Laurie Viera Rigler

From a Q & A with Laurie Viera Rigler, author of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict:

Why did you choose Jane Austen's world as the inspiration for your novel?

Despite my fascination (or let's be honest, obsession) with all those period details, what really draws me to Jane Austen is that she does, in fact, transcend time. Her all-seeing, all-knowing, take-no-prisoners approach to the follies and flaws of human beings makes her books not only timeless, but almost eerily contemporary, despite the bonnets and balls and carriages. It is as if she were a modern-day psychotherapist with a wicked sense of humor who time-traveled back to the Regency and wrote novels about everyone who spent time on her couch.

Why are you, and so many others, "Austen addicts"?

Because the more I read Jane Austen's six novels, the more I discover about myself and human nature in general. In fact, the Austen canon equates to the best self-help book you could ever have in your library. Feeling self-important? Read Jane Austen. In the midst of an identity crisis? Perhaps, like me, you'll find a little of yourself in all her heroines. Northanger Abbey's Catherine Morland, who is addicted to scary novels, dancing, and old houses, reminds me of who I was when I lived in a crumbling Victorian that was said to be haunted, or when I could spend all night in after-hours clubs and still make it to work by 9. Sense and Sensibility's Marianne Dashwood, she of the tear-rimmed eyes and self-destructive tendencies, is who I was when consuming little more than espresso, Big-Gulp-size vodka martinis, and American Spirits was my idea of post-break-up nourishment. Emma is who I am when I get lost in the land of running-your-life-is-so-much-better-than-looking-at-my-own. I still wish I were as eloquent a smart-ass as Pride and Prejudice's Elizabeth Bennet, but the more I venture into the minefield of self-reflection, the more I appreciate Austen's less incendiary heroines: the quietly steadfast Anne Eliot of Persuasion, and even the iconically timid Fanny Price of Mansfield Park, whom I used to dismiss as a prude.

Read the complete Q & A.

Visit Laurie Viera Rigler's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chelsea Cain

Chelsea Cain is the author of Confessions of a Teen Sleuth, a parody based on the life of Nancy Drew, several nonfiction titles, and a weekly column in The Oregonian.

Her latest novel is Sweetheart; it features Portland detective Archie Sheridan, who was introduced in Heartsick.

For The Rap Sheet, Ari Karim asked Cain a few questions, including:

Ali Karim: I noticed that you had published a few non-fiction books before entering the crime-fiction realm. Can you tell us a little about your early writing and journalism?

Chelsea Cain: I started in journalism, writing for my college paper. It was great fun. Crazy, smart people and crazy, late hours. Naturally, I thought, this is what I wanted to do for a living. (Having worked for newspapers since, I realize it is not at all like that.) So I went to graduate school in journalism. And I had to write a master’s project. I wrote a book about my early childhood on a hippie commune, and--total fluke--it got published. After that I published a few other books--mostly illustrated humor books, if you can imagine--and wrote for an alternative weekly. I finally ended up in marketing (A writing job that paid! I couldn’t believe it!) and worked as a creative director for a few years. I left that job to continue writing books, and to write a weekly column for The Oregonian, which I still do.

AK: So what books influenced you to take up the pen yourself?

CC: I always loved writing and I was always writing books. Mostly my books were construction paper that was stapled together and drawn on with crayon, but my family seemed to think they were brilliant. The books I loved most as a kid were the Nancy Drew books, by Carolyn Keene--and the Hardy Boys, if I was really desperate.

Read the entire Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Bacevich

Bill Moyers interviewed Andrew Bacevich about his new book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. From the transcript:

BILL MOYERS: It's been a long time since I've read a book in which I highlighted practically every third sentence. So, it took me a while to read, what is in fact, a rather short book. You began with a quote from the Bible, the Book of Second Kings, chapter 20, verse one. "Set thine house in order." How come that admonition?

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I've been troubled by the course of U.S. foreign policy for a long, long time. And I wrote the book in order to sort out my own thinking about where our basic problems lay. And I really reached the conclusion that our biggest problems are within.

I think there's a tendency on the part of policy makers and probably a tendency on the part of many Americans to think that the problems we face are problems that are out there somewhere, beyond our borders. And that if we can fix those problems, then we'll be able to continue the American way of life as it has long existed. I think it's fundamentally wrong. Our major problems are at home.

BILL MOYERS: So, this is a version of "Physician, heal thyself?"

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, yes, "Physician, heal thyself," and you begin healing yourself by looking at yourself in the mirror and seeing yourself as you really are.

BILL MOYERS: Here is one of those neon sentences. Quote, "The pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism, has induced a condition of dependence on imported goods, on imported oil, and on credit. The chief desire of the American people," you write, "is that nothing should disrupt their access to these goods, that oil, and that credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in part of through the distribution of largesse here at home, and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad." In other words, you're saying that our foreign policy is the result of a dependence on consumer goods and credit.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Our foreign policy is not something simply concocted by...[read on]

Read the full transcript or watch the interview.

Read "Illusions of Victory under Bush," adapted from The Limits of Power; learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University; he retired from the U.S. Army with the rank of colonel. He is the author of The New American Militarism, among other books. His writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

The Page 99 Test: The Limits of Power.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ronlyn Domingue

From a 2006 interview at Paraphernalia with Ronlyn Domingue about her debut novel, The Mercy of Thin Air:

PNR: Your first novel, THE MERCY OF THIN AIR, has received critical acclaim and has been released around the world; could you tell us about the publication of your book? Where did you get the idea for this novel?

Ronlyn D.: That comment I made to a co-worker years ago turned into an idea for a novel about a poltergeist who moves from house to house, not fixed in one place. All I had was a series of incidents in mind, but the character had no name, no gender. In 1999, I imposed the short story form on this novel idea--which forced me to come up with a story in the first place.

Then there was Razi...

PNR: Yes, Razi. As a reader, I found myself drawn in by Razi's plight and experienced an emotional bond with her; the novel’s themes are emotionally complex and she is such a wonderfully strong woman. Could you tell us about the development of her character?

Ronlyn D.: Let's start with the moment I knew I wasn't dealing with just any character. When I started to work on the short story, there were a few things I knew about her, what I call her 'bullet points'. She was the daughter of a suffragette. She was a birth control advocate. She had green eyes and blond hair. And she was dead. But she had no name. One day, I was driving home from work and stopped at a light. Suddenly there was a voice in my head (don’t take that too literally) that said, 'My name is Raziela'. I paused and thought, Well, okay, that's your name. From then on, she was a force to contend with.

Razi was very impatient with me to figure her out. I didn’t realize this at the time. Right now, I’m working on my second novel, and the narrator is quiet and patient. It's okay that I don't understand him yet. He's giving me some space.

But Razi. . . She had a presence like no other character I've written. She surprised me with her emotional depth, quite frankly. For someone who valued science, rationality, above all else, Razi was capable of intense passions in her political life, friendships, her bond with Andrew. The other day, I was talking to a writer friend about the challenge of capturing a character’s voice, and I shared with her how shocked I was when Razi became lyrical in her speech. It didn’t fit what I thought about her. Razi was more rounded that I gave her credit for being.

As for her strength, I see that as both nature and nurture. Razi was born feisty, smart, and strong-willed. She was also raised by parents who encouraged her intellectually. She was deeply loved. Her father could not have been more proud of her. Even though Razi lived at the turn of the 20th century, with such a foundation early in her life, it's plausible she would have had the conviction to pursue a medical career and do the things she did. That’s not to say she didn’t struggle with traditional expectations. That was a fault line in her relationship with Andrew all along.

Read more of the Q & A.

The Mercy of Thin Air, the movie.

The Page 69 Test: The Mercy of Thin Air.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robin Benway

Robin Benway is the author of Audrey, Wait!.

From a Q & A at her publisher's website:

Desert island book?

See, I’m terrible at picking just one thing. So I would have to say Nabokov’s “Lolita” and Salinger’s “Franny & Zooey.” (Little secret: I always travel with “Franny & Zooey” in my carry-on bag, just because it’s so familiar to me.) But honestly, if I’m stuck on a desert island, I’m not going to spend my time reading. I’ll be too busy figuring out a way to get the heck off that island.

Favorite city?

Los Angeles. New York holds a strong second place, but I’ve never been anywhere that feels like LA. An early summer afternoon, driving through the canyons with the bougainvillea, the way the air smells like eucalyptus, it’s so beautiful. It always feels like home, and I like having a home.

Favorite movie?

“The Royal Tenenbaums.” I saw it by myself in a movie theater and when the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” started to play in a scene, people in the theater sang along. I could watch it and find new details every time.

Read more of the Q & A.

Read an excerpt from Audrey, Wait!, and learn more about the book and author at Robin Benway's website and MySpace page.

Check out the Audrey, Wait! website.

Writers Read: Robin Benway.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joshua Henkin

Joshua Henkin, author of Matrimony, responded to some reader questions at Everyday I Write the Book Blog, including:

Q: At one point in the story, I was thinking, "This book is titled Matrimony, but at this point, no one is married". How did the title come about? What were you trying to convey about marriage in this story?

JH: I’m ambivalent about the title, but on balance I stand by it, though I’m aware of the risks of titling a book Matrimony. I tend to think that the best titles are evocative of the novel without telling the reader too much about it. My first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, is a good example of that. Swimming across the Hudson is simply an image from the book; it’s not a novel about aquatics, believe you me. But you call a novel MATRIMONY and you create certain expectations. People might think it’s a self-help book, and even if they know it’s a novel, they might expect a certain kind of story that may or not be borne out by what happens in my book. MATRIMONY is about more than marriage. It’s about friendship, class, maturing over the years, among other things. But I certainly couldn’t have called it Marriage, Friendship, Class and Maturing Over The Years, though Alice Munro has a story collection with a title not so far from that. But she’s Alice Munro, and as far as I’m concerned she can do whatever she wants; she’s that good.

In the end, the title Matrimony felt true to what the book was about, in that the central relationship is a marriage and the book is really about several other marriages as well—Carter and Pilar’s marriage, Mia’s parents’ marriage, Julian’s parents’ marriage. But I didn’t want to call the book Marriage. I liked the more amorphous feel of Matrimony, as well as the implied phrase “holy matrimony,” which of course is belied (or at least rendered more complex) by what happens in my novel.

That said, I wasn’t trying to convey anything about marriage more generally. “What were you trying to convey about marriage?” is an apple-banana question, and I’m a monkey-banana guy. Novelists aren’t in the business of making arguments, statements, or points; they aren’t in the business of teaching lessons. If you want to make an argument or a statement, if you want to teach a lesson, you should become a philosopher, an economist, a theologian, or a lawyer, all of which are perfectly good professions. They’re just not my profession. A novelist is in the business of creating characters and telling stories—nothing more, nothing less.

This isn’t to say that a good novel doesn’t make you think; of course it does. But a novelist doesn’t deal in generalities. He or she deals in particulars. I was not and am not making any statements about marriage. I’m simply depicting in as thorough and convincing a way as possible the specific characters and specific relationships in my novel. I leave the generalities for the critics and the Ph.D.s.

Read the entire Q & A.

Read an excerpt from Matrimony, and learn more about the novel and its author at Joshua Henkin's website and his blog.

The Page 69 Test: Matrimony.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Ebershoff

From a Q & A with David Ebershoff about his novel, The 19th Wife:

How did you first encounter the story of Ann Eliza Young, the 19th wife of Brigham Young, and what drew you to her story?

I first heard about Ann Eliza Young seven years ago while editing a book for the Modern Library. I had hired a scholar — a specialist in 19th century women’s history — to write a set of endnotes for a classic we were reissuing. History geek that I am, one afternoon I was gabbing with her about all sorts of 19th-century arcana when she mentioned the 19th Wife. I told her I’d never heard of her and she gave a me brief introduction. Needless to say, my writer’s ears stood up.

At the time I was working on another novel, one that I would ultimately put aside to write The 19th Wife. And so for a few years, while my attention was elsewhere, that nickname — the 19th Wife — continued to ring in my head. The 19th Wife? Who was that? What does it even mean to be a 19th wife? After a few years I started looking into that question. As I read more about Ann Eliza Young, I recognized how remarkable she was: intelligent, outspoken, declarative, contradictory, somewhat unreliable, a tad melodramatic, very beautiful (and a little bit vain) — she possessed a number of traits that can make a character in a novel unpredictable, and therefore interesting. I found myself torn between the novel I was working on and a nearly overwhelming desire to throw myself into the world of Ann Eliza and polygamy. Then one night I woke up — literally sat up in bed — and I knew I had to write this book. Just one problem: What book was I going to write? How would I tell her story? And how to make it relevant to today? It took a long, unsettling year of research before I could begin actually writing.

Read the entire Q & A.

Visit David Ebershoff's website.

The Page 69 Test: The 19th Wife.

--Marshal Zeringue

Reed Farrel Coleman

At The Rap Sheet, Jim Winter quizzed author Reed Farrel Coleman about his Moe Prager novels and other subjects.

One segment from their dialogue:

JW: Soul Patch was a great slice of Brooklyn and goes into the past almost as much as it brings Moe to the eve of the 1990s. Have you ever thought of visiting Moe’s days as a cop for an entire novel?

RFC: That’s a great question. Unfortunately, the whole point of Moe’s career in uniform was that it wasn’t very exciting. The one memorable thing he did on the job was to rescue Marina Conseco from that water tank. That issue is so thoroughly explored in the last two Moe books [Soul Patch and Empty Ever After] that I don’t think I could turn his rescue of Marina into a new book. I’m also not a big fan of revisionism, so I don’t want to go back and create a life for Moe that isn’t true to the books I’ve already written.

Read the full Q & A, including Winter's introduction to Coleman's work.

Learn more about the author at Reed Farrel Coleman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Redemption Street.

The Page 69 Test: Empty Ever After.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Frey

James Frey is the author of A Million Little Pieces, My Friend Leonard, and Bright Shiny Morning.

Anna Metcalfe of the Financial Times put a few questions to the author, including:

What book changed your life?

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. The first time I read it I couldn’t believe someone had written it. It’s offensive and pure and clear.

Who are your literary heroes?

Baudelaire, Céline, Kerouac, Brett Easton Ellis, Henry Miller.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom Vanderbilt

From a Q & A with Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), at the Knopf website:

Q: Is it true that the most common cause of stress on the highway is merging? Why of the myriad things to cause stress on the road is this at the top?

A: Merging is the most stressful single activity we face in everyday driving, according to a survey by the Texas Transportation Institute. People who have done studies at highway construction work zones have also told me of extraordinarily bad behavior, triggered by this simple act of trying to get two lanes of traffic into one. Sometimes, it’s simply the difficult mechanics of driving — trying to enter a stream of traffic flowing at a higher speed than you are, for example. Drivers, to quote a physicist who was actually talking about grains, are objects “who do not easily interact.” But I also think there’s something about the forward flow of traffic that makes us register progress only by our own unimpeded movement; as in life, we seem to register losses more powerfully than gains, and registering these losses boosts stress.

Read the entire Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue