David Quammen

David Quammen is the author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.

From the transcript of his Fresh Air interview with Dave Davies:

DAVIES: .... You begin your book with the story of a virus that appeared in Australia, which killed horses quickly and dramatically and painfully, and a number of people who treated them. And they had to do this detective work of finding what the reservoir host - what animal had this virus. How do you do that? How do they do that?

QUAMMEN: Well, in this case, it was a virus that was killing racehorses in a stable in a suburb of Brisbane, Australia, called Hendra. And some disease ecologists went in and said, well, we've got to identify the reservoir host. Where did this virus come from? And in particular, a man named Hume Field - he was a veterinarian. And he was working on a Ph.D. in ecology. He made this his dissertation project.

So he trapped all kinds of animals in the area surrounding the stables in the meadows of Hendra and elsewhere. He trapped rats and insects and small mammals of various different sorts and also trapped some bats. I think he caught a bat in a fence and tested it, tested all of them to see if he could find evidence of this virus. And he found it in the bats. He found it in two species of giant fruit bat that were native to that part of Australia.

And then the question became, how did the virus get from these giant fruit bats into these horses? And one of the fellows who worked on the response to this, another vet, a veterinarian, took me out to a meadow outside of this suburb of Hendra. And it was a big, hot, grassy meadow where they pastured horses.

For instance, one particular mare, when she was pregnant, they pastured her there. And there was just a single tree providing shade in the hot, subtropical Australian sun in this meadow. And this veterinarian pointed to it and said, there it is. That's the bloody tree - meaning that's the tree that this horse took shelter under for shade. It was a fig tree, and it attracted fruit bats.

The fruit bats came, ate the figs, dropped fruit pulp, dropped saliva, dropped feces onto the grass below. The horse ate the grass, picked up the virus. Then she was brought back to the stables, and she infected the rest of the horses. So it was Hume Field's detective work that...[read on]

Spillover is one of Laura Spinney's five best books about pandemics.

--Marshal Zeringue

Phil Stamper

Phil Stamper grew up in a rural village near Dayton, Ohio. He has a B.A. in Music and an M.A. in Publishing with Creative Writing. And, unsurprisingly, a lot of student debt. He works for a major book publisher in New York City and lives in Brooklyn with his husband and their dog.

Stamper's debut novel is The Gravity of Us.

From his Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: The Kirkus Review of The Gravity of Us begins, "Gay romance goes interstellar in this quirky coming-of-age tale." What do you think of that description?

A: At the end of the day, as long as Kirkus isn’t yelling at me I don’t care what they say.

I do think they found a nice catchy way to get people interested in the book. One big challenge I didn’t expect was that most readers initially assume the teens are in space, or that the teens are astronauts. I’ve seen Maya Rudolph’s gays in space gif about 40,000 times, and it always cracks me up.

But it’s helped me learn how to describe my book better…and how to be clearer about the fact it’s a contemporary YA, that the gays are not in space, that their parents are the astronauts, and so on.

Unfortunately, Kirkus saying “gay romance goes interstellar” kind of furthers that misconception. It’s such a great line, but I always worry about misleading people.

Anyway, let me reiterate: The gays are...[read on]

Visit Phil Stamper's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Gravity of Us.

--Marshal Zeringue

Maja Lunde

Maja Lunde is a Norwegian author and screenwriter. Her new novel is The End of the Ocean.

From Lunde's Q&A with Amy Brady at the Chicago Review of Books:

Amy Brady: Do you think about the climate crisis beyond what you write about in your fiction?

Maja Lunde: In part, The End of the Ocean was written out of gratitude. Being Norwegian means being able to live surrounded by water in any form, wild waterfalls and tranquil lakes, majestic glaciers and pristine snow, and of course the fjords and the ocean. It also means being able to turn on the tap and fill a glass of fresh, clean drinking water. This is a true miracle. But a miracle available to very few, and ever fewer. Our freshwater resources are emptied, the glaciers are melting before our eyes, while the world is getting drier and warmer every year. Therefore, the novel also originates from my own anxiety. In Norway we say “write where it burns.” This is where it burns for me.

Amy Brady: The End of the Ocean focuses on two people–a father and his small daughter–who are refugees from a war-torn and climate change-impacted nation. Whereas many novels focused on climate change center around the most privileged, yours focuses on refugees. What inspired you to create David and Lou?

Maja Lunde: The story started with an image of a young man walking alone in a drought ridden southern Europe some time in our close future. I knew he was alone, I knew he had lost everything. And then I saw him finding...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Christina McDonald

Christina McDonald's new novel is Behind Every Lie.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Behind Every Lie, and for your characters Eva and Kat?

A: The first seeds of Behind Every Lie began after I read the impact statement for Emily Doe, who was sexually assaulted by Brock Turner at Stanford University.

It really impacted me and I thought: how do you go on after that? Your self-trust and worth would be eroded. I wanted to write a story where my character was riddled with self-doubt that impeded her moving into a happy future.

So I came up with the idea for Behind Every Lie, which takes a thriller concept and places Eva, my protagonist, in a situation where she is riddled with self-doubt.

To start with, she’s been struck by lightning and can't remember if she murdered her mother, and this further erodes her self-trust. So she embarks on a journey to find out who she really is and what she’s capable of, while trying to solve the mystery of who murdered her mother.

Eva and Kat were really born from...[read on]

Visit Christina McDonald's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Night Olivia Fell.

Writers Read: Christina McDonald (February 2019).

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Bollen

Christopher Bollen is the author of The Destroyers, Orient, which was an NPR Best Book of the Year, and the critically acclaimed Lightning People. He is the editor at large of Interview magazine. His work has appeared in GQ, the New York Times, New York magazine, and Artforum, among other publications. He lives in New York City.

Bollen's new novel is A Beautiful Crime.

From his Q&A with Mitchell Nugent at Interview magazine:

NUGENT: A Beautiful Crime is being compared to Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley series, which is probably the best compliment I can imagine. What do you make of the comparisons?

BOLLEN: I’m completely divided because I love Patricia Highsmith so much. I love how she can manage to juggle both the beauty of lies and the desires of lies with their evil underside as well. And all of the paranoia and murder and ugliness and nastiness that comes with it, too. I think it captures so much about the American personality, or the urban American personality, I think. I do think that there is a humongous difference between [A Beautiful Crime characters] Nick and Clay and Tom Ripley. Tom Ripley is a sociopath without a doubt. And I don’t think that Nick or Clay is a sociopath at all. I think it’s a very different motivation that brings about their own crimes than Tom. So for me, there’s a difference in the motivation in the heart of the main character.

NUGENT: Highsmith was often criticized for making Tom Ripley so empathetic and lovable, and yet at the same time so wickedly evil. Nick and Clay aren’t as extreme in their acts or villainous as Ripley, but I was wondering why you think readers are so drawn to these kind of crooked yet charming characters?

BOLLEN: I think we’re all kind of faced with the grifter, the charlatan, the fraud, the con artist. And I think it’s obviously because...[read on]

Visit Christopher Bollen's website.

The Page 69 Test: A Beautiful Crime.

My Book, The Movie: A Beautiful Crime.

Writers Read: Christopher Bollen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sanam Maher

Sanam Maher is a journalist based in Karachi, Pakistan. For more than a decade, she has covered stories on Pakistan's art and culture, business, politics, religious minorities and women. A Woman Like Her: The Story Behind the Honor Killing of a Social Media Star is her first book.

From the transcript of Maher's interview with NPR's Renee Montagne:

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST: The story of Qandeel Baloch was a harrowing one that gripped her home country of Pakistan. She was a social media star, ambitious, beautiful and daring. Her posts were often sexy - or for many in Pakistan, scandalous. That included her own large family, though they welcomed the money she sent home. Yet all that fame could not protect Qandeel from a tragic end. In 2016, one of her brothers murdered her in what's known as an honor killing. She was just 26. Journalist Sanam Maher is now out with a book on Qandeel's life and death. She joins us from Karachi. Welcome.

SANAM MAHER: Thank you for having me.

MONTAGNE: Tell us more about Qandeel and her social media persona, which could be quite risque in what is a socially conservative country.

MAHER: That's absolutely right. Qandeel was one of the first social media celebrities that we had in Pakistan. She became famous for the videos that she would post online to platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And the videos and the photographs, the selfies that she put up, they were a mixed bag - I mean, just sort of ordinary things. She bought a new dress. And she would put it on. And she'd ask, do I look sexy? She would make videos about her thoughts on everything from politicians to movies to her crushes on certain cricketers. So we liked to watch her. We liked to make fun of her. We liked to see how this young woman was just expressing herself. And she became famous for doing pretty much that - like, just entertaining us.

MONTAGNE: Though there were other people - women - online at the time, what was it about Qandeel? What was the thing that pushed her right to the top?

MAHER: We do have a lot more women that...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Bobby Duffy

Bobby Duffy is the author of Why We're Wrong about Nearly Everything: A Theory of Human Misunderstanding.

From his Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You begin the book with a discussion of whether the Great Wall of China is visible from space. Why did you start there, and how does that question, as you write, "highlight why there might be this gap between perception and reality"?

A: It’s a great way to get people to see the wider causes and implications of even simple misperceptions – partly because we know from surveys that about 50 percent of people wrongly think it is visible from outer space. And I confirm those sort of figures in just about every talk I do, with a huge range of audiences.

The point is not to make people feel stupid in any way, it’s to highlight how even this shows the four to five key points from the book and why we get things wrong and the implications.

First, we tend not to think about this sort of question very deeply, because it’s quite trivial. But we don’t give lots of day-to-day decisions a lot of thought either; that would be exhausting. Instead we use what Daniel Kahneman calls fast thinking, where we’re not engaging in careful consideration.

We also struggle with scales as humans, often mixing them up. So the Great Wall of China is extremely big, in fact it is one of the largest man-made structures on earth, but it’s its length that gives it that scale, and that doesn’t make it visible from outer space.

We also suffer from illusory truth bias, which means we’re more likely to believe and accept something when we hear it repeated several times. We’ll have heard this “fact” in many circumstances, and not thought much of it, but its repetition alone helps make it seem more real.

But it’s also more emotional than it might seem for...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Emma Copley Eisenberg

Emma Copley Eisenberg's debut book is The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia.

From her interview with Kiersten A. Adams at The Philadelphia Citizen:

Kiersten Adams: How did you come to want to write about the so-called Rainbow Girls in Pocahontas County?

Emma Copley Eisenberg: I heard about the murders while I was living there and I didn’t think too much of it; then I ended up renting a house just a couple of miles from where the women had died. The first telling of the murders that I heard was that these women were from elsewhere and they came to Pocahontas County to be a part of a hippie festival and the Pocahontas County locals just weren’t having it and were mad about it. Two guys just randomly killed these women—sort of for sex, but also because they were mad they were there. That was the official story; if you Google it, that’s what comes up.

I think there are ways my experience rhymes with those conditions of why the women came. And then there are ways my experience felt contradictory to that story, and I was just kind of like, This can’t be right. I just didn’t believe it, it smelled wrong, like a lie. So I became interested in learning more about their murders; to retell the official version and also figure out and dig deeper into this contradiction between a little, loving, connected, interesting community, and this violent event that had happened. How could those exist in the same place? was kind of my question.

I had also been hanging out with a bunch of...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig

Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig are the authors of A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America.

From the transcript of their interview with Fresh Air's Dave Davies:

DAVIES: There's a lot in here about his relationship with President Putin. Wanted to - what insights did you get into how Trump thought he could deal with Putin and how Putin regarded President Trump?

RUCKER: You know, it's interesting. From the very beginning - this was right after the election, during the transition period, when Trump was trying to staff his cabinet. He was in an interview, a job interview, with one of his secretary of state candidates. And he turned to Reince Priebus, who was set to become the White House chief of staff, and asked Priebus, you know, when can I meet Putin? (Laughter) I want to meet Putin. Can I meet him before my inauguration?

And that would have been such an extraordinary breach of protocol, to be meeting with the Russian president before having met with the NATO allies, before being inaugurated, while President Obama was still in office. But it was indicative of Trump's burning desire to have a relationship, a friendship, a bromance with Vladimir Putin. He saw Putin and still sees Putin as a strongman, as someone who has the leadership abilities and kind of muscular machismo that's to be admired. And throughout the book, there are moments where Trump is admiring of Putin.

And he actually finally had his first meeting with Putin in Hamburg, Germany, on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit. And he met for about two hours in private with Putin, and afterwards, he told Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state - who, by the way, has years of negotiating with Putin as the head of ExxonMobil - Trump told Tillerson, I've got this. I understand Putin. I just spent two hours with him. I know more about him than you do. You don't need to advise me anymore. I got it under control.

DAVIES: And he expressed the opinion that, you know, Putin does not have an agenda of undermining U.S. interests, right? You can be friends.

LEONNIG: That was definitely what the president said repeatedly to all of his aides. Tillerson, Pompeo, the entire national security firmament, the intelligence community was constantly trying to brief this president about the ways in which Putin tries to exploit American vulnerabilities and leap into situations where he can take some advantage.

In fact, Rex Tillerson was trying to school the president gently, not in a patronizing way, but gently school him about here's what Putin is doing every morning when he wakes up; he's looking for where we've got a hole, and he's going to dash over there, and we won't be fast enough to take advantage of it and stop him. And the president repeatedly rejected this, including rejecting the intelligence that he was brought constantly about the fact that Putin had...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna Wiener

Anna Wiener writes about tech culture for The New Yorker; she also wrote a book, Uncanny Valley, about her time working for Silicon Valley startups.

From Wiener's interview with Jessica Zack for the San Francisco Chronicle:

Q: What excited you about moving to San Francisco in 2013 and joining the tech industry you admit you weren’t sure you were cut out for?

A: In part it was an experiment, when I was 25 and feeling stuck, in wanting my life to move faster. I felt like my identity was more aligned with the publishing world, but it’s a slow-moving industry and everyone’s climbing the ladder in a way that feels a little antiquated. Actually, it only felt antiquated once I got here and saw how fast people could move and how much opportunity there was, how quickly decisions were made.

I think what drew me is that I found this culture, the mood, the energy, the spirit of the workplace really intoxicating. I was drawn to the confidence all around me. I was suddenly surrounded by people who were so confident and convinced that they deserved to be where they were, and that what they were doing had moral value, if not moral superiority.

Q: That confidence was exuded almost exclusively by men. You write candidly about being a woman in tech, which you describe as being “in a position of ceaseless, professionalized deference to the male ego.”

A: I have a lot to say about that. My experience was fairly positive, given the range of things that have happened to other women I know. But the sense of it being a boys’ club was real. I was subjected to a fair amount of sexism at my first job, but it wasn’t a hotbed of sexual harassment. At my third job...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue