Bill Schutt

Bill Schutt's new book is Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History. From his Q&A with NPR's Angus Chen:

I hadn't heard of the medicinal cannibalism you described in Europe, starting with the Ancient Greek physician Galen of Pergamon and continuing to the 20th century. That was one thing that really surprised me.

Yeah, especially given the Western taboo around cannibalism, which has been around since the time of the Greeks, to find out that for hundreds of years, for many countries in Europe, pretty much every body part you can think of was used to cure something or the other. That was a complete shock.

I don't even know where some of these [purported cures] came from. That blood was going to cure epilepsy or how human fat could cure skin diseases? The most interesting one to me was mummies, and I think that was a mistranslation. To the Arabs ... the word mumia meant this stuff they used to bind wounds and prep mummies. In the translations, the Europeans thought they meant real mummies had medicinal values, so they started...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Rae Meadows

Rae Meadows is the author of Calling Out, which received the 2006 Utah Book Award for fiction, No One Tells Everything, a Poets & Writers Notable Novel, and the widely praised novel, Mercy Train (released in hardback as Mothers and Daughters).

Meadows's latest novel is I Will Send Rain.

From her Q&A with Kristina Perkins at Midwestern Gothic:

KP: You chose to set your newest novel, I Will Send Rain, in the fictional town of Mulehead, Oklahoma during the height of the 1930s Dust Bowl. While most consider Oklahoma outside the purview of the Midwest, do you see any relationship between life in Mulehead and traditional Midwestern values?

RM: Most definitely. The characters in the book are hard-working, laconic, humble. They are people who do instead of talk about it. I associate those traits with a Midwestern sensibility. Although the Oklahoma Panhandle is a pretty stark and lonely terrain, there is a rootedness to the people who live there that I was attracted to, a trait I might also ascribe to traditional Midwestern culture. I think farm life is something that I have been drawn to as a writer all along, and the iconic nature of the family farm is something that spans the two regions.

KP: In a recent interview with WNYC, you mention that you’re able to write better about a place if you don’t live there. For you, what about this distance lends itself to good writing?

RM: I find that I have to...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Rae Meadows's website.

The Page 69 Test: Mothers and Daughters.

The Page 69 Test: I Will Send Rain.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan's new novel is Harmless Like You. From her interview with NPR's Scott Simon:

SIMON: Please tell us about your central character, if we could, Yuki. She's a teenager living in New York in the late '60s. And her parents leave to go back to Japan, and she decides she doesn't want to leave New York. Does she leave them, too?

BUCHANAN: I don't think that she would see it that way. I think she doesn't realize how long it will be before she ever sees them again because, at that time, it would have been harder for her to travel. And she is trying to figure out herself in the city, and she doesn't want them to see her until she's figured it out. And the figuring out takes a lot longer than she thinks it's going to. To answer your question another way, at least in my experience, I think children rarely realize how much their parents need them.

SIMON: She ends up with a guy I don't like at all, Lou. Without giving anything away, he's the only one in the novel I think is guilty of anything really serious.

BUCHANAN: I'm sure somebody could write a novel about a man like Lou where you would understand exactly his history and exactly where he was coming from. But...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Daphne Merkin

Daphne Merkin’s new book is This Close to Happy: A Reckoning With Depression. From her Q&A with Isaac Chotiner for Slate:

Isaac Chotiner: What, if anything, about the act of writing the book changed the way you think about either your own depression or depression more generally?

Daphne Merkin: I went through different stages writing it. There were periods where I was depressed and didn’t write. Cumulatively, it gave me some kind of perspective on depression and its landscape. With rare cases, it completely remits, and people are never depressed again. But usually it does have a life of its own, and it is not all that predictable. It will taper off and then recur when it recurs.

I think one of the hardest things about being in a severe depression is that you don’t think it will end. I think most people who have been in one would say that. That’s undoubtedly what leads to suicide: the idea that you’re going to be stuck in this painful, in a way noisily painful yet also silent, illness forever. Writing the book, I became more aware that depressions don’t last. With or without medication, they have a lifespan. I don’t think they suddenly abate. They stop, and they recur. There were times when I was significantly not depressed. I think at the very end of the book I said the opposite of depression isn’t some state of great, extraordinary happiness. The opposite of depression is...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Auster

Paul Auster's new novel is 4 3 2 1. From the transcript of his Q&A with NPR's Robert Siegel:

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: The hero of Paul Auster's new coming-of-age novel, "4 3 2 1," is Archie Ferguson, born in 1947 in New Jersey to middle-class, Jewish parents. In fact, the heroes of Auster's novel are four different Archie Fergusons, each born to the same circumstances, the same parents but each with his own story.

In each story, Archie Ferguson's life takes a set of distinctive turns. His parents may divorce or stay married. In one story, Archie's father's business thrives. In another it collapses. He may die young or live. He may go to college or not go to college. Auster has dealt his baby boomer protagonist four different hands and each set of cards leads Archie Ferguson to a different place by the book's end. Paul Auster, welcome to the program once again.

PAUL AUSTER: Thank you, Robert. That was a very precise and apt description of the book - the structure of it - so thank you for that.

SIEGEL: (Laughter) You're welcome. Like Archie Ferguson, you were born in New Jersey in 1947...

AUSTER: True enough.

SIEGEL: ...To a middle-class, Jewish family.

AUSTER: True enough.

SIEGEL: Like all the Archies, books and writing matter a lot to you. And like more than one of them, Paris is some place special to you. Is "4 3 2 1" a kind of fractured mirror that reflects different versions of Paul Auster?

AUSTER: It's really...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Bren McClain

Bren McClain is the author of the novel One Good Mama Bone. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for One Good Mama Bone?

A: Let’s go back to a hot summer’s night in 1994 in Atlanta, Georgia, when a neighbor called me over to his porch to tell me about a secret he’d been carrying around since he was 6 years old. He had turned 60 that day.

He proceeded to tell me about a night in Alabama when his mother woke him from sleep and summoned him to the kitchen, where he was made to witness an atrocity. He said he was telling me, knowing, “You’re a writer.” I carried that story around with me for years and then wrote a novel around it. A failed novel.

Then, in 2007, I was visiting my father’s farm in Anderson, S.C., only to be awakened in the night by sounds that drew me outside to a gathering of mama cows, huddled in the corner of a barbed wire fence.

I would come to know that their babies had been weaned from them the afternoon before. These mamas were calling for them, deep guttural calls, which seeped into my bones and made me think of my failed novel, what I had hoped to be a celebration of motherhood, but I had not pulled that off.

There, in front of me, with these mama cows, lay the missing piece. The mama cow in the center had her eyes cut hard at me. I told her I could not bring her baby back, but I could...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Melissa Febos

Melissa Febos's new book is Abandon Me. From her interview with Hafizah Geter for PEN America:

Obsessions are influences—what are yours?

In many ways, Abandon Me is a conversation with all of my obsessions and influences: Winnicott and Jung, poets, hickies, the sound of my own name, mythology, the books of my childhood, the sea, my complicated family situation, sex, Labyrinth, the way we replicate our traumas in the people we choose, the parts of us we disown, the way narrative shapes us and is shaped by us, abandonment in all its forms, Billie Holiday, the music of certain words.

I’ve loved music as long and almost as hard as books, and it feels inextricable from my writing and living processes. I still listen to songs the way I did as a kid—like each new obsession is my oxygen, the prayer that will save me. Certainly, it has both accompanied and shaped my understanding of language and sound, and what I strive to do in my own art. I could write a book about my relationship to music. I sort of feel like I already did, in the cumulative mixtapes (yes, actual cassette tapes) that I made before you could just drag and drop songs into an infinitely long playlist. I loved mixtapes the way I love personal essays: you have a finite amount of source material and space, and it’s part alchemy, part puzzle to shape it into....[read on]

Visit Melissa Febos's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elinor Lipman

Elinor Lipman's new novel is On Turpentine Lane. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You are known for writing really wonderful dialogue. What can you say about how you create it?

A: Dialogue is the easiest part of the writing for me. I always want to get into a scene as late as possible and leave it as early as possible, so I dispense with the “hello, how are you?” and the “good-bye, nice to meet you."

I seem to have a good ear for the way people talk, so it’s hard to describe the work that goes into it. I try to avoid what I call speechifying and pamphleteering.

I also try never to plant information in dialogue. (An example of that no-no would be a character who said, “Here we are on our first date, at the restaurant around the corner from the office where we both work as administrative assistants.”) That’s...[read on]

Learn more about the author and her work at Elinor Lipman's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Family Man.

The Page 99 Test: I Can't Complain.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nigel Hamilton

Nigel Hamilton's latest book is Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943.

From the transcript of Hamilton's Q&A with Fareed Zakaria:

HAMILTON: [E]ven though [FDR] admired Churchill very much as a leader and a spokesman for democracy and principles of freedom, freedom of speech, nevertheless, he really -- he and Churchill were at opposite poles in terms of how they viewed the future.

ZAKARIA: Big differences; as you point out, Churchill lived to write his memoirs, in which he presented his version of everything, including World War II. He pretended he was in favor of the Normandy invasion, when you point out he was opposed. But Franklin Roosevelt never got to write his memoirs. And it's really strange to me that, until your project, we have not really had Roosevelt's view of -- of World War II.

HAMILTON: I think that's a tragedy. I mean, part of the problem, of course, is that Churchill was a brilliant writer. He wrote six volumes about how he won World War II, and it was so wonderfully written that it won him the Nobel Prize for Literature. Well, that is very difficult for most historians to combat, and it was very much how Churchill saw his own -- the way he considered himself to be the mastermind, the architect of the winning of World War II.

What I'd like to do is to change history, if history is the way we look at the past, by showing how, at every step in World War II, it was the president of the United States who was directing the war, not just in terms of vision and diplomacy but in terms of the military, the strategy for defeating first Nazi Germany and then the empire of Japan.

ZAKARIA: And you point out that, almost always, Roosevelt was right and Churchill was wrong. Roosevelt was vindicated by history.

But I'm going to leave it to people -- they...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Brooke Davis

Brooke Davis is the author of the novel Lost & Found. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Of your three main characters, one is very young and two are elderly. What role do you see age playing in the novel?

A: When I first started writing the book, I think it was about self-preservation: I found it difficult to write about things from my own point of view because it felt too close. I wanted to keep a distance so I could have time to work out how I felt.

This eventually evolved into the feeling that I wanted to represent grief as a thing that we all deal with differently. I felt like I couldn’t do that from my own singular point of view; that it required the freedom of both fiction and multiple points of view.

The very young and the very old also have these really interesting positions within Western culture—there’s an invisibility to them. They’re not really heard.

The very young are constructed as being pre-social-awareness, and the very old as the opposite but exactly the same, a kind of post-social-awareness. And the idea of tackling a subject we struggle to talk about like death via characters who aren’t listened to—it was a very compelling idea to me. It made sense.

There was such a sense of freedom in writing from their point of view—I was able to ask those real thorny questions about The Way Things Are that I was afraid to...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue