Susan Goldman Rubin

Susan Goldman Rubin is the author of many biographies for young people, including Diego Rivera: An Artist for the People and Hot Pink: The Life and Fashions of Elsa Schiaparelli.

Goldman Rubin's new book is Coco Chanel: Pearls, Perfume, and the Little Black Dress.

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

Q: Why did you decide to write about Coco Chanel?

A: I was asked to do the book. I had done a book, Hot Pink:The Life and Fashions of Elsa Schiaparelli, and in doing the research, it was exciting to find out about people I never knew about before.

In the case of Schiaparelli, she was the designer who introduced hot pink to the fashion world in the 1920s. I was doing a program in San Francisco on Elsa Schiaparelli, and hot pink was the color of the year!

In the course of my research I found and wrote that she and Chanel were rivals. Elsa Schiaparelli was a single mother and adored her daughter at a time when it was rare that a woman would be abandoned and make a career for herself and take very good care of her daughter. It made her less nasty.

I wrote a little about it, and to my surprise they were both designing at the same time in Paris and would make very snippy remarks. When I read about it, I thought, kids will get this. My editor said, Would you want to do a book on Coco Chanel?

I leaped at the chance. I didn’t know much about her. My 12 ½ year old granddaughter knew about Chanel. I thought, Kids know this name. Then, the minute I started, I was wowed by her story.

I begin by...[read on]

Visit Susan Goldman Rubin's website.

Writers Read: Susan Goldman Rubin.

The Page 99 Test: Coco Chanel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lucy Cooke

Lucy Cooke is the author of The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife. From the transcript of her interview with NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro:

GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. Now we're going to get to the nitty-gritty. I want to talk about penguin sex.

(LAUGHTER)

COOKE: Be warned. Be warned, listeners. Yeah. Well, I mean, penguins are one of those creatures that have been totally misunderstood. We always think of them as being great parents, monogamous...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right.

COOKE: ...Fantastically faithful. The movie "March Of The Penguins" has much to blame, actually, because the thing about penguins is these are birds with tiny brains. They live in a very harsh environment. It's brutal living in the Antarctic. And so they are flooded with hormones that make them basically have sex with anything that moves and quite a few things that don't move, like dead penguins, for instance. So, you know, they...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right. I didn't see that in the "March of the Penguins" or in the many other penguin movies I've seen. Why is it? That seems so strange to me.

COOKE: Yeah, they left out the pathologically unpleasant necrophiliacs from the lineup. So the males are basically...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Parker

Robert Parker's new novel is Crook's Hollow. From his CrimeReads Q&A with novelist Steph Post:

Steph Post: Besides being a crime writer and a fan of crime fiction, you’re a fan of Grit Lit writers such as David Joy and, I’m flattered to say, myself. The niche market that Joy and I, Brian Panowich and Daniel Woodrell, Tom Franklin and others find ourselves in is sometimes small and so I have to admit that I was a bit surprised to find a reader in Manchester, England, who truly understood and appreciated the genre. How did you come to find yourself as a reader of American Grit Lit and what about the genre do you find so appealing?

Robert Parker: It’s true that I am indeed a “fan from afar” so to speak, and it’s great to have a chat with someone whose work inspires you. While it’s very kind of you to say that I’ve “got” the genre of Grit Lit, I’m not sure, as a British guy living in England, that I can fully appreciate the finer nuances. What I can say for sure is that my enjoyment and connection with the genre is solid, and I’m constantly finding myself burrowing further into it and finding great reads all the time.

For work, I end up reading lots of UK-set thrillers and detective stories, to keep on top of what the contemporary British crime scene is doing. For fun, I read absolutely all sorts of different stuff, right through from horror, noir, crime, suspense, Grit Lit and so on, but nothing has really grabbed me like the authors you mentioned.

Post: Why do you think that is?

Parker: I think what happened was I started reading some...[read on]

Visit Robert Parker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy E. Wallen

Amy E. Wallen is associate director at the New York State Writers Institute and teaches creative writing at the University of California, San Diego Extension. Her first novel, Moon Pies and Movie Stars, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller.

Wallen's new book is When We Were Ghouls: A Memoir of Ghost Stories.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You begin your memoir with a memory from your childhood in Peru. Why did you choose to start there?

A: I never expected to write a memoir, had no intention of writing one. In fact, over and over I swore I was a novel writer only. But I started to write a personal essay about the time my family dug up a grave.

When I discovered that my memory of who was graveside with me, that my brother who so vividly stood out in my memory was missing from the reality, a journey to explore ALL my memories of those years living overseas became insistent.

The discovery of what really happened throughout my childhood became the nagging resource for all the scenes in the memoir. After I realized I had a book-length work and not a short essay I tried out all sorts of structures for how to tell the bigger story.

The metaphor of digging up my family’s history was too great to...[read on]

Visit Amy Wallen's website.

The Page 99 Test: When We Were Ghouls.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jamey Bradbury

Jamey Bradbury's new novel is The Wild Inside.

From her Q&A with Elise Cooper for Crimespree magazine:

Elise Cooper: What genre would you put this book in?

Jamey Bradbury: A literary horror novel. I think it is hard to pin down because there is definitely a paranormal element.

EC: How did you come up with this story?

JB: At first, it was just a picture in my head of a family house in Alaska. It was inspired by a 1961 horror novel by Theodore Sturgeon, SOME OF YOUR BLOOD. The narrators are a Colonel, a military psychiatrist, and a patient who writes a journal of his thoughts. My protagonist, Tracy, also got her say in the form of her own journal, which she wrote at the encouragement of a school guidance counselor. This is how Tracy was born.

EC: Do you live in Alaska?

JB: I was an...[read on]

Visit Jamey Bradbury's website.

Visit Jamey Bradbury's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Wild Inside.

My Book, The Movie: The Wild Inside.

Writers Read: Jamey Bradbury.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathleen Belew

Kathleen Belew's new book is Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.

From the transcript of her interview with NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro:

GARCIA-NAVARRO: You say that the fact that we see the Oklahoma City bombing through this lens as an individual actor, and we don't see it as part of the white power movement and its capacity for violence - you say that that's remarkable. What is the problem with that?

BELEW: I think the main thing is that what seems new and alarming in our current moment is not new. These events were covered in the front pages of national newspapers, on morning news magazine shows. And yet somehow we lost the understanding of this movement such that the altercation in Charlottesville can seem astonishing to people without this history. But this history shows us that what seems new is not new.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: As you point out, we are in a period where two long wars are taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan that have sent hundreds of thousands of Americans to battle. And those men and women have been coming home. And you link this with the 2016 election as well, with the rhetoric of the so-called alt-right that has become mainstream. You see this as part of the continuum.

BELEW: Yes. The history shows us that this movement never received a definitive stop in court or in public opinion. In every surge of Ku Klux Klan activism in American history, there is a strong correlation with...[read on]

Visit Kathleen Belew's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Priya Satia

Priya Satia is the author of Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution.

From her Q&A with Slate's Isaac Chotiner:

Isaac Chotiner: How much is the story of guns intimately connected to the story of slavery?

Priya Satia: They’re very deeply connected in multiple ways, because guns were a very big trade item on the West African coast. They were used in the slave trade, and exchanged for slaves. In that way, they’re part of the slave trade. Then they’re also used to enforce slavery on plantations. They’re an instrument of discipline, and oppression, and violence in the whole slave plantation system that the British helped create, that trans-Atlantic system. But even after the slave trade is abolished in 1807, guns remain a big part of the trade with West Africa. They’re just exchanged for other types of goods instead. The end of the slave trade doesn’t actually spell the end of the gun trade in West Africa, but what initially drives the gun trade in West Africa is the European interest in procuring slaves.

And what is the connection between the period you are writing about and the prevalence of guns today?

The connection is the way the British expanded in the 18th century, and their involvement in various different types of colonial conflict all over the world. Guns are a big part of all of that. Guns are a part of their trade relations with so many parts of the world. Because of the multiple ways they’re used—as items of trade, as weapons of war, as items with symbolic value, even as a currency in a way, too—it becomes really difficult to regulate them as simply weapons of war. Look at today and...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Sara Blaedel

Sara Blaedel's new novel is The Undertaker's Daughter, the first in a new series. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: The Undertaker's Daughter introduces a new character, Ilka. Why did you decide not to have a detective as your main character this time?

A: I’m not committed to only centering on detectives, though I am a huge fan of crime fiction. The process must be organic for me, and I’m open to exploring what feels right and captures my imagination. I wasn’t looking for a change. Instead, the concept came to me.

It was the experience I had after losing my parents that was the impetus for The Undertaker’s Daughter and Ilka. The woman I hired to handle the burials and funerals was and remains a bright spot in my life during the most difficult time.

I, at that time, had not the slightest idea of all that goes into being an undertaker. The whole process was a learning one for me, and I couldn’t...[read on]

Visit Sara Blaedel's website.

Writers Read: Sara Blaedel (February 2016).

--Marshal Zeringue

Lawrence Wright

Lawrence Wright's latest book is God Save Texas: A Journey Into The Soul Of The Lone Star State. From his Guardian interview with Andrew Anthony:

You write about two Texases, what you call AM and FM, rural and city, reactionary and progressive. Do they represent a widening gap in the US as a whole?

The political and cultural fissures in Texas are very much like those in the country at large. One can divide it into Trump versus anti-Trump, or city versus rural. Those divisions are more pronounced in Texas, and certainly Texas has contributed to the division. A lot of the political movements that start in Texas tend to move into the national discourse. The demographics are not really reflected in the political delegation we have. People outside look at our politicians and think that’s Texas. It doesn’t represent the complexity of the state.

You write about the Kennedy assassination and the shadow it cast over Dallas. How much do you think that event influenced the conspiratorial thinking that we’ve seen since 9/11?

I don’t know that it affected the “9/11 truthers”, but it certainly created a pattern of wilful denial of the factual evidence in favour of a worldview that conspiracy thinkers have. If the facts don’t comport with your view of the world then...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Ronan Farrow

Ronan Farrow's new book is War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence. From the transcript of his interview with NPR's Rachel Martin:

MARTIN: You sat down with Rex Tillerson in January, just months before he would be fired by President Trump. As you spoke with him, did you get the sense that he was following orders by making these dramatic cuts to the State Department, or did he believe in this as a key component of his mission?

FARROW: He was open in this interview about saying that he did defy the extent of the budget cuts, that he pushed back behind closed doors. But the fact is the underlying realities of his tenure in the job were devastating for the department. I mean, he told me point blank that his ardent defense of these deep, deep cuts to the department was partly born of inexperience. The idea of advocating for your institution, he said, he learned too late was something he was supposed to be doing. And that really astonished all of these other secretaries of state that I talked to.

MARTIN: What else was the through line in your conversations with all these former secretaries of state?

FARROW: Many of them said surprising and candid things. You know, a lot of these people have controversial histories but also a lot of insights about where we go wrong as a nation. Colin Powell is someone who, despite a divisive track record in some ways with his involvement in the Iraq effort, was...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue