Peter Doggett

Peter Doggett's newest book is CSNY: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

From his Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: In the book, you write, "Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young have spent approximately two of the past fifty years as a functioning band, and the other forty-eight years fending off questions about why they are no longer together." How would you describe the dynamic between the four musicians?

A: In one word – “difficult”! And I hope my book explains why. The great joy of CSN and CSNY is that those bands are comprised of immensely talented, willful, driven musicians and songwriters, who can strike sparks off each other and inspire each other to heights they can’t always achieve by themselves. The other side of that equation is that all four of them are (like most creative artists) egomaniacs, each convinced that they know better than anyone what to do in every situation. Usually rock bands have one or two creative forces, and several support players to balance them out and keep them on the road. With CSNY, there was too much ego for their collaboration to work out on any regular basis.

The additional complication was...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Rob Hart

Rob Hart's new novel is The Warehouse.

From his CrimeReads interview with Lisa Levy:

LL: Is this book crime fiction?

RH: In my head it’s still crime fiction because there’s there there’s a drug ring and there’s corporate espionage and there’s an overarching mystery to the whole story.

You know what crime fiction tends to evoke is very much on the street level whereas there’s a mix of a lot of stuff here that’s coming from a higher level. Look at the heroin crisis for example. If you trace that all the way back to the genesis it was pharmaceutical companies who were asking doctors to prescribe opioids and were squashing the thoughts about their different nature. And that sort of exploded to where we get tons and tons of street crime and tons and tons of people using drugs. It was really because a bunch of rich assholes wanted to be rich.

At the end of the day a book has a social conscience. I would argue that The Great Gatsby is a crime novel.

LL: I did argue The Great Gatsby is a crime novel.

RH: There we go. It’s about a gangster and it revolves around his murder. That’s very much a crime.

And at the end of the day everything’s a mystery. You don’t know what the ending is, but technically everything is a mystery if it’s not in the nonfiction section. Genre labels are kind of funny. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I’ve been in this sort of speculative sci-fi whatever...[read on]

Visit Rob Hart's website.

My Book, The Movie: Potter's Field.

The Page 69 Test: Potter's Field.

Writers Read: Rob Hart (July 2018).

--Marshal Zeringue

Deb Spera

Deb Spera is the author of Call Your Daughter Home.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You note that Call Your Daughter Home was inspired at least in part by your great-grandmother and grandmother. How did your family stories result in the creation of your three main characters, Gertrude, Retta, and Annie?

A: Really the most important thing that came from those stories was a sense of time and place. Branchville was such a distinct place when I was growing up. The way of life was so different from the suburbs of Louisville, Kentucky, and yet it was also somewhat the same. We always had a vegetable garden. My grandmother whom I called Mamaw, made something out of everything as did my great-grandmother, Mama Lane. Every old dress was turned into an apron or dishtowel. Jelly were made for winter. Corn was shucked and frozen for Christmas dinner.

Mamaw’s memories of Branchville were so different than mine. I experienced it as a place of plenty and she experienced it as a place of lack. She was loved, but she was hungry. So, Gertrude, Annie and Retta are complete works of fiction as were the circumstances in the book, but the stories I heard growing up...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Ingraham

Christopher Ingraham is the author of If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now.

From the transcript of his NPR interview with Rachel Martin:

CHRISTOPHER INGRAHAM: I stumbled across this really cool dataset made by the USDA called the Natural Amenities Index. And what it did is it essentially ranked all 3,000-some odd counties in the United States on their natural beauty. So I wrote it up, and one of the interesting things is that the county that ended up dead last in this ranking was this little place I'd never heard of called Red Lake County in northwest Minnesota. It seemed like one of those classic middle-of-nowhere places, miles from the nearest highway.

So I just kind of mentioned that they were last place in this article - threw in a snarky little line about the absolute worst place to live is Red Lake County, Minn. - and sent it out and called it a day. And I thought that would be the end of it. But it was not.

MARTIN: It was not. So the people in northern Minnesota were not so pleased with your story. What happened?

INGRAHAM: They were very upset. And it wasn't just northern Minnesota. It was all over Minnesota. And they were sending me pictures of the county. You know, the state's representatives and U.S. senators got in on the action, the media in the state. It was just crazy. It was a frenzy.

MARTIN: But then someone finally convinces you. Someone actually issues an invitation. Like, if you're going to make this grandiose statement about our community, why don't you come visit? So...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Suzanne Hinman

Suzanne Hinman holds a Ph.D. in American art history and has been a curator, gallerist, museum director, professor, and an art model. She owned an art gallery in Santa Fe and then served as director of galleries at the Savannah College of Art and Design, the world's largest art school. Her interest in the artists and architects of the American Gilded Age and the famed Cornish Art Colony in New Hampshire grew while associate director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. The author continues to reside near Cornish as an independent scholar.

Hinman's latest new book is The Grandest Madison Square Garden: Art, Scandal, and Architecture in Gilded Age New York.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Why did you decide to write this book about the second Madison Square Garden, and why do you see it as "the grandest"?

A: It is so difficult to answer this question because it was so long ago that I was both captivated and captured by the subject matter—I truly can barely remember a time when I wasn’t obsessed by this Madison Square Garden and its creators.

Likely it began when I first came to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire’s Upper Valley as associate director of the Hood Museum of Art and learned about the nearby home and studio of one of America’s finest sculptors, the Augustus Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park.

I fell in love with his beautiful 1893 goddess Diana, a half-sized version installed at the park. And when I learned its home had originally been the Garden designed by Stanford White, one of my favorite architects with a fascinating if troubled private life as well, I...[read on]

Visit Suzanne Hinman's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Grandest Madison Square Garden.

The Page 99 Test: The Grandest Madison Square Garden.

--Marshal Zeringue

Min Jin Lee

Min Jin Lee is a recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation (2018) and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2018-2019). Her novel Pachinko (2017) was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, and one of the New York Times' "Ten Best Books of 2017." A New York Times bestseller, Pachinko was also one of the "Ten Best Books" of the year for BBC and the New York Public Library, and a "best international fiction" pick for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In total, it was on over seventy-five best books of the year lists, including NPR, PBS, and CNN, and it was a selection for Now Read This, the joint book club of PBS NewsHour and the New York Times. Pachinko will be translated into twenty-seven languages. Lee's debut novel Free Food for Millionaires (2007) was one of the best books of the year for the Times of London, NPR's Fresh Air, and USA Today, and it was a national bestseller.

From Lee's 2017 Q&A with NPR's Lynn Neary:

LYNN NEARY, BYLINE: Min Jin Lee got the idea for her second novel when she was still a college student. The year was 1989. She went to a lecture by an American missionary who had been working with the Korean-Japanese in Japan. He told a story about a 13-year-old boy who committed suicide. After his death, the boy's parents found his school yearbook.

MIN JIN LEE: And in this yearbook, several of his classmates had written things like, go back to your country. And they had written the words, die, die, die. And the parents were born in Japan. The boy was born in Japan. And I think that story just really could not be more fixed into my brain.

NEARY: Lee, a Korean-American, was determined to tell the history of Koreans in Japan. She lived there for a while and interviewed many Korean-Japanese to get a sense of what life was like for them. She decided to tell their history through a multigenerational family story.

LEE: I was very interested in history, but I also thought, you know, history's not that interesting sometimes. And it can feel a bit medicinal. And I wanted it to be really fun, and I wanted it to be really exciting. And I also wanted...[read on]

Visit Min Jin Lee's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicola Harrison

Nicola Harrison is the author of Montauk.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Montauk and for your character Beatrice?

A: I’ve spent a lot of time in Montauk. I used to own a house there - we bought it from a local lobster fisherman named Billy who was selling up and moving his family to Florida.

When we went into town and talked to the locals they all said, “Oh yeah, I know where you live, you live in Billy’s house up on the hill.” For years our house was referred to as Bill’s house and I was just so intrigued by the strong sense of loyalty and community.

Also in the years that we owned the house I saw Montauk change so much from a sleepy little fishing village into the popular destination that it is today. I think I just became obsessively nostalgic for the quaint little fishing village that it started out as.

A lot of the places that I write about in the novel are still thriving today – The Montauk Manor, Gurneys, The Yacht Club, Duryea’s, White’s Pharmacy, and others have since closed (such as Trails End). What’s nice about Montauk is that…[read on]

Visit Nicola Harrison's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samantha Power

Samantha Power is the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and William D. Zabel ’61 Professor of Practice in Human Rights at Harvard Law School.

From 2013 to 2017 Power served as the 28th U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, as well as a member of President Obama’s cabinet. Her new memoir is The Education of an Idealist.

From the transcript of her NPR interview with Noel King:

KING: For a long time, it seemed like it was America's place in the world to go in and fix things when horrific atrocities were being committed. At the very least, America was to consider playing a role, even if it didn't play a role. And it just - in 2019, it seems like that's changed. How does someone like you respond to this large percentage of Americans that say, we just don't want to do it anymore, and we elected a guy because he said we're not going to do this anymore - we're not going to get involved in conflicts that are not our business?

POWER: First, I think it's really important to be clear what the it is. You know, what is the it that we're not going to be doing? I think the fatigue with the use of military force and the perception that it rarely addresses the root causes of the crises that bring us there in the first place - and that fatigue is entirely legitimate and maybe it's a healthy corrective to the kind of adventurism or maybe an overconfidence that existed for a long time. But if you then talk to people and you say, well, wait, how are we going to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon? It requires diplomacy and engagement and foreign policy. You know, just yelling at them and telling them to be different is not a substitute for, you know, the kind of years-long investment in building a coalition to isolate Iran and then to, effectively, take the nuclear weapons program away. That's a much more constructive path, I mean, precisely because...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna Sherman

Anna Sherman was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She studied Greek and Latin at Wellesley College and at Lincoln College, Oxford. Sherman worked as an editor at Millennium Journal of International Studies, Financial Times Energy, and then, after moving to Asia in 2001, for Hong Kong University Press and other imprints in Hong Kong and Tokyo.

The Bells of Old Tokyo is her first book.

From Sherman's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Bells of Old Tokyo?

A: Tokyo is difficult to know for many reasons. It’s huge, of course, but also it's also hard to know because of how quickly the city changes. Not just year to year or month to month but day to day. Tokyo is a kaleidoscope.

I didn’t plan to write about the time-telling bells. Then I happened to see one. It was HUGE, bigger than I was, and when I stood next to it, I felt electricity: This…! This! I have to write about this!

I needed a way to shrink Tokyo, to fold it up like origami: it would be impossible to write about the entire place. The bells let me collapse geography and time.

Q: How do you see your depiction of Tokyo perhaps differing from other books or travel memoirs about the city?

A: Richard Lloyd-Parry wrote People Who Eat Darkness about...[read on]

Visit Anna Sherman's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Bells of Old Tokyo.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen King

Stephen King's new novel is The Institute.

From his Q&A with Xan Brooks at the Guardian:

Carrie was published against the backdrop of Watergate, Vietnam and the Patty Hearst kidnapping. Is America a more or less scary place to write about now?

The world is a scary place, not just America. We’re in the spooky house – on the ghost train, if you prefer – for life. The scares come and go, but everyone likes make-believe monsters to stand in for the real ones.

The Institute is about a concentration camp for children, staffed by implacable factotums. To what extent did Trump’s immigration policies affect the book?

Trump’s immigration policies didn’t impact the book, because it was written before that incompetent dumbbell became president. Children are imprisoned and enslaved all over the world. Hopefully, people who read The Institute will find a resonant chord with this administration’s cruel and racial policies.

You were raised in a working-class Republican household. What would your mother make of today’s GOP?

My mother bolted the GOP the last time she voted and cast a ballot for George McGovern. She hated the Vietnam war. I was sworn to secrecy, but feel the statute of limitations on that has run out. In Maine, lots of Republicans are more purple than red. It’s how Senator Susan Collins...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue