Douglas Smith

Douglas Smith's new book is Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy.

From a Q & A at the author's website:

​How did you first get interested in this story?

It was back in 2005 when I was writing a book on the scandalous love affair between Count Nicholas Sheremetev and his serf Praskovya Kovalyova, the famous opera singer who performed as “The Pearl.” I got to know some of the descendants of the count, now living in the United States, and became fascinated by their stories of what had happened to the family after the revolution. Their tales of loss and emigration, of desperate escapes from the Bolsheviks and the destruction of their ancestors’ way of life captured my imagination. I started reading everything I could find on the subject, but nothing seemed to satisfy my curiosity. It wasn’t long before I knew I had to write this book.

Why do you think no one had ever written such a book before?

I think there are a few reasons. For most of the past century the subject was taboo in the Soviet Union. It simply didn’t exist as a topic. The nobles themselves had been too traumatized to discuss these things publicly and the Soviet historical profession had no interest in even mentioning the subject. It was only with the reforms begun under Gorbachev in the 1980s that Russians began to uncover this repressed past. I was fortunate to come to this subject at just the right moment after a great deal of material had finally been published, the archives had been opened, and noble families were keen to talk about their experiences.

How did you do the research for the book?

Former People draws on...[read on]

Visit Douglas Smith's website.

The Page 69 Test: Douglas Smith's The Pearl.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kitty Pilgrim

Kitty Pilgrim worked as a CNN correspondent and news anchor for 24 years. As a New York-based reporter her normal beat included politics and economics but her assignments also have taken her around the world – Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba, the Middle East, Korea and South Africa. Pilgrim anchored her own CNN morning show, Early Edition in 1998-1999 and was anchor for prime time broadcasts at CNN from 2001-2010. Pilgrim is the recipient of an Overseas Press Club Award, a Peabody Award, an Emmy, and New York Society of Black Journalists Award. She is a member of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations and the Explorer’s Club of New York.

The Stolen Chalice is Pilgrim's latest novel featuring archaeologist John Sinclair.

From her Q & A at Debs Carr at Novelicious:

When you are writing, do you use any celebrities or people you know as inspiration?

My heroes are scientists and explorers, so I use them as models for some of my characters. In The Explorer’s Code, the character of Cordelia is based on a real marine scientist who works at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. When I wrote the book, I consulted with her on how a marine scientist would think and act. I frequently stop by at Woods Hole to meet her and talk to the other scientists. Another character in The Explorer’s Code is Thaddeus Frost, a botanist (who is also a spy). I took a course on botany at the New York Botanical Garden’s graduate school to gain insight into this kind of expert. In writing The Stolen Chalice I met someone who is an Egyptologist at The Brooklyn Museum who inspired my character Carter Wallace. I don’t copy these people in great detail, but they inspire me to create my own characters.

What is your favourite Women’s Fiction book of all time and why?

I must say Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen is my favourite women’s fiction book. A narrative by a strong woman, it creates all the romance and mystery of the early years of the colonization of Africa, with deep sensitivity to the indigenous culture. I also love...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Kitty Pilgrim's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Stolen Chalice.

The Page 69 Test: The Stolen Chalice.

Writers Read: Kitty Pilgrim.

--Marshal Zeringue

Attica Locke

Attica Locke's latest novel is The Cutting Season.

From her Q & A with Irene Lacher for the Los Angeles Times:

Is there a story behind your first name?

Yes, I was named after the prison riot at Attica prison in New York.

Because you were such an adorable baby?

All I know is I was born three years later, in '74. [My mother] has since said it's a fit for my personality. I guess I'm fiery or righteous, but she felt right away that's what she wanted her child to be named. It's late '60s, early '70s politics. Both my parents were activists in Texas, starting in college at the University of Houston and for a few years after.

I gather that your new book was inspired by a visit to Oak Alley Plantation.

I went to a wedding at the Oak Alley Plantation in 2004. It's in Vacherie, La. We were bused from New Orleans, and you basically drive through rural poverty and all of a sudden these majestic columns shoot up along the Mississippi and it is a stunning sight. And I immediately felt my stomach turn over, because I was confused by the mix of the beauty and what the place represented. When we disembarked from the bus, I burst into tears. I was there with my white husband — it was 2004 — and the couple getting married there was an interracial couple. So I didn't understand if our presence there was a sign of...[read on]

Read more about the book and author at Attica Locke's website.

Learn about Locke's hero from outside literature.

The Page 69 Test: Attica Locke's Black Water Rising.

--Marshal Zeringue

George Pelecanos

George Pelecanos is a screenwriter, independent film producer, award-winning journalist, and the author of bestselling novels set in and around Washington, D.C.

From his Q & A with Noah Charney for The Daily Beast:

You’ve had a number of jobs before writing: woman’s shoe salesman, line cook, dishwasher. How do these various jobs color your work as a writer?

I started working in my dad’s diner at 11, so I had 20 years of blue- and gray-collar work experience before I wrote my first novel. I had fun. It wasn’t like I was an undercover artist masquerading as a worker. I was paying the bills. I mine those experiences for my fiction to this day. But I think the greatest influence those jobs had on me was that they gave me my work ethic as a writer. I treat this as a job. When someone asks me what I do for a living, I say, “I’m a professional writer.” In a way, I think of myself as a small business owner. My office has doors on it, and I open my business every morning, just as my dad turned the key on his diner each and every day.

Your work has been described as quintessential of, and about, D.C. What do people mean when they say that? Did you set out to chronicle your hometown, or did it happen organically?

I realized from the beginning that there was a hole in Washington fiction. I had no interest in the political novel or the spy thriller, or the Georgetown novel set in the milieu of Washington society. Others could do that better, because I was not of that world. Washington is a city with its own language, culture, music, style, and racial politics. As a young Greek American straddling many different quadrants here, mainly because of work and sports, I thought I might write about the city from a different perspective than had been done before. After awhile, I started to see the chronicling of this city as my life’s work. The crime novel gave me...[read on]

Learn about the fictional character which Pelecanos thinks most resembles him.

--Marshal Zeringue

Martin Amis

Martin Amis's latest novel is Lionel Asbo: State of England.

From his Q & A with Irene Lacher at the Los Angeles Times:

The subtitle of your new novel, "Lionel Asbo," is "State of England." But I think your story of a sociopathic criminal who wins the lottery and becomes a tabloid celebrity could easily have happened here.

Yeah, it could. But it's not just for that reason the subtitle is there. It's the whole imagined world of Diston [Asbo's home borough in London]. It's just so English. Put it this way: It's true that anything can happen in America, but it's almost impossible to imagine a microcosm of America. Henry James said America was more like a world than a country, and you couldn't imagine a novel with a subtitle "State of America," could you? There has been John Dos Passos' "U.S.A.," and many ambitious American novelists have tried to contain a huge amount of America in this or that novel, but I don't think they for a minute think they've got anything close to the essence of it — it's too various. England is small enough, homogenous enough so that you can have a shot at writing a novel with that subtitle, whereas in America it would be a vast undertaking.

So Lionel and his girlfriend, "Threnody," have real-life inspirations?

In Lionel's case, I did read a charming book written by a dustbin man, a young man who won the lottery, and it wasn't nearly as much as Lionel — 10 million or something. And I read his book, thinking this will be full of good stuff, but when I closed it, I realized I couldn't use a single idea or notion, because that is the usual cliched story. Whatever else you say about Lionel, he isn't a type. He isn't a cliche. So you abandon the real-life model very early on. The same with [celebrity and former topless model] Katie Price; my character "Threnody" is a Katie Price wannabe, but she can't pull it off in the way Katie Price has done. All you get out of that kind of research is the setting, not the...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Enid Shomer

A widely published fiction writer and poetry, Enid Shomer is the author of seven books. Her work has been collected in more than fifty anthologies and textbooks, including POETRY: A HarperCollins Pocket Anthology, Best American Poetry, and New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best.

Shomer's new novel is The Twelve Rooms of the Nile.

From her Q & A with Lauren Bufferd:

With a novel like this, you know there was a historical fact that provided the initial spark to your imagination. What was it?

The initial spark was learning that Flaubert and Nightingale traveled the Nile at the same time. I’m not talking about approximately the same time. They were towed from Cairo to the navigable part of the river through the Mahmoudieh Canal on the same boat. That day, Flaubert wrote a description in his journal of a woman in a “hideous green eyeshade,” and we know that Nightingale had such a contraption that she wore attached to her bonnet. Their itineraries throughout their Nile journeys were almost identical. It’s kind of a miracle that they didn’t meet!

Did you know a lot about Florence Nightingale and Flaubert before you started the novel? Do you think readers need to know about them before they read the novel?

I did not know a lot. My sense of Nightingale at the outset was based on Lytton Strachey’s book Eminent Victorians, which depicts Nightingale as a shrewish and eccentric control freak. (He claims she actually worked one of her friends to death.) The more I read about and by her, the more I came to reject this depiction. She was, for one thing, blessed with a fabulous wit, a virtue Strachey ignored completely. Other early biographers painted her in saintly sepia tones. I set out to find out who the real Nightingale was.

I knew that Flaubert was...[read on]

Visit Enid Shomer's website and Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: The Twelve Rooms of the Nile.

Writers Read: Enid Shomer.

My Book, The Movie: The Twelve Rooms of the Nile.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hanna Rosin

Claire Zulkey interviewed Hanna Rosin, the author of The End of Men: And the Rise of Women.

Part of the Q & A:

After completing your book, did you consider changing your parenting tack in order to raise sons who not only do right by themselves but also do right by women (particularly after you worked on your "hookup culture" chapter)?

My concern about raising my sons has more to do with teaching them to meet whatever demands school places on them without making them frustrated or miserable or think they have to be just like girls. I try to be realistic — I can't make my sons into people they're not. I think the "William wants a doll" fantasy of the '70s is a proven failure. But I can't put my head in the sand and pretend that school does not demand a level of organization and verbal acuity that doesn't come 100 percent naturally to them. So I try and teach them to cultivate the skills they have — to nurture their inner secretary, as I put it. One example is I make a list for my son that he reads every morning of what he needs to do — put his lunch in his backpack, remember his PE shoes, etc. — in the hopes that eventually he'll internalize those organization skills.

As for the hook-up culture, I won't teach my sons and daughters differently on this front. Young people are aiming for different kinds of connections than I had, ones that aren't crude but aren't entirely settled, either. But at their best they are respectful. Here is what one woman I interviewed told me. As a guiding principle, I think it's not half bad:

"We want a relationship of freedom — the freedom to be there for each other and available sexually when it suits the both of us, and also emotionally when it suits the both of us. We want it to be fun and maybe involve some dates and long talks over coffee. But we certainly don't want these "relationships" to be entered into with an expectation of long-term, or to get in the way of the other important things in our lives. Compatibility isn't even all that important. Amusement, affection, affirming attention, sexual fulfillment, the ever-elusive "fun" — that's what we're after. We (both women and men) are putting ourselves first. Some might call that selfish; we call it smart and independent and secure."

You touch upon many pop culture references in the book. What are some of your personal favorite movies/TV shows/books that portray male/female relationships in a realistic yet progressive manner?

We seem to have thankfully passed through the era of the Judd Apatow irresponsible man-child who needs to be rescued by his shrill girlfriend. One positive example right now is...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Tony Horwitz

For Chapter 16, Christopher Hebert interviewed Tony Horwitz about his book Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War.

Part of the Q & A:

Chapter 16: Midnight Rising is not your first book about the Civil War. You also wrote the bestselling Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Pantheon, 1998), in which you explore the thrall in which Americans, especially in the South, continue to hold the war. I’m curious about how you developed your interest in this period. And what made you decide to pursue John Brown?

Tony Horwitz: I was a Civil War nerd almost from birth and rediscovered my boyhood obsession when my wife and I settled in rural Virginia in the 1990s. I felt surrounded by the War—battlefields, fights over memory, crazed reenactors—and that’s what led me to write Confederates in the Attic. While researching the book, I visited Harpers Ferry, only fifteen miles from my home, but it didn’t dawn on me to write about John Brown and his raid until I’d moved a decade later to New England. Go figure.

One reason I was drawn back to this period is that I’d always dwelled on the Civil War proper, from 1861 to 1865, without really understanding how and why the conflict came about. John Brown’s Raid seemed like a good place to start. Also, it’s a writer’s dream, a tense, sweaty drama with an unbelievable cast of characters—not just Brown but Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, the Transcendentalists, Frederick Douglass, John Wilkes Booth, and many others.

Chapter 16: In the popular imagination, the historical figure of John Brown has often been reduced to the heroic abolitionist that Henry David Thoreau exalted as Brown was being martyred in Harper’s Ferry. But as becomes painfully clear in your book, the real John Brown was far more complicated than the historical myth. How did the John Brown you discovered through your research compare to the Brown you thought you knew before you undertook the project? What surprised you most about the real John Brown?

Horwitz: Before writing this book, most of what I knew about Brown...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Drew Gilpin Faust

Drew Gilpin Faust's books include This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.

From her Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:

Q: How did the death toll of the Civil War – an estimated 620,000 soldiers and 50,000 civilians and perhaps even more, according to a new estimate – change us as a nation?

A: We learned about our obligations to the dead. If we are to understand ourselves as a nation made up of citizens, and if we ask people to fight in defense of that democracy, there are obligations owed to them.

Before the Civil War, there were no national cemeteries, no processes for identifying the dead in the battle. There weren't any dog tags, and there was no next-of-kin notification.

You didn't necessarily even hear what the fate of your loved ones had been. It was up to their comrades to write and inform you.

Those kinds of practices were transformed by the recognition of what the country owes to the citizen in the way of an honorable death and the responsibility for the remains and for the kin of those who have died in war.

Q: How was the government itself transformed by its new responsibility to take care of soldiers who lived and those who died?

A: It had never had so much work as was represented by the bureaucracy necessary to rebury the dead, with more than 300,000 Union soldiers relocated and buried in national cemeteries.

That was an enormous logistical undertaking. And the pension system that was set up to take care of the relatives required...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Goce Smilevski

Goce Smilevski was born in 1975 in Skopje, Macedonia. He was educated at Charles University in Prague, Central European University in Budapest, and Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, where he works at the Institute for Literature. He has won numerous prizes for his writing, in Macedonia and abroad; his novel Freud's Sister won the European Union Prize for Literature and is being published in more than twenty-five languages.

From his Q & A with Ann Mayhew at Publishers Weekly:

Why do you think it’s important to investigate history’s “forgotten” characters, and why Adolfina?

In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera wrote that “historiography writes the history of society, not of a man,” while the art of the novel has the ability to examine “the historical dimension of human existence.” Historiography remembers only the influential people; its selective memory neglects the lives of ordinary people. Adolfina Freud is one of those billions of forgotten people, and we are certain of just a few facts of her life and death. We know nothing about her joys and sorrows. On the other hand, many things about her brother Sigmund have been well recorded, including those that are trivial, such as where he bought cigars. Writing a novel narrated by a relative of one of the most influential people in history was, for me, a symbolic act; I was giving a voice to one of those forgotten people whose lives, happiness, and tragedies have been lost.

What kind of research did you do to reimagine Adolfina’s life?

My main research was about 19th-century and early 20th-century life, the Holocaust, psychoanalysis, and her brother’s works.

How did Sigmund Freud’s work influence how you novelized his sister’s life and death?

The...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue