Richard Price

Richard Price's eighth novel, a New York cop story called The Whites, is being published under a transparent pen name: “Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt.”

From the author's Q & A with Dan Slater for The Daily Beast:

When James Wood reviewed your last novel, Lush Life, he wrote that you have greater ambitions than your genre can accommodate. Are you a genre writer?

No. I think what he’s saying, and what I feel myself, is that I slightly ghettoize myself by continuously writing about cops. But I feel like a literary writer. Not to be grandiose, but would you call Theodore Dreiser, after An American Tragedy, a crime writer? Would you call Dostoyevsky a crime writer?

When you’re looking at a huge phenomenon—such as the crack epidemic and relationships between black kids and cops; or the the amorphousness of the Lower East Side—how do you write about that? It’s a panorama. But where’s your story? A crime, and the investigation that follows, gives you a spine for your panorama, a way into the world. The nature of investigation pulls in so many disparate people: lawyers, witnesses, families, victims, killers. It’s a beautifully built-in way to show all the things you’re fascinated by, but in a pertinent way to the story.

What’s a great crime-centric novel that’s not a genre book?

George V. Higgins’s first novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Higgins was a former prosecutor in Boston. The novel was about the Boston underworld. It was a small story about small people. But it was so dead-on. The guy had...[read on]

Learn about Richard Price's five most essential books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elana K. Arnold

Elana K. Arnold's new book is The Question of Miracles.

From her Q & A at Sharpread:

Can you tell us a little bit about The Question of Miracles?

Iris Abernathy, the main character in THE QUESTION OF MIRACLES, has a lot to be unhappy about: her best friend has died, her family has moved her from sunny California to rainy Oregon, and she’s both lonely and unwilling to connect with other people. On top of all that, even her hairless cat Charles is miserable. When Iris meets Boris, a kid at her new school, she figures he’s barely better than no friend at all. But when she learns he’s considered by some to be a LITERAL MIRACLE, she starts to wonder… why do some people get miracles, but not others? Can she get a miracle, too?

What is your favorite thing about being an author?

My favorite thing about being an author is...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Elana K. Arnold's website and blog.

Writers Read: Elana K. Arnold (November 2012).

Writers Read: Elana K. Arnold (June 2013).

The Page 69 Test: Burning.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Lippman

Laura Lippman's new novel is Hush Hush (Tess Monaghan Series #12).

From the author's BOLO Books Q & A:

BOLO Books: Hush Hush is your first novel in several years to featuring Tess Monaghan as the main character. Did you always intended to return to Tess? And did you expect that any return to her character would have to be with a story in which the crime was attached to motherhood?

Laura Lippman: I expected to return, hoped to return, but I was resigned to the idea that I might have painted myself in a corner by making her a mother. Tess is far from the first mother in PI fiction. (And there are lots of fathers, too.) But my sense is that the people who read and like the Tess books would have very definite ideas about how she should behave and would be unforgiving if she took risks – or put her family at risk. I finally realized that was the story, how motherhood had affected this once impulsive woman.

BOLO Books: The first Tess Monaghan book, Baltimore Blues, was published in 1997. Other than the obvious things such as getting older, marrying and having a child, how is Tess different now than she was back in that first novel?

Laura Lippman: She’s gained a lot of confidence. She’s running a successful business. She’s aware of her strengths and weaknesses, but instead of berating herself for the weaknesses, she finds a partner who complements her.

BOLO Books: Similarly – and again, moving beyond the obvious – how are you different than you were back when you wrote Baltimore Blues?

Laura Lippman: I’m a lot more...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Laura Lippman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Louisa Treger

Born in London, Louisa Treger began her career as a classical violinist. She studied at the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music, and worked as a freelance orchestral player and teacher.

Treger subsequently turned to literature, gaining a First Class degree and a PhD in English at University College London, where she focused on early twentieth century women’s writing. Married with three children, she lives in London.

Treger's new book, her first novel, is The Lodger.

From the author's Q & A with Dorothy Reno at the Washington Independent Review of Books:

The heroine of your book is Dorothy Richardson, a real-life English writer from the first part of the 20th century. Can you summarize her most important work?

Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957) was a fascinating figure. In her lifetime, she was considered Virginia Woolf’s peer, and she forged a new style of fiction that became known as stream of consciousness. Her life was as interesting as her writing, for she was deeply unconventional in both. Due to her family’s financial difficulties, she was forced to find employment at the age of 17, working first as a governess and teacher, and later as a dental assistant in London. She attended a wide range of lectures and political and scientific meetings, and lived frugally so that she could afford concert tickets. She associated with political radicals, European exiles, and writers, including H.G. Wells, with whom she had an affair. Wells saw that she had talent and encouraged her to write. In 1917, she married the artist Alan Odle. Dorothy was initially hailed as a literary pioneer, but the early recognition and interest slid from her grasp, and she died in poverty and obscurity.

Dorothy’s life work was a 12-volume autobiographical novel-sequence called Pilgrimage, which focused on the inner development of its protagonist from the time she left home, aged 17, to the moment she became a writer. Dissatisfaction with the conventions of the realist novel — which she perceived as being explicitly masculine — led Dorothy to seek new narrative forms that would render the texture of consciousness as it recorded life’s impressions, life’s minute-to-minute quality. Virginia Woolf noted that Dorothy "has invented, or, if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own uses, a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender."

In The Lodger, Dorothy has an affair with her best friend’s husband, author H.G. Wells. Do you think she’s ever able to forgive herself for perpetrating such a betrayal?

Dorothy is fully aware of the magnitude of her betrayal, though she...[read on]

Visit Louisa Treger's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Lodger.

My Book, The Movie: The Lodger.

Writers Read: Louisa Treger.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Zeihan

Peter Zeihan is the author of The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder.

From his interview with Fareed Zakaria:

ZAKARIA: So, the big point of your book is America is in an enviable position. And it was historically and it will continue to be. But I want to touch on why geography and demography and these structural factors really inform your analysis. So, you start out by pointing out that America has one of the world's most enviable markets because of the rivers. Explain that.

ZEIHAN: Sure, it really comes down to a balance of transport. How easy is it to move things within your system versus beyond your system? Water transport costs about 1/12 of what it cost to move things by land and that's assuming that you already have the infrastructure in place. Once you add in interstate, the roadways, the ports, and everything, it's about a 50-1 advantage.

ZAKARIA: And that's why you point out throughout history civilizations and cities have always started on rivers or ports.

ZEIHAN: Almost all of the successful ones, whether it's the French, the Chinese, the Japanese, or so on. But in modern times, the United States has over 17,000 miles of these waterways that's more than everybody else put together.

ZAKARIA: That's more than the rest of the world put together.

ZEIHAN: Absolutely.

ZAKARIA: By comparison, what it is China and Germany?

ZEIHAN: China and Germany, about 2,000, the entire of the world, just over 100.

ZAKARIA: And so, you have these great river systems that allow you to get goods out. And then talk about America's port advantage.

ZEIHAN: Ports, it's a whole different scale. Because of the Intracoastal Waterway, in essence, half of American frontage is protected. There's these barrier islands that protect everything. You have all these indentations in Texas, which...[read on]

Visit Peter Zeihan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Martha Hodes

Martha Hodes's new book is Mourning Lincoln.

From a Q & A in the publisher's catalog:

What led you to write a book about personal responses to Lincoln’s assassination?

I was in New York City on September 11, 2001, and I remember the moment of Kennedy’s assassination from my childhood. As a historian of the Civil War era, and as someone who lived through those two modern-day transformative events, I wanted to know not only what happened in 1865 when people heard the news of Lincoln’s death but also what those responses meant.

Did anything surprise you during your research?

Almost everything. Not only did I find a much wider array of emotions and stories than I’d imagined, I also found that even those utterly devastated by the assassination easily interrupted their mourning to attend to the most mundane aspects of everyday life. I also found myself surprised by the unabated virulence of Lincoln’s northern critics and the way Confederates simultaneously celebrated Lincoln’s death and instantly—on the very day he died—cast him as a fallen friend to the white South.

Do personal responses to Lincoln’s assassination tell a larger story about American history?

Very much so. The assassination provoked personal responses that were deeply intertwined with different and irreconcilable visions of the postwar and post-emancipation nation. Black freedom, the fate of former Confederates, and the future of the nation were at stake for all Americans, black and white, North and South, whether they grieved or rejoiced when they heard the news.

Visit Martha Hodes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman's latest book is Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances.

From his interview with NPR's Arun Rath:

RATH: You note that usually short story collections or collections like this have some sort of a unifying theme. And you apologize for the fact that this doesn't have a unifying theme. You say it's kind of a hodgepodge. But I would maybe put to you that there's a theme of fiction overtaking reality or dreams doing that - and also it seems like this idea of forgetting and memory.

GAIMAN: I think that's true. In some ways, it's me tipping my hat both to the human imaginative facility - the fact that we can imagine - and it's also a way of trying to celebrate aspects of and creatures of and people of the imagination that I've loved, which is why it contains a Sherlock Holmes short story, which is why it has a tribute to Bradbury in there, which is why it has a Jack Vance story. There are things in there that are just ways of tipping my hat to things and fictions and acts of imaging that I have...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

James McGrath Morris

James McGrath Morris is an author, columnist, and radio show host. He writes primarily biographies and works of narrative nonfiction.

His newest works are Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, The First Lady of the Black Press and the best-selling Kindle single, Revolution by Murder: Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and the Plot to Kill Henry Clay Frick.

From Morris' Q & A with Kevin Nance for the Chicago Tribune:

Q: What would you say were some of the highlights of [Ethel Payne's] coverage of the civil rights movement?

A: When things started to happen in the South, she begged to be sent there, and at first the Defender refused because they were concerned about her safety. Perhaps the most significant moment was when she went to Montgomery right after the bus boycott. This was a time when the nation wasn't paying much attention; it was still not a national story. She went down there to cover it, and what she discovered was quite profound, which was that there was a new kind of leadership emerging in the South, where the clergy were taking over the movement.

Q: Another important aspect of her journalism at that was her writing style, which you describe as "folksy."

A: She understood her audience very well. You have to remember that African-Americans at the end of the 19th century were highly illiterate, and in the '50s when she was writing for the Defender, their literacy level and education level was far lower than whites. So she was constantly striving to write in a way that her readers would understand. I compare her to Ernie Pyle in World War II. It's a very personal form of journalism, and looking back at it, her reporting is diminished in the eyes of some because it doesn't have the analysis and the sophistication of some of the white reporters when they arrived on the scene. But they were writing for a different group.

Q: Another thing that distinguished her as a journalist was her relationship to the concept of objectivity. She saw herself as "an instrument of change."

A: She felt she was part of the story, so she abandoned the idea of objectivity. Whenever she asked a question about race, it involved her directly. She thought it was sort of fake to remain objective. Instead, she...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at the official James McGrath Morris website.

The Page 99 Test: Eye on the Struggle.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura van den Berg

Laura van den Berg's new novel is Find Me.

In it, her main character Joy has no one. She spends her days working the graveyard shift at a grocery store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins with memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, Joy, for the first time in her life, seems to have an advantage: she is immune.

From the author's interview with NPR's Scott Simon:

SIMON: So what's this sickness?

VAN DEN BERG: The sickness is an epidemic that destroys memory. And in the early incarnations of the book, the sickness actually got a much more realistic treatment, sort of "Contagion"-esque if you will. But the more I worked on the book the longer it began to move into this surreal direction. And then when I uncovered the part about memory loss, I finally understood how the larger story of the sickness locked together with Joy's interior story.

SIMON: Joy's interior story - for example, why is she always swilling cough syrup?

VAN DEN BERG: Yes, I mean, Joy is a character who, ironically, wants to forget. She's had a childhood trauma that is somewhat repressed and over the course of this story she has to...[read on]

Learn more about Find Me, and isit Laura van den Berg's website.

Learn about Laura van den Berg's 6 favorite unconventional mystery novels.

Writers Read: Laura van den Berg (January 2010).

--Marshal Zeringue

Todd Purdum

Todd Purdum is the author of the book An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

From his 2014 Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross:

GROSS: What impact did the Civil Rights Act and its passage have on President Johnson's relationship with the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement?

PURDUM: Well, the immediate effect was a positive one. He became quite close to them - many of them - and they work cooperatively through the Voting Rights Act. But as the '60s went on, and particularly as Martin Luther King and others began to oppose very vocally President Johnson's policies on Vietnam, an estrangement grew up. And by the time of King's assassination in 1968, he and Johnson were not on speaking terms anymore.

So that also is a very poignant - I mean, the two of them really combined to pass this landmark legislation and by the end of King's life they were really not speaking.

GROSS: You know, another ripple effect of the passage of the Civil Rights Act was the change in voting habits in the - the voting patterns in the American South. You want to just describe that?

PURDUM: Well, the night he signed the bill, Johnson told his friend Bill Moyers that he had a premonition that they'd just delivered the South to the Republican Party for years to come. And in fact, beginning in the 1960s and up to the present day, that really came true, as white backlash and resentment against these laws conspired to help revive and revitalize the Republican Party throughout the South.

The Republican Party in the South had been basically a black party and by the, you know, end of the 20th century was almost a completely white party. And the Republican Party's source of national strength is and remains the South.

GROSS: What did you learn writing this book on how the Civil Rights Act was actually passed about how Congress really works?

PURDUM: Well, I learned several things. One is that there was a lot of advantage to having a backroom deal, having quiet negotiations out of public view where people could test their ideas, not posture, not preen for the cameras, but just talk to each other as people. Secondly, they...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue