Eula Biss

Eula Biss's new book is On Immunity: An Inoculation.

From her Q & A with Nichole L. Reber at Late Night Library:

NR: You dug up some fantastic research on vaccinating newborns against Hep B, stating, “Like human papillomavirus and a number of other viruses, hep B is a carcinogen, and it is most likely to cause cancer in people who contract it when they are young.” This reminded me of certain Republican politicians on the national stage who disagreed with vaccinating young women against HPV. Did your research lead you to a sense of the general public’s stance on the vaccine against HPV?

EB: I don’t think there is one stance on HPV shared by the general public. That’s part of why the HPV discussion is so difficult and confusing. Many parents have already vaccinated their children against HPV, but there is also fairly widespread reluctance to follow the HPV vaccination recommendations. I can think of at least five different mothers I’ve spoken with who have five different reasons for delaying or refusing the vaccine. Some people don’t like the idea of vaccinating children before they are sexually active, though this is when the vaccine is likely to be most effective. Some people don’t think the vaccine is worthwhile, despite evidence that vaccinating every 12 year-old girl in the United States could prevent about 1,300 deaths every year. Some people are afraid of the potential side effects of the vaccine, and these fears are stoked by unsubstantiated or exaggerated reports of side effects – one of my neighbors, for instance, was reluctant to vaccinate her son because another neighbor of ours had told her that she had heard that it made girls in Australia infertile. That concern was new to me, so I looked into it and found that the origin of that fear was a single individual – a girl with unexplained infertility whose doctor had forwarded her case for further study. For some people, (and this might include the Republicans you mention, as well as some of the Democrats I know), the actual efficacy or side effects of the vaccine are irrelevant because the vaccine has become emblematic of the encroachment of the state on the rights of the individual and refusing the vaccine is a way to...[read on]

Visit Eula Biss' website.

Writers Read: Eula Biss (June 2010).

--Marshal Zeringue

Merritt Tierce

Merritt Tierce's debut novel is Love Me Back.

From her Q & A with Emma Chastain for The Barnes & Noble Book Blog:

EC: I loved your book. I loved it so much. I just want to gush about it for the whole interview. It was one of those books that makes me feel like everything else is so fake and phony and this is one of the only things I’ve read that’s about real life and being a woman. It’s so real that I wonder if you had to put pressure on yourself as you were writing to be honest and not to worry about what readers would think.

MT: Yes. I don’t think I should get any credit for it; that’s just how I write. I don’t think about who’s going to read it. I write to make really, really perfect sentences. That’s what I’m going for. I don’t care about the story that much, so it’s hard to think about. I say that because I think that people who have an imaginary reader or an imaginary critic must think about what that reader would make of a character’s decisions, or the plot turns or something. But those aren’t the things that I care about most, and it’s hard to think, “What would a reader think of this sentence?” The closest I’ve come to that was in grad school, where one of my professors, who’s a famous writer, just kind of loathed my writing and had some pretty negative things to say about it—and even said flat-out that it wasn’t fiction, which I don’t even know what that means. And that was kind of crushing because she was—and still is—an idol of mine as a writer. But it forced me to realize that I wasn’t writing to please anyone else or for anyone else’s approval. And it wasn’t like before that I had been writing for her approval or anyone’s approval and then I changed courses. It was just that I realized, “Well, people will think that. And I don’t really care.”

What did she mean when she said it’s not fiction—did she suspect it was memoir?

No, that’s not what she meant at all. I think she meant...[read on]

Visit Merritt Tierce's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Werner Herzog

From Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, Paul Cronin’s volume of dialogues with the director:

Paul Cronin: During an interview a few years ago someone shot you. You told the world: “It was not a significant bullet.”

Werner Herzog: Winston Churchill said that being shot at unsuccessfully is an exhilarating moment in a man’s life. I was at the top of the Hollywood Hills near my home, recording an interview, when I heard a loud bang. I assumed the camera had exploded because it felt as if I had been hit in the stomach by a chunk of glowing metal, but it was intact. Then, some distance away, I saw a man with a gun, ducking out of sight on a veranda. We had already heard him shouting obscenities about the fact that yet another film star was being interviewed in public. In that respect, it was something on a par with road rage. Although the bullet—small calibre, probably 22mm, or a high-powered airgun—went through my leather jacket and a folded-up catalogue, it didn’t perforate my abdomen, which would have been unpleasant. For this reason, the entire incident is nothing to speak of. I would have continued with the interview, but the cameraman had already hit the dirt. The miserable, cowardly BBC crew were terrified and wanted to call the cops, but I had no interest in spending the next five hours filling out police reports. When you dial 911 because of a burglary, the police take hours to check in on you, but when you report someone shooting, the helicopters start circling within five minutes, and soon after that a SWAT team moves in. The entire incident was more a piece of American folklore than anything else, though I’m glad...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Sandeep Jauhar

Sandeep Jauhar was a Ph.D. student in physics at Berkeley when a girlfriend’s incurable illness made him yearn for a profession where he could affect people’s lives directly. Once situated at a New York teaching hospital, Jauhar wrestled with his decision to go into medicine and discovered a gradual but deepening disillusionment with his induction into the profession. Jauhar’s conception of doctoring and medicine changed during those first eighteen months as he asked all the hard questions about medicine today that laypeople are asking—and reached satisfying and often surprising conclusions about the human side of modern medicine. Today he is a thriving cardiologist and the director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. He writes regularly for the New York Times. He lives with his wife and their son and daughter on Long Island.

Jauhar's new book is Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician.

From his Q & A with Sarah Kliff at Vox:

SK: One of the parts of your book I found most disturbing is about how referrals work. Your experience seems to suggest that referrals are a lot about money and relationships, and that a lot of follow-up care and tests are unnecessary. Why do doctors accept referrals for procedures that they don't think are necessary?

SJ: There's an etiquette. If someone asks you to see a patient, and you refuse, you're never going to get a referral again. Your business could dry up. I'm not under nearly as much pressure as an interventional cardiologist [who does surgeries]. What are you supposed to do when you feel like the patient doesn't need the care? It's a conflict that has to get resolved, and sometimes the physician who is being referred to just acquiesces.

SK: The case that jumped out at me in your book the most was the old woman who you didn't think should have surgery, but she did anyway, mostly because another cardiologist seemed worried about losing out on the surgeon's business. It's a scary situation to think about as a patient.

SJ: It is scary. That case did have a discretionary element. I wasn't 100 percent sure I was right and that the surgeon was wrong. I, as a cardiologist, was saying, we shouldn't do anything, but we ended up doing it. She did end up...[read on]

Learn more about the author and his work at Sandeep Jauhar's website.

The Page 69 Test: Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation.

The Page 99 Test: Doctored.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jason McGraw

Jason McGraw is associate professor of history at Indiana University. His new book is The Work of Recognition: Caribbean Colombia and the Postemancipation Struggle for Citizenship (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

Cara Caddoo is author of Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Harvard University Press, 2014).

Caddoo interviewed McGraw about The Work of Recognition:

What led you to this topic (Afro-Colombians, Colombia, this era)? I was thinking of a question that gets to your personal story if you are comfortable with that. Did you say you backpacked around South America during college?

That’s right, I traveled across northern South America and Central America in the 1990s, mainly to see places my family had lived. But I was very wary of going through Colombia, since those years were the height of the conflict there, and as a typical person from the States with limited knowledge of the place, all I could think about was drugs, guns, bombings, and kidnappings. But I did go through the country (instead of around it). And it was incredible. I fell for the place.

The Caribbean coast of Colombia was particularly fascinating. It has some of the oldest European and African settlements in the Americas, and it is still home to some of the first peoples to make contact with Europeans after 1492. As I began to do research in Colombia, I found a lot of information about former slaves of African descent. That was a history I knew about from other places, and I was in school to study that subject. Yet despite Afro-Colombians make up about one-quarter of the population, there was little written that described what happened after slavery ended in 1852. So I thought to myself, “Job security!”

What I found in Colombia was a version of what happened in many countries after they freed their slaves. The time after slave emancipation was a crucial period for making sense of what freedom would look like, of who could take part in public life, and of what it meant to have and to practice rights. Colombia (like other places) freed its slaves without agreement on what freedom meant. This lack of agreement created a great deal of conflict between former slaves, free people of color, political bosses, church leaders, lawyers, and merchants.

How can this story help us understand today?

Many of our ideas of freedom come from the period after slavery was abolished, and they are contested today just as they were then. Groups from the NRA and Tea Party to the Occupy Wall St. movement and protest movement around the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, have made political claims based on freedom. Everyone claims to fight for freedom, but no one agrees on what it means. Although I’m not trying to offer lessons for today, perhaps understanding that these ideas have been disputed for a very long time could open up new ways to think about the moment we are living through.

I will admit that the idea of freedom has resonance more in the United States, whereas in Latin America justice or social justice is the more powerful concept. Yet you do see various Latin American social movements embracing the idea of libertad.

I also hope that by contributing to Afro-Colombian history I can offer something constructive to the politics and community building currently taking place in their country. I want readers to know that black people cannot be equated with slaves—which is a common perception in Colombia—that people of African descent have engaged in freedom struggles for a long time, and that this process did not end when slavery was formally abolished in 1852.

Is there anything strange or unexpected you discovered during your research?

The strangest find by far was the story of a man who appeared on the Caribbean coast of Colombia in 1898 calling himself El Enviado de Dios—“The One Sent from God.” He was a messiah figure who carried on his back an invisible cross, and he went around blessing newborns, performing marriages, claiming healing powers, and preaching to the poor about spiritual renewal. He quickly amassed about 10,000 followers. These men and women forced Catholic priests out of their communities, occupied parish churches, and began taking cattle from ranches to feed themselves and other impoverished Colombians. All of this so unnerved the church and state that the government sent a military gunship to take him out—a late nineteenth-century version of a drone strike, if you will. But once the messiah was eliminated, his followers erupted in violence. They armed themselves and began assassinating local government officials and priests. For almost a year they fought the Colombian army to a standstill. In fact, the authorities never were able to wipe out the movement, and some of the descendants of the original followers are, we could surmise, still living in rural communities across the coast.

What are some common misconceptions about “citizenship” that you book addresses?

What a great question! I think there are two main misconceptions. The first is that citizenship has never mattered in Latin America. There is a deep pessimism about legal and political rights in the region, with its history of military dictatorships and widespread government corruption. The second misconception is something of the other side of the coin: that all citizenship rights flowed down from the top. According to this belief, whatever the small cliques who ran governments chose to impart as the rights of the people is what counted as citizenship.

I think both assumptions are wrong for very much the same reasons. I want people to consider citizenship as, yes, existing, and also as the product of people who created it as part of their everyday lives. Recognition is a concept I use to make sense of this citizenship (borrowed from philosopher Charles Taylor), and I see this recognition as a from-the-ground-up dynamic. Ordinary citizens demanded to be recognized as citizens, and they demanded the right to grant recognition to others. They did not wait around for the government or the constitution or small ruling groups to tell them what their rights were. This did not always work out for them, and that is where the struggle of my title comes from. Citizenship, then, was created through struggle—between the powerless and powerful, poor and rich, uneducated and overeducated, people of color and white people. Citizenship is not a fixed set of rights and duties but the outcome of social relationships.

Your next book is about Jamaican music. How did you get from this topic to that one?

So, from nineteenth-century Colombia to ska and reggae seems like a stretch? I guess it is, but I have been a fan of, and doing research on Jamaican music for going on 20 years. In 1996, I went to see the Skatalites, one of the most influential Jamaican bands of the 1960s, and I was blown away by their sound and virtuosity. It was this music that inspired me to study slavery, emancipation, and the African Diaspora in the first place.

Jamaican music is one of the most written-about music cultures in the world. So, why write another book about reggae? I have two things to offer to the story of Jamaican music. The first is to show how ska, rocksteady, and reggae were made by people crossing borders. Music came into and flowed out of Kingston, Jamaica, and it was the constant circulation of people, recordings, and ideas from the Caribbean to Britain to the United States and back that created this music. The transnational nature of Jamaican music is known and often remarked upon, but no one has written a narrative of how fundamental it was to artistic creation. The second thing I have to offer is what I call the social history of the music. The musicians, singers, sound system operators, and producers were central to the music industry. But this was dance music! So, I want to put the dancers, record buyers, and listeners at the center of my story. They were also important to creating the music, and the music existed for them. (Besides, audiences and performers were not so distinct, since they usually hailed from the same Kingston neighborhoods.) It was these audiences, moreover, that carried the music across borders. The outcome of all this was the worldwide reggae explosion from the 1970s until today.

Are you reading anything right now that is influencing your writing?

I’ve been reading Kevin Young’s The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. This book is what happens when a poet lets loose on the ostensibly academic topics of history, literature, and culture. It’s a thoughtful and rhetorically powerful take on black American cultural traditions, from the slave narratives through gospel and blues to jazz and hip hop. What has struck me about Young’s book are the connections to my own work. It is helping me see new links between Jamaican music and American soul music of the 1960s—and also to see new dimensions to soul music. But Young also connects music to poetry in ways that remind me of how I used poetry in my book on Colombia. Sometimes it takes another thinker/writer to help you triangulate your ideas and establish the trajectory in your own work. Maybe I should say it always takes another to do that!

Learn more about The Work of Recognition at The University of North Carolina Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Work of Recognition.

--Marshal Zeringue

Roxana Robinson

Roxana Robinson's latest novel is Sparta.

From her Q & A at 2paragraphs:

Q: Your novel Sparta won the James Webb Award for Distinguished Fiction given by the Marine Corp Heritage Foundation. The question is often asked the writer: who do you write for? In the special case of Sparta–which considers a soldier’s return from Iraq–is there particular satisfaction in the work being recognized by this audience of veterans? Did you have them in mind as you wrote?

A: When I decided to write a book about a Marine (or rather, when that idea took me over), I began to do research about a culture that is famously insular. I learned very quickly how guarded and protective this culture is – how “tribal,” as one Marine called it–and how deliberately and absolutely they exclude outsiders. At a professional level I was rebuffed, over and over. I realized that it would only be on a personal level, through direct encounters, and through word of mouth, that I would be able to talk to the people who so interested me. They did interest me. I was not just interested but fascinated by every part of the experience of being a soldier. I was deeply sympathetic, but that wasn’t a reason for them to talk to me. I might get it very wrong, regardless of sympathy. No one knows what a novelist is up to, and I couldn’t explain it exactly myself. There was no reason for people to trust me.

Which is why I was humbled by...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Roxana Robinson’s website.

The Page 69 Test: Sparta.

Writers Read: Roxana Robinson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chelsea Cain

Chelsea Cain's new novel is One Kick.

From her Q & A with Rob Hart at LitReactor:

You cover a lot of heavy and complicated subjects in One Kick: guns, self-defense, lock-picking, child abduction and pornography. Clearly a lot of research went in to this—did you ever feel like you were falling too deep down the rabbit hole? And did you find anything down there that surprised you?

My hard drive fried a few months ago and I had to send my laptop to a data recovery company in Northern California. These are the specialists — like calling in the A-Team. If your computer goes down on a sinking ship and is recovered at the bottom of the ocean two years later covered in barnacles these are the people who can recover your data for you. I was on the phone with one of their guys, kind of a crisis counselor/customer rep, and I was about to hang up and suddenly it occurred to me that if they did manage to recover my data they might see my internet search history. "Um, there's something you should know," I said. And I proceeded to explain that I was an author and not actually planning to abduct children or hurt anyone at all despite the fact that I had searches like "how to build a secret room" and "chloroform" and "best ways to kill someone with a knife". My internet searches always lead me to interesting places and if I have learned anything it's that the answers to the mysteries of the universe are all out there somewhere if...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Chelsea Cain’s website, blog, and Facebook page.

Read about Chelsea Cain's 6 favorite detective stories.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeri Westerson

Jeri Westerson is the author of the Crispin Guest medieval “noir” mysteries.

From her Q & A with Nancy Adams at Saints and Trees:

SAT: Crispin Guest is such a wonderful character! Where did he come from?

JW: I think he probably came from a lot of places, but he mostly formed when I decided what kind of medieval mystery I wanted to write. Once I had come up with the idea of a hardboiled kind of detective on the order of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, he began to form more quickly. Following the tropes of the hardboiled detective, he had to be a loner, down on his luck, hard drinking, hard fighting, tough talking—and a sucker for a dame in trouble. I wanted a knight, because so many medieval mysteries were inhabited (pun intended) by clerical sleuths and I wanted someone completely different, someone who was used to fighting, to being his own man. And I wanted action and a bit of adventure. But I also wanted a sexier sort of detective, so a dark and brooding man, a little Mr. Darcy blended with a bit of Errol Flynn. But I have to say that a great deal of his character stems from his innate sense of honor and justice carved out by his present circumstances, because to make him that loner down on his luck, I had to take away everything that he used to define himself: his knighthood, his title, his lands, his wealth, his very place in such a codified society. And once I did that, he...[read on]

Learn more about the author and her work at Jeri Westerson's website and her "Getting Medieval" blog.

Westerson's first six books featuring Crispin Guest are Veil of Lies, Serpent in the Thorns, The Demon's Parchment, Troubled Bones, Blood Lance, and Shadow of the Alchemist.

The Page 69 Test: Veil of Lies.

The Page 69 Test: Serpent in the Thorns.

The Page 69 Test: The Demon's Parchment.

My Book, The Movie: The Demon's Parchment.

The Page 69 Test: Troubled Bones.

The Page 69 Test: Blood Lance.

The Page 69 Test: Shadow of the Alchemist.

The Page 69 Test: Cup of Blood.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Lovesey

Peter Lovesey's new book is The Stone Wife (Soho Crime), the 14th novel featuring Chief Superintendent Peter Diamond of the Bath, England, police department.

From the author's Q & A with J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet:

JKP: What was your original conception of Inspector Peter Diamond, and how do you think he has measured up to your expectations?

PL: Calling him “The Last Detective,” I made him one of the old-school of police sleuths, resisting the teamwork that characterizes modern investigation. Having a central character who does all the active detective work and deduction is impossible in the real world, but all crime writers have to contrive some way of fixing it if their protagonist is to satisfy the reader. Diamond is difficult to work with, clumsy, accident-prone, but has integrity. This is why he has survived 14 books.

JKP: Diamond faced a variety of difficulties during the first books in this series, not the least of which were that he had to find a way back into law enforcement, after storming out of CID, and later lost his beloved wife, Stephanie, to a sniper. But lately he has had an easier time of it. He has a regular girlfriend and seems to have curbed his temper to some degree. Did you always want the man to find a peaceful groove and settle in?

PL: In the first book, I had the unnerving experience of being sidelined by my own creation. At the point when he resigned, it was borne in on me that this strong personality wouldn’t take a reprimand for an offense he felt was excusable. So he quit. I was left with the difficulty first of solving the mystery in a way that still brought him credit, and later of getting him back into the police. It took two books to do it.

The murder of his wife was devastating for him and many of my readers. I’m often asked how I could have done this. I answer that...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Matt Richtel

Matt Richtel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times technology journalist and novelist. He won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for his series on distracted driving. His new book is A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention.

From Richtel's Q & A with Jon Foro for Omnivoracious:

How did you come to the story of Reggie Shaw?

I first met Reggie for a story about distracted driving that I wrote for The New York Times. In more than two decades in journalism, I’ve met hundreds of fascinating people. Few like Reggie. He has a depth of character, a candor, quiet wit, the All-American kid laid bare through tragedy, dark truth and, ultimately, redemption. He became the first person, or one of the first, charged with negligent homicide in a texting and driving death. And he was, in many ways, the last person you’d ever expect that to happen to. Ordinary guy, good guy, turned hunted and haunted criminal, turned hero.

At what point did you realize that this story had potential beyond the tragedy of the accident? What compelled you to write the larger story about technology and society?

Although the Reggie story stuck with me, and he and I stayed in contact, I wasn’t particularly compelled to write a book about it, not at first. Instead, I kept studying and thinking about the science: what was so alluring about technology; what was it doing to our brains? Why would Reggie, a thoughtful, smart 19-year-old kid send a meaningless text while driving at dawn in the rain, while going 55 miles an hour? I realized that I had formulated some ideas about just how magnetic our devices had become, how irresistible, and they were steeped in science that is both decades old and emerging. I’d talk to scientists about my thesis and they’d say: Yes, yes, you have to write about this. Something is happening to our brains and you’ve got to write about it.

But those were just ideas. And, from my standpoint, ideas don’t make good books. Certainly not great books. Great books are stories. They are about people, characters, and passions. That’s my bias, anyway. I want to be swept away by a narrative. Reading, to me, should be fun. Think: Unbroken or Into Thin Air.

In the years I spent learning about the science, I got to know the scientists. You want to talk about characters. These are brilliant, funny, quirky, opinionated people. They laid the groundwork for how we, as a society, understand the brain. They also have their quirks. One of the foremost experts has a license plate that reads “attend.” When I asked him why, he said: “Because turn off your #*^& cell phone is too long.” Another neuroscientist holds crazy Friday Night parties in San Francisco with the most famous technology people, and with musicians and the digerati. One of the great early scholars, whose work after World War II helped shape how we think about the brain and its relationship with technology, told me incredible stories about the early days of neuroscience.

Now I was starting to see story lines; the story of...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Matt Richtel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Ellroy

James Ellroy's new novel is Perfidia.

From his Q & A with Emma Chastain for The Barnes & Noble Book Blog:

Is it daunting, embarking on a new quartet?

It’s moving, more than anything else. Perfidia, the first novel of the Second L.A. quartet, which comes out September 9 from Alfred A. Knopf, is my Ragtime. And yes, it’s a novel of a horrible occurrence. America’s entrance into World War II, the Pearl Harbor bombing, the grave injustice of the Japanese interment, where innocent Japanese Americans and foreign-born Japanese were imprisoned for the length of the war because they might be fifth-column spies. It was a gross injustice that started—what I call the month of December ’41—the party at the edge of the abyss, and the precipice of America’s ascendance. It was a largely inclusive time; Americans, Los Angelinos were united in common cause. Sex took on an egalitarian tinge. There were brief and passionate love affairs deeply inspired by the war, and this overarching sense that we could be next. They don’t know what hit them in Pearl Harbor, we could be next. And I’m living that right now and it’s both daunting and entirely liberating for me as a writer.

What’s liberating about it?

It’s getting to live the time, assume the attitudes, of the diverse range of people and comport within their souls and their...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Rebecca Makkai

Rebecca Makkai is a Chicago-based writer whose first novel, The Borrower, is a Booklist Top Ten Debut, an Indie Next pick, an O Magazine selection, and one of Chicago Magazine's choices for best fiction of 2011. Her short fiction has been chosen for The Best American Short Stories for four consecutive years (2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008), and appears regularly in journals like Harper's, Tin House, Ploughshares, and New England Review.

Makkai's new novel is The Hundred-Year House.

From her Q & A with Zhanna Slor for The Millions:

The Millions: The first thing that was really clear to me after finishing your book is how incredibly complicated the structure of it is, especially how every section goes backward in time – from 1999 to 1955 to 1929. How did you go about writing it? Did you write it in chronological order, or did you play around with it a lot?

Rebecca Makkai: I wrote a short story once called “Gate House,” which consisted of some of the plot of the 1999 story. And it didn’t work as a short story at all; it was terrible. But when I revisited it, years later, I suddenly thought of turning it into a novel, and that’s when I started to consider what I would have to do to move backwards in time. At that point the whole thing was coming to me as I went about my day, as I was brushing my teeth – I would have these ideas of the way the plot would be layered. Soon I realized it would be stupid to start writing without seriously outlining, so that was the next thing I did. I ended up with a sixty-page outline. I had calendars, I had timelines, I had historical events. And of course it changed a ton as I was actually writing it. I knew I wanted to write it in reverse chronological order, as it appears in the book, but I had to outline first. Because I couldn’t write 1955 until I knew what happened in 1929.

TM: So you did have to jump around a little?

RM: Well it’s not that I was jumping around, it’s that I had to have every detail worked out before I could write anything, which is unusual. I think people are afraid of...[read on]

Learn more about the author and her work at Rebecca Makkai's website, Facebook page and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: The Borrower.

The Page 69 Test: The Hundred-Year House.

My Book, The Movie: The Hundred-Year House.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shannon Stoker

Shannon Stoker has been writing her entire life. She decided to give writing a serious try after her husband bought her a small dog as a birthday gift. Nucky stole her heart immediately and she wanted a job that provided more flexibility to stay with him.

When she’s not writing Stoker enjoys watching an insane amount of television shows as well as horror movies. She got a little taste of television herself when she competed on an episode of TLC’s Four Weddings. You can catch her episode in replays on the channel. Her latest book is The Alliance: A Registry Novel.

Stoker was born in Clawson, Michigan and raised in Elgin, Illinois. She currently lives in DeKalb, Illinois with her husband Andy and small dog Nucky.

From Stoker's Q & A at IceyBooks:

IceyBooks: Describe your dystopian series, The Registry.

Shannon Stoker: In the future American girls are sold into marriages, while American boys are required to serve in the armed forces. The Registry series tells the story of Mia and Andrew, two individuals who fall in to these categories. They go against the grain and decide to reject their prescribed lives. Escape is not so easy though, since they are trailed by Mia’s former intended, and escape is not enough, because of their ties to the people left at home. The Registry examines the dystopian genre from a global standpoint and the reader gets a view of many different ideologies.

IceyBooks: Many novels are inspired by one sentence or question, was there one that sparked THE REGISTRY?

Shannon Stoker: Actually, my friend once said: “I will never join Facebook, Facebook is evil.” I thought to myself, I’ll show her an evil Facebook, and created The Registry. I think it’s funny that now she is an active member of ...[read on]

Visit Shannon Stoker's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Shannon Stoker & Nucky.

Writers Read: Shannon Stoker.

The Page 69 Test: The Alliance.

My Book, The Movie: The Alliance.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Whitmer

From Julianna Baggott's exchange with Benjamin Whitmer about his new novel, Cry Father:

I despise the pervasive myth of inspiration – the idea that an entire book can exist simply because of an accumulation of inspired ideas – but I don’t deny that inspiration exists. There are things that have no other explanation. Was there a singular moment of inspiration for this book?

Kind of. For me it was just looking at my children and being scared to death. Parenthood is always on my mind. I’m a single father, and it’s the most important thing in my life. Which doesn’t make me any better at it, of course, it just means I worry about it all the time. What could I have protected them from that I didn’t? What more could I have done for them? Where did I screw up? Parenthood is the best way to come face to face with your failures as a person. And fatherhood, in particular, is a great way to drive your head straight into all those tropes of masculinity that most of us’d probably be better off without. Cry Father came out of wrestling with those. I don’t think I learned anything from it, except maybe that I’m no good at writing positive examples, but that’s...[read on]

Visit Benjamin Whitmer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Arthur Allen

Since 1995 Arthur Allen has been writing articles and books, mostly about science and medicine, for publications such as The Washington Post, Science, Smithsonian, Landscape Architecture, The New Republic and Slate.com. His 2007 book Vaccine was the first major U.S. work to examine the anti-vaccine movement, and he has written many articles about the science and anthropology of vaccines. In 2010 he published Ripe, a foray into the world of tomato breeding, genetics, culture and food snobbism, which allowed him to spend time in southern Italy, Mexico and western China.

Allen's new book is The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis.

From the author's Q & A with Stacy Herlihy for the Times of Israel:

How did you come up with the idea for this book?

My book Vaccine (WW Norton, 2007) has a chapter titled “War is Good for Children.” It’s primarily about research funded by the U.S. military to develop vaccines. Armies are interested in vaccines because they want their troops to stay healthy. During World War II, military-funded labs came up with new vaccines against flu, Japanese encephalitis, yellow fever, and, finally typhus. I wrote a small amount about the U.S. typhus vaccine in the book and while doing the work I read a small amount about these strange vaccines they were making in Poland during the war. I didn’t spent much time on that while writing the book, but the names Weigl and Fleck stuck in my mind. A few years ago I decided to see if I could find out anything more about them, and I did.

Can you tell us about your research process?

I always start out reading whatever secondary literature I can get my hands on. In this case, that meant books about the Nazi doctors, and typhus, and Buchenwald, and Auschwitz, and the city of Lwow, which is now Lviv, Ukraine. I probably read all or parts of about 300 books—trying to gain generalized knowledge for a while and pretty soon tunneling into the literature that seemed most linked to what I was after.

Pretty soon I developed a sense of my book’s narrative arc, how it would move along, and then I tried to populate the chapters. In the case of this book it...[read on]

Learn more about The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis.

Visit Arthur Allen's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl.

--Marshal Zeringue

Louise Aronson

Louise Aronson is the author of the story collection A History of the Present Illness.

From her Q & A with Christine Sneed:

Tell us a little about your book.

With A History of the Present Illness I wanted to take readers into the real lives of real and often overlooked people - all of whom might be described as either patients as doctors, among many other mostly more important characteristics - in the hugely varied neighborhoods, hospitals, and nursing homes of San Francisco. Among the stories are: the elderly Chinese immigrant who must sacrifice his demented wife's well–being to his Americanized son's authority, the busy Latina physician whose eldest daughter's need for more attention has disastrous consequences, the psychiatrist who advocates for the underserved but may herself be crazy, the gay doctor who learns very different lessons about family from his life and his work, and the young veteran whose injuries become a metaphor for the rest of his life. I wanted to show the humanity of many different sorts of people, to be honest about life and medicine, to make people laugh and cry. I also wanted to explore the role of stories in medicine and offer a portrait of health and illness in American today that was different from what was already out there, and completely honest.

You write with extraordinary sympathy about so many different people - the elderly and the very young, immigrant families from all over the world, young medical students, experienced physicians. I'm guessing that as a practicing MD, you have treated people who might or might not resemble your characters. How do you immerse yourself in these different perspectives and voices?

I write about all the different sorts of people I have met as a medical student, resident and practicing doctor, though my characters are...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Wendy Davis

Wendy Davis is the Democratic candidate for governor of Texas and author of a new memoir, Forgetting to Be Afraid.

From her Q & A with Jill Filipovic at Cosmopolitan:

How does your life experience, including ending a pregnancy but also growing up poor and the many other details in your book, inform your views and shape what kind of leader you are?

My story is similar to so many. The challenges I faced are similar to so many challenges that people in my state face: going to work when I was 14 to help my mother, who had a very limited education and was left as the primary financial support of her four young children. Finding myself a single mom when I was very young. Feeling the disappointment in myself for getting off track; feeling frustrated that I didn't know how to get back on track. Understanding the experience of standing at the grocery store when you have to put groceries back because you don't have enough money; understanding what it's like to come home and have your electricity turned off, even though you're working as hard as you can. I know there are people in our state who confront these challenges every day.

My path out of that was education. While a lot of folks know about my fight in the reproductive rights arena, they may not know about what a strong fighter I've been in education. My first filibuster was to try to stop $5.5 billion in cuts to public schools. My fight for equal pay for equal work for women in our state has of course been informed by my own personal experiences. My position and desire as governor to move our state forward with an increase in the minimum wage is informed by my experiences. My fight in consumer reform too — I have been unafraid to take on some of the biggest bullies in the Texas capital, the payday lenders, the electricity arena, and the insurance arena. I've taken them on because I understand how families can be made or broken based on whether they're treated fairly. I am a product of my life experience. The legislator I've become, and the governor I will be, is all informed by that.

How have you felt about the various responses to your memoir, positive and negative?

I don't read them. I let...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Janet Bolin

Janet Bolin's love of sewing, knitting, crocheting, quilting, and machine embroidery led her to invent the village of Threadville where the supplies for all these hobbies, and experts to untangle all those unavoidable snares, are only a short walk away. Bolin's love of reading, writing, and mysteries caused her to add some rather nefarious activities to Threadville, along with a slightly reluctant sleuth named Willow who co-opts her best friend, Haylee, and Haylee's three (yes, 3) mothers to help solve murders.

Bolin's latest Threadville Mystery is Night of the Living Thread.

From her Q & A with Rosemary McCracken:

Janet, you are becoming well-known as a writer of “cozy” mysteries. What does the cozy sub-genre mean to you?

Cozy is a sub-genre of the traditional mystery—think Agatha Christie—in which the reader can attempt to solve the puzzle along with the sleuth. In a cozy, readers won’t encounter overt violence (except for the murder itself, but gore in cozy mysteries is held to a minimum), gratuitous sex or profanity. The sleuth is an amateur, often with a skill or hobby that may help solve murders. Cozies take place in a defined space where everyone usually knows everyone else. It gives a whole new meaning to “cozy,” doesn’t it?

Do your novels require a lot of research?

It’s terrible! I have to visit sewing and embroidery shops and try out the latest embroidery machines and software. I can hardly stand that. (Where’s the nearest sewing store? I’m on my way!)

Is the protagonist at all like you? If so, in what ways?

Willow is in her early 30s. She’s tall, slim, talented and feisty. Yep, that pretty well describes me. No? Well...[read on]

Visit Janet Bolin's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

The Page 69 Test: Threaded for Trouble.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Janet Bolin and Laddie and Lacy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kimberly Elkins

Kimberly Elkins was a finalist for the National Magazine Award and has published fiction and nonfiction in the Atlantic, Best New American Voices, Iowa Review, Chicago Tribune, Glamour, and Village Voice, among others.

She has a B.A. from Duke University, an M.A. in Creative Writing from Florida State, and an MFA in Fiction from Boston University. Elkins grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

What Is Visible is her first novel.

From Elkins's Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:

I always want to know what sparked a particular book and why it haunts the author. Why Laura Bridgman? How did the subject matter personally speak to you?

I first read about Laura Bridgman in the New Yorker in 2001, and was astounded that I’d never heard of her. The mid-nineteenth century’s second most famous woman and Helen Keller’s predecessor, and yet she’d seemingly vanished from history! But it was the photograph of Laura that really got me: an ethereal, almost emaciated, and yet somehow fierce-looking young woman with a ribboned shade tied round her eyes, balancing an enormous, raised-letter book on her lap. She sat absolutely erect with a stubborn dignity and vulnerability that both opened and broke my heart, posing for a photographer she couldn’t see, for a photograph she’d never see, and with a face and body that she’d never know except through touch. That very night, I stayed up until dawn writing a story about her that would appear shortly thereafter in The Atlantic. That’s how quickly and completely I got into her head and heart, and she in mine.

And yet for many years, even while writing the novel, I had no plausible idea why I had been so irrevocably drawn to this woman who’d lost four of her five senses--what could I possibly have in common with her, and how could I possibly know her voice so well? Finally, it hit me, just shy of the book’s publication, that I had immediately and subconsciously identified with her sense of profound isolation, her inability to communicate her deepest thoughts and desires to anyone she thought would truly understand her. These feelings I knew from a lifetime of battling severe depression, and though our disabilities were far from the same, it was a terrible bridge that we shared across the centuries. Four years ago, I finally found...[read on]

Visit Kimberly Elkins's website.

My Book, The Movie: What Is Visible.

The Page 69 Test: What Is Visible.

Writers Read: Kimberly Elkins.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Gilbert

Matthew Gilbert's new book is Off The Leash: A Year at the Dog Park.

From his Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:

You’re a person after my own heart, a homebody, yet Toby, your dog, transformed you into someone who loves the company of others and who is truly present in the world. How did this alchemy take place?

When the puppy you’re falling in love with comes into your office and starts nudging your elbow with his cold nose, looking at you with his brown eyes like you’re the best person in the world, well, you go wherever he wants to go.

And my dog, Toby, always only wanted to go to the dog park. So as reticent as I was to stand around making chitchat with other dog owners, I couldn’t resist Toby’s hunger for play. I was the classic writer-type who writes because he’d rather not communicate in person; the thought of a dog park group was not inviting. And I was the classic TV addict who prefers to be protected from the hurts and messiness of the real world by a screen. But I had a dog who was a thoroughly social being, and he pulled me and pushed me.

I love the way we get the dog we need. In my case it was an introverted owner getting an extroverted dog who pulled him into a more vibrant, present life.

And gradually, as I write in the book, I came around. Big-time. I began to love the semi-anonymity of the park, the shared exhilaration of watching dogs wrestle and play, and the new friendships, which were...[read on]

Visit Matthew Gilbert's website and Twitter perch.

Coffee with a Canine: Matthew Gilbert & Toby.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ed Lin

Ed Lin is the author of several books and is an all-around standup kinda guy. Waylaid and This Is a Bust were both published by Kaya Press in 2002 and 2007, respectively, and both were widely praised. Both also won the Members’ Choice Awards in the Asian American Literary Awards. His third book, Snakes Can’t Run, was published by Minotaur Books in April 2010; it was loved by many and also won an Asian American Literary Award, and was followed by in One Red Bastard 2012. Lin, who is of Taiwanese and Chinese descent, is the first author to win three Asian American Literary Awards.

Lin's new novel is Ghost Month.

From the author's Q & A with Anna Wu for Taiwanese American.org:

Anna Wu: Hi Ed. Could you tell us a bit about your novel, Ghost Month?

Ed Lin: My latest novel Ghost Month was published by Soho Crime, actually near the start of Ghost Month, the seventh lunar month in late July, a time of year the gates to the underworld open and ghosts are free to roam the earth. It is a Taipei-based mystery and basically, this guy named Jing-nan who works at the Shilin Night Market finds out that this girl that he’s loved his whole life and planned to marry was murdered, and he goes and tries to find out how she was killed and who killed her.

It’s also a bit of a meditation on the state of Taiwan, because there is a small faction that wants eventual or soon-ish “reunion,” (I say in quotes), with China. And another faction wants to declare independence immediately, but most people actually favor the status quo right now, this sort of strange kind of independence. But, you know, the status quo kind of means something different to everybody, and I just wanted to really be as inclusive as possible in terms of how people feel.

A: When did you first start working on this book? What inspired it?

E: I started working on this book maybe two and a half years ago. I had written a series on a Chinese American cop set in 1976 in New York, and just in the course of that, just doing the research into the state of Chinese America in 1976, I naturally sort of looked to my own family, and just looked at my own roots, and I’ve never really had a chance to explore fictionally the sort of Taiwanese part of my identity. My father’s family is from Taiwan, they arrived there shortly after the Ming Dynasty fell apart [in the 1600s].

My mom was from Northern China, and she was part of the waishengren [the large migration of "mainlander" Chinese to Taiwan in the 1940s and 50s]. She essentially grew up in Taiwan. So over the years, she has come to believe herself that Taiwan should be independent. [Laughs.] But it’s funny. Her siblings, most of her family, believe the opposite and believe that Taiwan is part of China. I just wonder if it’s just one of these ongoing things that will never be resolved.

The thing is about Taiwan is that...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Ed Lin's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Snakes Can't Run.

The Page 69 Test: One Red Bastard.

My Book, The Movie: Ghost Month.

Writers Read: Ed Lin.

--Marshal Zeringue

Janice Steinberg

Janice Steinberg is an award-winning arts journalist who has published more than four hundred articles in The San Diego Union-Tribune, Dance Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. She is also the author of five mystery novels, including the Shamus Award–nominated Death in a City of Mystics. She has taught novel writing at the University of California, San Diego extension, and dance criticism at San Diego State University.

Her latest novel is The Tin Horse.

From Steinberg's Q & A at writing for the web:

Q. What drove you to write Tin Horse?

My inspiration was a nameless character in the Raymond Chandler novel The Big Sleep, a woman working in a bookstore who’s described as having “the fine-drawn face of an intelligent Jewess.” I was struck by that phrase with its sense of otherness and by the fact that, among Chandler’s tough guys and fast women, the Jewess in the bookstore was the one character with whom I identified. So—in the spirit of novels like Mrs. Ahab, which take marginal female characters from other books and put them center-stage—I set out to tell the Jewess’s story.

Q. Obviously place has had a big influence on writing TH. Can you talk about that?

I got insanely lucky! I had a feeling the Jewess in the bookstore occupied a very different Los Angeles than Chandler’s mean streets. And I started researching the history of Jews in Los Angeles, to find out where, in the 1930s, she would have lived. I found a goldmine, a setting so rich that it could become a character in its own right: Boyle Heights.

I say a lot about Boyle Heights on my website, The Tin Horse, but to give a few basics: It’s directly east of downtown L.A. and is now completely Hispanic, but in the 1920s and 30s, Boyle Heights had a large Jewish neighborhood on the West Coast and was a center of Jewish culture, with delis, Yiddish and socialist societies, synagogues, and more.

I got even luckier in that...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Janice Steinberg's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Tin Horse.

Writers Read: Janice Steinberg.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rory Flynn

Rory Flynn is the author of Third Rail. From his Q & A with Janet Walker for The Culture Concept Circle:

Third Rail is the first in the Eddy Harkness series. What inspired Eddy Harkness and the series?

I wanted to create a different kind of cop, of course. Every crime writer wants to do that, create someone new. With Eddy, it’s the unusual combination of intuition, which lets him find hidden drugs and other evidence, and a strong moral compass, which leads him to do what he feels is right, even if it means going against the rules. He also combines a certain amount of smart sophistication (he went to Harvard!) with a street-wise toughness that comes from having been part of Boston’s very rough-and-tumble hardcore punk scene back in his youth. He’s also intimately aware of the Harkness family’s mixed heritage. After all, his father was a charming swindler. And he knows the centuries of history accumulated in Nagog, his colonial hometown, and beneath the crooked streets of Boston, the city he loves so deeply.

Why Boston?

Well, there’s a long tradition of great crime/mystery novels coming out of Boston, from George V. Higgins to Robert B. Parker to Dennis Lehane. Boston’s in the middle of a new renaissance in so many ways. The restaurants don’t suck anymore, thanks to Barbara Lynch. The streets are cleaned up. The Combat Zone’s gone. The Seaport screams prosperity. We’ve got a great new mayor whose Boston accent is even thicker than the last guy’s. But there’s still a lot of violent crime and deep corruption – which all adds up to make the city a natural for fiction. For example, the last three Speakers of the House in Massachusetts have been indicted on felony charges. That’s got to be some kind of record.

Crime in Boston is different now – pockets of...[read on]

Visit Rory Flynn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chuck Greaves

The Last Heir is Chuck Greaves’s third novel in the award-winning mystery series featuring trial lawyer Jack MacTaggart.

From the author's Q & A with Ken Isaacson for The Big Thrill:

THE LAST HEIR is centered around a Napa Valley winery. I’ve heard that you have a winery of your own. How did that come about?

What I have is a small vineyard—just five acres of viognier and pinot noir grapes—in which I can be found most afternoons after mornings spent wrestling with my current work-in-progress. Its function is primarily therapeutic. But my love of wine goes back many years, and I’ve been a collector and general aficionado ever since I returned to California from law school in Boston in the early 1980s.

A recurring motif of the MacTaggart series involves plopping Jack—who’s a lunch pail kind of guy—among the tea party set and letting him rattle the china. I thought that a Napa Valley winery would make a perfect setting for that sort of frisson. I also liked the idea of an outwardly happy, successful wine family that’s actually riven by inter-generational jealousy and dysfunction leading, naturally, to murder, with each family member trying to manipulate Jack – this blue-collar outsider – in order to advance his or her agenda. Publishers Weekly calls it “intrigue-laden,” which I think is a good descriptor. And of course, it was an opportunity to write about a subject (wine, not family dysfunction) with which I’m both interested and familiar.

Most new authors write, in the hope of being published, while still hanging onto their day jobs so they can eat. You, on the other hand, up and left a successful law practice to “see if you could write.” Weren’t you terrified?

There were times when...[read on]

Visit Chuck Greaves's website.

The Page 69 Test: Hard Twisted.

The Page 69 Test: Green-Eyed Lady.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy Hallinan

Timothy Hallinan is the Edgar- and Macavity-nominated author of numerous widely praised books—twelve novels and a work of nonfiction—including the Poke Rafferty Bangkok thrillers and the Junior Bender mysteries, including Crashed, which kicked off the series.

The latest Junior Bender novel is Herbie's Game.

From Hallinan's Q & A with Neal Thompson for Omnivoracious:

Book that changed your life?

The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum. My family moved all the time – 22 houses in my 18 years with them, and when you're a kid, a move across town might as well be to the next galaxy. All your friends disappear, you're in a new school, and so forth. You learn not to make friends. When I was seven, I read The Wizard of Oz and realized that wherever I went, I could take books with me. From then on, I read all the time. It's impossible for me to imagine who I would be if that part of my life hadn't opened up so wondrously.

Book that made you want to become a writer?

The Big Sleep, pure and simple. It opened to me a form of storytelling in which the objective was to answer a question, and the answer was buried deep inside a character. And, like most really great writers, Chandler made it look easy. Eighteen books later, I'm...[read on]

Visit Timothy Hallinan's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Crashed.

My Book, The Movie: Crashed.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Mountford

Peter Mountford’s debut novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, won the 2012 Washington State Book Award and was a finalist in the 2012 VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize. In its full-page review, The Seattle Times wrote: “Debut novels don't come much savvier, punchier, or more entertaining...the work of an extraordinary talent.”

Mountford's latest novel is The Dismal Science.

From his Q & A with David Sheilds for Tin House:

David Shields: All of your work seems to me mature, complex, layered, bittersweet, but this book feels almost unspeakably sad. How do you write or read about such sadness without succumbing? This is a bit of a rhetorical question on my part. I can’t read work that isn’t unspeakably sad, but I want to hear your answer, Peter.

Peter Mountford: All my favorite pieces of writing break my heart, badly. I’ve actually assembled in a manila folder a dozen or so short stories that bring me to tears every time I read them. And I sometimes reread one just to experience that little rush of heartbreak. It blows open the doors within me. What I’ve noticed with those stories is that there’s usually a lot of humor along the way to coax the reader onward, and to sharpen the contrast. That’s important, I think, and this book has a certain comedic atmosphere, even if it’s not at all a comedy. Toni Morrison once said something like, “My goal is to break my reader’s heart, I want to make them cry, and if I’m going to do that, I can’t cry.” I’m paraphrasing, but it’s true. As a writer you can’t force the emotion onto readers.

The emotion has to be a natural byproduct of what’s happening, and it has to be earned, too, so it often takes a while. People have to be made to care, over time. The crushing end of A Farewell to Arms—without the preceding 200-something pages, without the aching beauty of their stolen romance, without that it wouldn’t eviscerate you.

DS: When I write about politics, it comes out as “Impeach George Bush.” How do you manage to write so well about politics?

PM: Thank you for saying that, but I think the answer is implied by your question. Certainty is...[read on]

Visit Peter Mountford's website.

The Page 69 Test: A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism.

My Book, The Movie: A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism.

Writers Read: Peter Mountford.

The Page 69 Test: The Dismal Science.

My Book, The Movie: The Dismal Science.

--Marshal Zeringue