Craig Nova

Craig Nova is the award-winning author of twelve novels and one autobiography. His latest novel is The Informer.

From John Irving's interview with Nova for The Daily Beast:

John Irving: Nova’s characters are not easy to like; yet, in novel after novel, he made the most unlikely characters sympathetic—and, especially lately, he’s often put them on a collision course.... So, let’s talk about collisions. What are the collisions here, in The Informer? How is it that unlikely characters become sympathetic?

Craig Nova: I like the sense that one character is going to have a train wreck with another. This is more intriguing if the author makes a partnership with the reader, so the two of them together can see it coming. It is a sort of elbow in the ribs, a wink, between author and reader that makes for fun, although it is often an ominous, scary kind of fun.

And as far as unlikely characters being sympathetic, I’ve noticed that the most important thing about characters is that they want something decent, like love. And the more difficult it is to get something like love (because of unusual or trying circumstances), and the more characters want it, the more we can feel their needs. And these are human, basic needs.

In The Informer, the collisions are between two women, one from the streets and one a polite woman who works for Inspectorate A, the serious crimes section of the Berlin Police Department in 1930, and the things that are lurking in the shadows. These are events and people that these two women discover as the book goes along, but the dangers are not immediately obvious.

JI: I’ve noticed that you are having more fun with suspense in your recent books. You've always loved the ominous in fiction, those foreboding moments, haven't you?

CN: I think both of us have liked...[read on]

Visit Craig Nova's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrea Levy

Andrea Levy's fourth novel, Small Island, won the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction, the Whitbread Book Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her latest novel, The Long Song, is the tale of a girl born on a 19th-century Jamaican sugar plantation.

From her Q & A with Anna Metcalfe at the Financial Times:

What book changed your life?

The Women’s Room by Marilyn French. Before then I’d thought I didn’t like fiction. I was 23 and I hadn’t read a book before. It awakened me to feminism, too.

* * *
Which literary character most resembles you?

At the moment, Bertha Rochester from Jane Eyre. I’m very jittery when I have a book coming out.

* * *
If you could own any painting, what would it be?

“The Ambassadors” by Holbein, although I’d never get it into the house.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor at Brown University and critic. He is best known for his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), which is the most widely read book in modern African literature.

From his Q & A with Deborah Solomon in the New York Times Magazine:

Since its publication in 1958, “Things Fall Apart,” the story of a Nigerian yam farmer who is unable to accept the changes wrought by British colonialism, has become the best-selling novel ever written by an African.

Well, I hear such exaggerated comments. I just leave them alone.

It’s a staple of American high-school English classes, and it has supposedly sold more than eight million copies.

That would be possible. I’m not grumbling; I have done well. But don’t imagine I’m a millionaire.

Things are again falling apart in Nigeria, which was in the news this month, when a predawn massacre occurred near Jos and all the world saw images of Christian villagers, many of them women and children, laid out in mass graves. Do you think the incident is related to the spread of Muslim extremism?

It...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Jo Nesbo

From the Globe and Mail’s Alison Gzowski's interview with Norwegian author Jo Nesbo:

Why do you think readers are drawn to these sorts of stories. They’re psychological stories, but there are so many ways to tell them … why are we drawn to see the world through crime?

I think there are many reasons. One reason why people like crime is that it’s an established way of telling stories. What you’re looking for in a story you don’t want the unexpected, you want what you’re expecting but you don’t know that’s what you’re expecting. It’s like timing in humour. A famous Norwegian comedian told me that what makes you laugh is not the unexpected, it’s the expected, but you give the punchline one second before you arrive at the punchline yourself. That’s why the classic crime novel in some ways is like the comfort of your own apartment. Here in Toronto, you have rush hour, heavy traffic and you have a perfectly good public transportation system. So why do people ride in their own cars? Why don’t they take the bus? It has to do with the comfort of their own cars, you can do anything, and with the crime novel, you have all kinds of great novels. Why do intelligent well-educated people turn to the crime novel? I think it has to do with the comfort of their own vehicle, they know what they’ll get, in a way. Though that sounds a bit depressing, it’s why they like crime novels.

It also sounds like you’re saying that they’re lesser books … and they’re not, though they have been perceived that way.

Yeah, but...[read on]

Of the 20 most loaned books in Norway's libraries in 2008, 5 were Jo Nesbø novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Nicholls

David Nicholls trained as an actor before making the switch to writing. He is the author of the novels Starter For Ten and The Understudy. He has also written many screenplays for film and television, including the feature film adaptation of Starter For Ten. He lives in London.

His new novel, One Day, releases in the U.S. this summer.

From his Q & A with the Independent:

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

I read a lot of F Scott Fitzgerald. I love Tender is the Night, and its atmosphere of doomed romance. He was one of the greatest prose stylists, with a wonderfully clear but lyrical quality. I love to re-read him.

* * *
Which fictional character most resembles you?

I identified with Pip from Great Expectations, especially when I was younger; I had the same kind of gaucheness and uncertainty.

* * *
Who is your hero/heroine from outside literature?

Billy Wilder, a great writer and director with integrity whose work combined European and American sensibilities. I love The Apartment for its blend of cynicism and romance.

Read the complete interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Gordon

In The Serialist, David Gordon's debut novel, Harry Bloch is a struggling writer who pumps out pulpy serial novels—from vampire books to detective stories—under various pseudonyms. But his life begins to imitate his fiction when he agrees to ghostwrite the memoir of Darian Clay, New York City’s infamous Photo Killer. Soon, three young women turn up dead, each one murdered in the Photo Killer’s gruesome signature style, and Harry must play detective in a real life murder plot as he struggles to avoid becoming the killer’s next victim.

From Gordon's Q & A with GQ's Christopher Swetala:

The protagonist, Harry, is an ex-porn writer. How did you come up with the idea?

I used to work at Hustler.

What was that like?

Most of the men there were bookish and nerdy, and our fan mail tended to come from guys in prison. That's when I first had the idea for a struggling writer who gets a letter from a famous criminal.

Did you have an advice column?

I was never actually the Slut Whisperer. We did have a column, "Dear Slut," that had advice from a porn star. We got outrageous letters from guys who were concerned about their semen production or wanted to talk their wives into threesomes. I had to sort through all these letters and photos.

What photos? People would submit their own candids?

There was an amateur section in Hustler. I had to...[read on]

The Page 69 Test: The Serialist.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy Hallinan

Author J. Sydney Jones interviewed Timothy Hallinan about his Poke Rafferty Bangkok thrillers. Part of the Q & A:

What things about Bangkok make it unique and a good physical setting in your books?

Those are really at least two different questions. The most striking thing about Bangkok is that it’s the most cheerful big city in the world. It’s bigger physically than New York and more cheerful than Smallville. The Thai people are the world’s most welcoming, even now when foreigners are no longer the novelty they were in 1981, when waiters would sit down at my table to try out their English. (They also couldn’t believe that I’d willingly eat alone, since Thai people never do anything alone if they can help it. They wanted to keep me company.)

Beyond the good cheer, Bangkok is a city of enormous contrast. It’s heartbreakingly poor and breathtakingly rich. It’s carnal, with more red-light districts than anywhere I can think of, and deeply spiritual, with giant temples and small street shrines everywhere. (Many taxis have an abstract of Buddha-spirit handpainted on the ceiling above the driver.) You’ll walk down some deafening street and turn into a small street (or “soi”) and it’ll be lined with open-air shops where men are beating tiny pieces of gold into gold leaf for the faithful, who rub it onto the statues of the Buddha. All the Buddhas in the big temples are gilded, even the backs, which no one usually sees; the Thais say that doing good deeds secretly is “Gilding the Buddha’s back.”

Finally, Bangkok is, as Maugham said of Monaco, a...[read on]

Also see: Brett Battles interviews Timothy Hallinan.

The Page 69 Test: A Nail Through the Heart.

The Page 69 Test: The Fourth Watcher.

My Book, The Movie: The Fourth Watcher.

The Page 69 Test: Breathing Water.

Visit Timothy Hallinan's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nell Irvin Painter

Nell Irvin Painter is the award-winning author of many books, including Sojourner Truth, Southern History Across the Color Line, Creating Black Americans, and Standing at Armageddon. Her new book is The History of White People.

From her Q & A with Thomas Rogers at Salon:

Why write a history of whiteness?

We've spent so much time in this country on various racial issues. It's our national sport, in a way, and it's always as if there is only one side: nonwhite. But this is one of those binaries where you need both sides to make sense of it.

I want to point out that this book is not about white nationalism. It's not about how bad white people are. It's about how we have thought about people now considered white. I used to encounter reservations about the project, and people would ask, "Why are you doing this as a black person?" People hear it's a book called "The History of White People" and that it's by a black author, and make assumptions.

We've all seen the word "Caucasian," usually when we're filling out forms, but most of us have no idea where it came from. What is a Caucasian, exactly?

It comes from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who applied it to a large swatch of humanity on the 11th of April, 1795, with the publications of the third edition of his dissertation, in Latin, about the varieties of mankind. He used the word "Caucasian" because he wanted to underscore the beauty of white-skinned people. He thought they were the most beautiful. He located these people in Europe, east into Russia, south into India and southwest into North Africa. The Caucasus is a border area between Europe and Asia and it's an area freighted with mythological baggage -- Jason and the Argonauts, Mount Ararat.

The Human Genome Project found that there's no genetic basis for racial difference. Is this the end of race?

This is...[read on]

Visit Nell Irvin Painter's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Danielle Steel

Best-selling author Danielle Steel's new novel is Big Girl. From her Q & A with Nanci Hellmich for USA Today:

Q: What inspired you to write Big Girl, which focuses on weight, body image and self-esteem?

A: Books are always written about beautiful people who find other beautiful people, but most people are regular people, and weight is an issue for a lot of them. I thought, it must be a drag to always have beautiful people highlighted in books. Why not make a heavier woman the star of the show? If you notice, I do not have Victoria lose weight by the end of the book, but she gets a great guy. I thought that was important and more real.

Q: What messages about weight and body image do you want readers to take away?

A: That it's OK to be you, less than perfect. Our role models are ridiculous. Most of the models that you see in Vogue are extremely young and way too thin to be healthy. We are a society that worships extreme youth, extreme thinness, extreme beauty — and anyone who doesn't measure up feels ugly. Women are born saying, "Do I look fat in this?" Somebody gave me a funny bracelet a few years ago that...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Hugh Raffles

Hugh Raffles teaches anthropology at The New School. He is the author of In Amazonia: A Natural History, which received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. His essays have been published in Best American Essays, Granta, and Orion. He received a Whiting Writers’ Award in 2009. His new book is Insectopedia.

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

You’re an anthropologist who has written about life in the Brazilian Amazon. Why insects for this book? Have you always been fascinated by insects and people’s interactions with them?

Actually, no! But since I started researching this book a few years ago, I’ve become completely obsessed by insects and our relationships with them. Now they seem like the most amazing creatures. But before that, they were around me but weren’t something I paid that much attention to unless they were biting me or invading my apartment.

For a long time though, I’ve been interested in the connections between people and animals of all types. And I’ve thought a lot about what other worlds exist alongside the ones that we people live in. Most of these worlds are invisible to us. To give an example: we usually assume that time is a universal measure that everyone experiences in more or less similar ways. But it seems likely that other animals’ experience of time is completely different from ours—that for them, their short lives might actually last a very long time.

Despite the complexity of our own reality, it’s quite a limited universe when we consider all the parallel realities within which other beings exist. Insects are fascinating because they’re so different from us. It’s almost impossible to imagine what the worlds they live in are like. Recreating those worlds is one of the things I try to do in Insectopedia, often by meeting people (artists, musicians, and scientists, for example) who have their own interesting ways of thinking about this.

How did you decide on this encyclopedic format of A to Z? Did that seem a natural order after you wrote the essays or did you plan that from the beginning?

I’m one of those people who’s interested in pretty much everything. After spending a long time writing a book about one small community in the Brazilian Amazon, I wanted...[read on]

Visit the Insectopedia website.

--Marshal Zeringue