov: Even if only half of it is true, it’s...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Marie Marquardt

Marie Marquardt's new young adult novel is The Radius of Us. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You've worked with immigrants for many years--how did you come up with the idea for this particular story and what do you think readers might take away from it given the current political climate surrounding immigration?

A: For six years, I have worked with an incredible group of volunteers to run a Georgia non-profit that works with immigrants and asylum-seekers in detention.

I often visit with young Central American asylum seekers who have fled some of the most dangerous communities in the world, and who are detained in prison-like conditions while they away their asylum hearings immigration court.

These young people are incredible, resilient, and brave. Their stories are so important and compelling. Not many people know what’s happening to make these teens seek protection in the U.S., or what life is like for them when they arrive. I hope this story will give readers some insight into that, while also giving them a great love story.

The political climate surrounding immigration right now is incredibly tense and extreme, and I think that many of the actions being taken by our administration are fed by fear and misunderstanding.

I hope that The Radius of Us will give readers a chance to see the issues they are hearing about in the media through another lens. I think that one of the great powers of fiction is that it gives us a chance to experience empathy, to get a feel for what it might be like to live in completely different circumstances than our own.

If we can develop empathy, if we can dwell for a while in the stories and experiences of immigrants and asylum-seekers, then we'll begin to ask better questions about immigration policy, and...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard J. Evans

Richard Evans is a distinguished historian of 20th-century Germany whose books include an acclaimed trilogy on the rise and fall of the Third Reich. From his Q&A with Isaac Chotiner in Slate:

There has been a debate in the press and among progressives about whether, crudely speaking, [Trump] is a buffoon and crazy and has no plan, or whether he is canny and smart and has a real plan for authoritarianism. Was this debate similar to ones about Hitler, once he came to power?

Absolutely, yes. Many people thought that Hitler was a buffoon. He was a joke. He wasn’t taken seriously. Alternatively, they thought that he could calm down when he assumed the responsibilities of office. That was a very common belief about Hitler. There is a major difference in the sense that Trump speaks off the cuff in a very unguarded, spontaneous way. I think that’s true with his tweets. Hitler very carefully prepared all his speeches. They might seem spontaneous, but they were carefully prepared.

All we heard for months about Trump growing into the role has been proven false. But even the counterargument could be read two ways, either “He’s not going to grow into the role because he deep down is a fascist,” or “He’s not going to grow into the role because he’s a little bit off his rocker, and he’s not going to change because crazy people, especially as they get older, do not change.”

Yeah. I think it’s dangerous to regard Hitler, for one, as crazy. He was an extremist. I think that that’s a kind of evasion, really, of the things that they’re saying and doing, just to write them off as being crazy.

It is really is hard for me to see Trump as not being crazy, even though I don’t think of Hitler as crazy. The tweeting at 3 a.m. about cable news shows, just the inability to understand his own self-interest.

Yes. I think it’s much more fruitful to use a concept like irrationality. What that means is...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Adelia Saunders

Adelia Saunders has a master's degree in international relations from Georgetown University and a bachelor's degree from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She has taught English in Paris, written for an independent newswire at the United Nations, and assisted an agricultural economist in Uganda. She grew up in Durango, Colorado, and lives with her husband and two children in New York City. Indelible is her first novel.

From the author's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for your novel Indelible, and for your three main characters?

A: The seeds of the book started when my husband and I were doing archival research in Vilnius, Lithuania. I spent a lot of time looking at old documents.

I was intrigued by the idea that long after a person died, all that was left in an official sense would be a few data points—a birth certificate, a marriage certificate, occasionally a letter written from the person, something that would hint at something more interesting.

But mostly it was about the bureaucratic data points—it was interesting filling in [between them]. What if you were to know what’s in a person’s file—if the person were wearing it on their bodies for one unfortunate person to read? [That was the idea] for Magdalena.

I am interested in genealogical research—for so many people, it’s so fascinating; it’s interesting what a hold it has on us, how people get interested in researching our families.

My father had done a lot of research. One of the characters he got interested in was someone related to me, my mother’s grandfather who abandoned his family when his children were very young and went to California and became a minor screenwriter.

From that came the idea of a man [the character Richard] looking for one family member who happened to be famous—he had a...[read on]

Visit Adelia Saunders's website.

Writers Read: Adelia Saunders.

--Marshal Zeringue