Alafair Burke

Alafair Burke's novels include “two power house series” (Sun-Sentinel) that have earned her a reputation for creating strong, believable, and eminently likable female characters, such as NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher and Portland Deputy District Attorney Samantha Kincaid.

Burke's latest novel If You Were Here features former prosecutor turned journalist McKenna Jordan.

From the author's Q & A with Richard Godwin:

As a former Deputy District Attorney in Portland, Oregon, and Professor of Law at Hofstra Law School, how has your knowledge of law helped inform your fictions?

I know the flow of a criminal investigation and prosecution at a fairly organic level, and that flow tends to shape the arc of my novels. It helps that I can depict procedures in a believable way without having to do research, of course. But most important, I learned a lot about the culture of law enforcement when I was still in practice. There’s a language and a vibe to a precinct, and when it’s not depicted with authenticity, readers know it.

Revenge is a popular theme in much crime fiction. To what extent do you think revenge is lawless justice and does its appeal lie in the feeling that the law fails many victims of crime?

I’m not a huge fan of raw revenge stories. Maybe I’m old fashioned and still believe that our imperfect justice system is the best system out there. For me, revenge stories only work if the audience truly believes there’s a reason for the hero to work outside of the system. Then you can let those stories rip.

Do you think the best detectives have strong criminal shadows?

I think the best detectives have...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Alafair Burke's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: If You Were Here.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Bordo

Susan Bordo, Otis A. Singletary Professor in the Humanities at University of Kentucky, is the author of Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, a book that is still widely read and assigned in classes today. During speaking tours for that book, she encountered many young men who asked, "What about us?" The result was The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private. Her latest book is The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England's Most Notorious Queen. (UK edition now available.)

From Bordo's Q & A at the Queen Anne Boleyn Historical Writers website:

In your book you very convincing lay out a cultural timeline of how historians, fiction writers and people in general viewed Queen Anne Boleyn. How do you believe this dynamic took hold? Do you see any significant parallels in your research in both the cultural demonizing and in contrast the cultural iconizing of Queen Anne Boleyn with other female historical figures?

Anne’s enduring fascination has to do with several factors: First, the fact that she was the first English queen ever to be executed—an event which was shocking even to her enemies. We are chewing over Henry’s motivation to this day, and it still remains difficult to grasp. How could he do it? It’s a question I seriously consider in a chapter of the book.

Second, it’s so easy to construct a juicy archetypal triangle out of the Henry/Katherine/Anne story: There’s the discarded, menopausal first wife, the larger-than-life King blinded by passion, the younger, bewitching interloper. And he pursued her for seven years, willing to split his kingdom in bloody halves for her! What was so special about her? It’s ready-made for soap opera of all sorts.

Third, there is an obdurate mystery about Anne that can never be solved, because we actually know so little about her (few letters, little information about her childhood, her time in the European courts, nothing dependable known about her feelings for Henry,) but nonetheless we want so hard to figure her out. In that respect, her fascination for us is similar to that of Marilyn Monroe. We sense that despite the thousands of words, the portraits, the pop media attention, she has not yet been fully understood, fully known. There is much for the imagination to “fill in,” and historians, novelists and filmmakers have eagerly tried their hands.

And fourth...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at the official The Creation of Anne Boleyn website.

My Book, The Movie: The Creation of Anne Boleyn.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Susan Bordo & Sean and Dakota.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sam Thompson

Sam Thompson is the author of Communion Town.

From his Q & A with Matt Freeman for the BFSA:

Could you give a brief description of Communion Town for new readers?

Communion Town is a sequence of stories about an imaginary city. The subtitle is A City in Ten Chapters, and the idea is that the book builds a mosaic picture of this invented place from the perspectives of many different citizens: in the first few stories, an immigrant finds herself in trouble with the city’s paranoid authorities, a folk singer falls in love with a rich girl, a child has a scary encounter by the canal, a hard-boiled detective is drawn into a surreal investigation, an abattoir worker suspects his boss is a murderer… I wanted to capture a feeling I’ve always got from cities where I’ve lived, which is that they’re strange, secret places with all kinds of weirdness hidden just under the surface of everyday life.

Does working as an English teacher help with and influence your writing?

I think so. It’s an excellent day job for a writer, not least because it involves reading lots of books and thinking hard about how language works. And universities just feel to me like hospitable environments for writing. I know some people think academia sits uneasily with fiction-writing, and I can understand the argument that an academic subject like English Lit has to be orderly and systematic, whereas fiction needs to be wild if it’s worth anything. But I’d say that’s a positive tension — the point of fiction being that it’s a free, irresponsible place outside all the frameworks and institutions within which you ordinarily live. So writing and teaching...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Pekkanen

Sarah Pekkanen is the internationally bestselling author of The Opposite of Me, Skipping a Beat, These Girls, and The Best of Us as well as a series of linked short stories for ereaders.

From her March 2013 Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:

You write a lot about relationships between women. Can you comment on the "gender wars" that seem to be going on in publishing where if a woman writes about domestic issues she's "women's fiction," but if a guy does it, why, he's Franzen?

It's true that folks like Nick Hornby, who writes the same kind of books as Jennifer Weiner and the rest of us in the "women's fiction" or "chick lit" category, tend to get a little more respect from the press. And a lot more attention. But I don't think readers care how we're labeled - they just want to read good books. It's mostly an issue within publishing and the media, which selects the books that receive attention. Luckily, we have champions like Jen and Jodi Picoult, who are calling attention to the issue and forcing some editors at newspapers and magazines to rethink how they cover our books. Jen and Jodi aren't doing this for their own benefit, as they're already superstars, but they're fighting on behalf of the rest of us. I so admire what they're doing, and how they're forcing a shift in the way editors and reporters view such novels written by women.

So you wrote your first book at the age of ten. You always knew you were going to be writer?

I did! I worked as a newspaper reporter for years, but rediscovered my love of fiction when I became a mom. One night ...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner’s latest novel is The Flamethrowers. Her debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the California Book Award, and a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book. It was named a best book by the Washington Post Book Book World, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Seattle Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Christian Science Monitor, and Amazon. Kushner's fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, Artforum, Bookforum, Fence, Bomb, Cabinet, and Grand Street.

From her Q & A with Jesse Barron for The Paris Review Daily:

Your first novel was written from multiple points of view, but Flamethrowers is first person, with a few relatively minor deviations. Was it easy to make that decision?

No. I deliberated in a tortured and endless way over what the voice was going to be, whether it was going to be first or third person. The first year I was writing this book I hadn’t decided. I would go to friends’ readings and raise my hand at the end and ask, Why did you choose to tell the story in third person? And people would look at me like, Why would you ask such a basic question? But to me these basic questions must be asked and answered for every single book.

At this point in my life, I’m not that interested in third person. There’s a certain falsity when a character is given a full name and a set of characteristics and can be seen from outside. To me it speaks of a kind of realism whose artifice I have a hard time shaking, as a writer, in order to get inside what I am doing and imagine it fully. The first-person narrator of Bolaño’s Savage Detectives is almost like water. He doesn’t have much of a “voice.” And he doesn’t always matter in a scene. He’ll just be background—someone else has taken over. There is often a skid in the narration from one character to the next, even as it’s being told by the first-person narrator, and this influenced me. I had been looking to find a first person who came across like thought, who could be drowned out and overrun in the way that we as people can be overrun by others. Having a point of view doesn’t mean you’re always in control or couching everything in running commentary. That’s fiction.

Proust gets away with these impossible formal propositions in his use of first person. He’s telling you about, say, a private conversation between two people where Marcel cannot possibly be in the room. It’s a real invention inside literary modernism. For me, an uninflected voice is something I’m drawn to. Partly because...[read on]

Learn about Kushner's ten top books about 1970s art.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wiley Cash

Wiley Cash's highly acclaimed debut is A Land More Kind Than Home. His new novel is This Dark Road to Mercy.

From Cash's Q & A with Eric Akoto at Litro:

Litro: Tell us a bit about yourself? How long have you been a writer and what is your life like in West Virginia?

Wiley: I don’t really know how long I’ve been a writer. I suppose I’ve been writing fiction since I was eighteen years old or so. My first story was published when I was nineteen. I guess that made me a writer then, but I had a decade of rejections and didn’t have another story published for ten years, so I guess I took a break from being a “writer” during that time!

My wife and I are both from North Carolina, but we moved to West Virginia where I had a job teaching literature and writing at a small liberal arts college. A few years ago I resigned to spend more time writing, and in September 2013 we moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, where my wife is from and where we met in 2005.

Wilmington is a great city for a writer. The beach is close by, there’s a wonderful local arts scene, and the city is crawling with professional writers.

Litro: In a nutshell, what is This Dark Road to Mercy about?

Wiley: It’s about a washed-up minor league baseball player who kidnaps his two daughters from a foster home and tries to be a father to them.

Litro: Where did your inspiration for the book come from?

Wiley: The inspiration for this novel came from...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Wiley Cash's website.

Writers Read: Wiley Cash [April 2012].

My Book, The Movie: A Land More Kind Than Home.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Dunant

Sarah Dunant is the author of the international bestsellers The Birth of Venus, In the Company of the Courtesan, and Sacred Hearts, which have received major acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic.

Her latest novel is Blood & Beauty: The Borgias.

From the author's 2013 Q & A with the Independent:

Choose a favourite author, and say why you admire her/him

I have recently gone back to Emile Zola. The range of his work is astonishing, but he is particularly brilliant on the havoc wreaked by sexual passion.

* * *

Which fictional character most resembles you?

If 'Broadcast News' had been a book before it was a movie I would have been the news producer played by Holly Hunter. Vibrat-ing with energy and commitment, she is rather too intense for her own good.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison has written or edited 75 books; more than 1700 stories, essays, articles, and newspaper columns; two dozen teleplays, for which he received the Writers Guild of America most outstanding teleplay award for solo work an unprecedented four times; and a dozen movies. He won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award twice, the Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker award six times (including The Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996), the Nebula three times, the Hugo 8½ times, and received the Silver Pen for Journalism from P.E.N. Not to mention The World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, the American Mystery Award, two Audie Awards, the Ray Bradbury Award, and a Grammy nomination for Spoken Word recordings.

From Ellison's June 2013 Q & A with Damien Walter for the Guardian:

HE: I spend a lot of time annoying people. That's my job on this planet.

DW: That's a good job to have. You've always been a political writer and politically active as well. You famously marched from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King.

HE: Yup.

DW: Why don't speculative fiction writers today cause more trouble?

HE: Ah, kiddo, I wish I could give you an answer. I sigh woefully, [sighs], because that's what writers are supposed to do, afflict the contented. But most of them don't. Most of them just want to tell a story, and I guess that's a noble endeavour in and of itself, to tell a story. Storytellers can be teachers, like Aristotle, or they can just be storytellers like – I don't know, who's writing the trash these days? I don't know who's writing trash over there where you are, but whoever it is, you pick the name, put it in for me.

DW: When you were starting out, and you'd run away from home, and then you were in the army for a short while, and you were writing through the night to get all of this stuff done, did you expect, did you dream, of becoming as famous and as successful as you have as a writer?

HE: Absolutely. At one point in my career – I don't think I was married at the time. I've been married to my wife for 27 years, and God knows how she's been able to stand it. But she's my fifth wife. At one point I had a T-shirt that said, "Not tonight dear, I'm on a deadline." And you stop and think how many movies you didn't go and see, how many parties you didn't attend, how many concerts you didn't get to hear, because you were working. And I've worked endlessly through my entire life. I've never been a sluggard, and yet I've never felt that I've done one twentieth of what I was capable of doing.

And when I stopped at some point – and I've done this on numerous occasions – and said, "Why? Why am I doing it?" I am reminded...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Reza Aslan

Reza Aslan is the author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. From his Q & A with Randy Dotinga for the Christian Science Monitor:

Q: What do you mean when you describe Jesus as a zealot?

A: It implies a radical commitment to the sole sovereignty to God, a refusal to serve any other master other than the master of the universe. It means he's not this pacifist preacher of good works with no concern for the cares of this world. But I don't think that he was some violent revolutionary bent on violence against the state. It's a little more complicated.

Q: It's almost Christmas, and millions upon millions of people will be reflecting on the stories of Jesus's birth. You write that the gospel stories of Jesus's childhood are legend. What do you mean by that?

A: No one knows anything about Jesus's childhood because the childhood of a marginal Jewish peasant from the backwoods of Galilee is of no interest to anybody until he becomes God incarnate.

The purpose of the gospels is to make a theological argument about his status as a descendent of David. They were not written for their factual nature. They were written because they were expressing a deeper truth, one that goes beyond their facts.

Q: Many people reading this will take issue with you because they believe the gospel stories are literally true. What do you say to them?

A: There does not need to be any inherent conflict between faith and history. These are concerned with two totally different issues. The person of faith is...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

George Packer

George Packer's latest book is The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.

From his Q & A with JP O'Malley at the Christian Science Monitor:

You also speak about the shift in American popular culture, where celebrity worship became primarily about money. You use Jay Z and Oprah as two examples. When did it become almost acceptable to flaunt your wealth as your sole motivation as an artist or a celebrity in America?

I think celebrity comes to the fore of people’s consciousness in times of inequality, when they stand in for the old institutions that used to guide more ordinary aspirations. Modern celebrities were invented in America in the 1920s. Celebrity itself requires a machine-made diffusion. So celebrities grow in power and in influence. Today when I hear Jay Z at concerts, I get the feeling that he is telling his fans: Just give it to me. I will live it for you. And you can fantasize about it through me. But you are not going to get here, even if you wear my clothes, and flash my corporate logo.

Even Newt Gingrich did something to politics, where he turned it into an entertainment industry. He was willing to say anything, the more outrageous the better. He was willing to break down old taboos about what you could call your colleagues in Congress, and how much you could boast to a reporter, and how viciously you could try and tear down the president or [Congressional colleagues].

I guess what I am getting at is a collapse of taboos at that level of society that says: This is actually a rigged game. The old rules don’t work. If you are continuing to play by them, you are a sucker. Jay Z’s story tells you: Don’t hold down an honest job and stay in school, and hope that you move up. No, go for all of it, by any means, and then success will be its own justification. So that is why Jay Z interests me. I think he is a talented individual, but....[read on]

Writers Read: George Packer (July 2007).

--Marshal Zeringue