Adam C. English

Adam C. English is Associate Professor of Religion at Campbell University where he teaches on the philosophy of religion, constructive theology, and the history of Christian thought. His new book is The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus: The True Life and Trials of Nicholas of Myra.

From his Q & A with Randy Dotinga at The Christian Science Monitor:

Q: Who was Saint Nicholas in real life?

A: The historical Saint Nicholas was born around the late third century or early fourth century. He lived his life in what is now the southwest shores of Turkey. He served as a bishop, a Christian pastor of the church in Myra, doing good works of gift-giving and generosity, serving the people as a true civil servant. There are stories of him bartering with grain ships to get grain to save the starving people of Myra, going to the capitol to appeal for lower taxes, interfering in court cases and saving three men from beheading.

As a young man, he inherits gold from his parents, and he hears of a man in town who's become desperately poor and is thinking about selling off his own daughters. Nicholas bags up some of that gold and throws it through his window. It's used as a dowry for one of the daughters. He returns two times so the other daughters might be able to marry.

Q: What did it mean then to sell off one's daughters?

A: Prostitution. We have decrees dating back to the early days of the Roman empire trying to curb that activity and try to prevent parents from selling daughters into prostitution and children into slavery.

While it seems inhumane, those options become very live and real when...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides's first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published in 1993.

From his 2009 interview with Guy Raz for NPR:

RAZ: Where were you in life when you wrote "The Virgin Suicides"? What was going on?

Mr. EUGENIDES: I was working at the Academy of American Poets as an executive secretary and earning a very small salary and living out in distant Brooklyn. And I, you know, I decided to become a writer when I was fairly young, 16, 17 years old. And by this time, I was almost 30 with only one publication to my name. So, I was in a state of increasing anxiety as I began to get older with nothing to show for myself and began writing "The Virgin Suicides" some time in that period. And I had started other novels before, but for some reason, this one was the one I was able to finish.

RAZ: How long did it take you to write?

Mr. EUGENIDES: It took about three years. And I used to - I had a nine-to-five job, so I worked at night, two hours every night and four hours on the weekends in a pretty regimented way, and about three years. I was also - I got fired in the midst of writing it. So, I had to publish it because I was collecting unemployment. Otherwise, I probably would still be working on it.

RAZ: And of course, it's about 10 years since the film of your book by Sofia Coppola came out, a film that really - it's really loyal to the book. It's almost as if you wrote that book in a way where it could very easily be translated onto film.

Mr. EUGENIDES: I certainly...[read on]

Learn about the book that the author says changed his life.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ben Mattlin

Ben Mattlin is the author of Miracle Boy Grows Up: How the Disability Rights Revolution Saved My Sanity.

From his Q & A at The Daily Beast with Jay McInerney:

What’s the genesis of Miracle Boy? Didn’t you first try an autobiographical fiction approach?

You’re exactly right! I was afraid to tell my story directly, wanted to couch it in a fanciful (and imitative) yarn of sex and intrigue. That was doomed to failure for several reasons. First, I was in my 20s and didn’t really have sufficient perspective on my life to tell it right. Second, it was the 1980s, and the world wasn’t ready for the kind of disability story I had in mind. The Americans With Disabilities Act hadn’t even passed yet. People like me just weren’t on people’s radar. We weren’t recognized as a minority group, let alone an interesting, diverse minority group with something to say.

Also, I wasn’t prepared to be honest then. Not until I was in my 40s did I realize that I no longer worried if people thought I was cool. I didn’t have to coat my story in a hip sheen. There was no need to pretend, to fashion myself as something other than what I was and am. I could write about and from my own perspective—write truthfully, authentically—and perhaps establish something new.

But still, I had a block. I just didn’t believe my life was as interesting as people kept telling me.

It was only when I saw my life through someone else’s eyes that I began to get the idea. I had hired a young man from UCLA as my part-time “PA,” as we say. That’s “personal assistant” or “personal-care attendant.” He got me washed and dressed and in my wheelchair in the morning. To me he was a particularly impressive young man—from Africa, with a thirst to better himself and then better his nation. I was as inspired by him as he was by me.

I was no stranger to being called inspiring. Most disabled people are, and we grow tired of it. So I didn’t take it personally. But what he actually said was, “How do you stay so positive?” Apparently, most men he knew were practically drowning in anger.

Which got me thinking about my relationship with anger and...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Ken Jennings

Ken Jennings broke game show records in 2004 with his unprecedented seventy-four game, $2.52 million victory streak on Jeopardy!. Jennings’s book Brainiac, about his Jeopardy! adventures, was a critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller, as was his follow-up, Maphead. He is also the author of Ken Jennings’s Trivia Almanac.

Jennings’s new book is Because I Said So!: The Truth Behind the Myths, Tales, and Warnings Every Generation Passes Down to Its Kids.

From the author's Q & A with Matthew DeLuca at The Daily Beast:

What surprised you more, the myths you debunked or the ones that turned out to be true?

I was surprised both ways. Lots of things I would have supposed were right were wrong, just things you would absolutely take as gospel are not true. Like that sugar makes kids hyperactive. When you think about it, why would it be right? We just assume sugar makes kids nuts because we’ve always assumed it makes kids nuts, and parents want to believe it. I think because it’s flattering for them to say, ‘Yeah, my kids had too much cake at the birthday party,’ and not just, ‘Yeah, my kid was a terror at your birthday party.’ A lot of these myths exist because the behaviors they’re forbidding are annoying.

You made a YouTube trailer for Because I Said So! in which a little girl runs on a treadmill holding a pair of scissors. For a nice guy, you seem to have a wicked sense of humor. Where does that come from?

It came from me thinking it was funny. I remember my wife and I were driving back on a car trip from a family vacation, and we thought, wouldn’t it be good if there was a book trailer for this book. And yeah, I don’t know, you don’t get a lot of chances on Jeopardy! to be funny, but I just love the idea of kids with those suction cups on. That was my daughter holding the scissors. They were...[read on]

See Ken Jennings's eight top books about parents and kids.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Russo

Richard Russo's new memoir is Elsewhere.

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

Why your first memoir now?

In a sense I would have preferred that it be never. I'm a perfectly happy novelist. I love to invent things. But in the months after my mother's death, which was about five years ago, she was very much on my mind and also visiting my dreams as well, which made it feel to me like maybe there was unfinished business there.

I think that this book is in a way connected to my novels, especially the last couple, because "Empire Falls" and "Bridge of Sighs" are both about people who are pushing 60 pretty hard and wondering, how in the world did I come to be here? [In "Empire Falls,] Miles Roby has this profound sense of his mother's dream for him, and he imagines this other life where he is a learned man if only he had finished college the way she wanted him to and become some sort of teacher or professor, that he would have fulfilled her dream. In "Bridge of Sighs," Lucy Lynch, who never leaves his hometown, wonders, how is it that life turned out this way? What was it in my genetic makeup, what were the choices that I made?

And in the months after my mother's death, I found myself...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Alexander Rose

Alexander Rose, a New York historian, is the author of American Rifle: A Biography (2008).

From his Q & A with Randy Dotinga at The Christian Science Monitor:

Q: When did the rifle first appear?

A: The rifle made its first appearance in Europe in the early-modern era, around the 16th century, but there were exceedingly few of them. German immigrants to Pennsylvania in the early 18th century brought their gunsmithing skills and blended English-style muskets with German rifle technology to create a specifically American hybrid, popularly known as a "Kentucky rifle."

At that time, the distinctive difference between a rifle and the standard musket was that the former's barrel was grooved and the latter's was smooth. Among other things, the grooves imparted spin and stability to a bullet as it hurtled through the barrel, allowing it to fly farther and truer than a musket's.The downside was that it took much, much longer to load a rifle than a musket, so it was really a question of quality versus quantity.

Q: Was the rifle initially used for hunting or for military uses?

A: Paradoxically for a gun so closely identified with the military, the rifle began life as a weapon...[read on]

Learn more about the author and his work at Alexander Rose's website and blog.

The Page 99 Test: American Rifle: A Biography.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon's latest novel is Telegraph Avenue.

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

I know that you always strive to entertain. Do you think "entertainment" has become a dirty word among purveyors of high culture?

Sure, and with good reason, in the sense that most of what gets labeled "entertainment" is really terrible. We get the entertainment we deserve. To me, being entertained is having your mind engaged with the work of art on multiple levels. So I think a lot of what gets passed off as entertainment really does not qualify for that definition. It's merely diverting at most.

To be entertained by something is in turn to entertain it, like you entertain ideas, a kind of mutuality there that I think is part of my definition of "entertainment," that you're giving back to the work at the same time the work is giving to you.

Another book that I just loved is the last in Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels sequence ["At Last"]. They conveniently published the first four in one volume in paperback and then the fifth one, so I was able to read them all from the start to the finish, which is how I think they ought to be read. It was just one of the most amazing reading experiences I've had in a decade.

The sequence begins when the protagonist, Patrick Melrose, is about 5 years old and continues up to the present day when he's well into his mid-40s. After all the suffering and torment and despair that Patrick Melrose has been through over the years, [Aubyn] leaves him in a very interesting place, and he does it all with his incredible examination of the sweep of time and the way our understanding of people changes over decades. All of that is done with this incredible, biting, witty, hilarious prose style, the elegant, classic English sentences that he writes and these amazing put-downs, and he's great at...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Caroline Kennedy

Caroline Kennedy, the only living child of JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy, wrote the foreword to Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy.

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

Why did your father start taping? He wasn't making tapes at the beginning of his administration.

Right. They don't really start until almost halfway through — July '62. So no one's quite sure, and there isn't a really accurate explanation. I was always told it was a combination of things, one, that especially after the Bay of Pigs he had gotten what he considered poor advice from the military and then there was a lot of debate about who had said what. And I think he wanted an accurate record of things going forward, but they weren't installed until quite a while after that. So it rings true to me that he was interested in history, he wrote a historical bestseller, he loved reading history, he loved reading diaries. So he was probably thinking that he wanted a historical record; he would write his own book one day, his memoir. He was interested in new technology; he was interested in innovative uses for technology, so this was technology that was just becoming available at the time.

Speaking of the Cuban missile crisis, it was interesting to hear how much bad advice he was given.

I know.

And his strength to resist it. Was it known that he thought he could have been impeached for resisting the military's calls to invade Cuba?

He certainly was walking a tightrope. It's incredible when you listen to the generals. It gives you such a vivid, visceral sense of...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen Thompson Walker

Karen Thompson Walker is author of the debut novel The Age of Miracles. In the novel, an 11-year-old girl wakes up one morning to the news that the earth’s rotation is slowing.

From her Q & A with Liesl Schwabe at Publishers Weekly:

Did you always know that Julia, an adolescent girl, would be your narrator?

I did. I always had a sense of her voice. She has an adult perspective on her childhood, and her character grew out of that voice. She’s an observer and the quality that makes her shy and more on the sidelines also gives her interesting access to what’s going on.

It’s stranger for me to imagine having a sibling (I’m an only child) than it is to imagine this change to the planet. Being an only child is part of who Julia is and how she observes her parents. She’s outnumbered by them.

What sparked the idea for “the slowing”?

After the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, I read...[read on]

Learn about Karen Thompson Walker's five favorite "What If?" books -- "books that envision our world having undergone a great change."

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Odell

Jonathan Odell is the author of the acclaimed novel The View from Delphi, which deals with the struggle for equality in pre-civil rights Mississippi, his home state. His novel The Healing (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) explores the subversive role that story plays in the healing of an oppressed people.

From Odell's Q & A with Lois Alter Mark:

Lois Alter Mark: I loved everything about The Healing -- the story, the characters, the writing. What inspired you to write this?

Jonathan Odell: While doing research for my first novel, The View from Delphi, I kept hearing stories about how crucial the midwife was to the community. People held her memory in great reverence. When I interviewed the first black mayor of Laurel, Miss., I asked what he was proudest of, expecting him to talk about the racism he had overcome, the threats to his life, his struggle to get an education. He thought for a moment and said, "I was one of Miss Kate's babies." Miss Kate had midwifed his mother. These women were saints in their communities.

Secondly, while doing research on black midwives, I discovered that my great-grandmother was a midwife, and was responsible for the death of her daughter -- my father's mother -- through a botched abortion. My dad did not learn about this until he was in his 70's. He had been raised by his grandmother midwife, but never knew about the hand she played in his mother's death. This intrigued me. What was it like for that woman to raise the child of the woman she was responsible for killing?

LAM: You were born in Mississippi, where black people were being lynched and the soon-to-be KKK's Imperial Wizard was working as a respected businessman. When did you realize this was not okay?

JO: I sold books door-to-door in college. One of the publications was...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Jonathan Odell's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Healing.

--Marshal Zeringue