Tessa Arlen

Tessa Arlen, the daughter of a British diplomat, had lived in or visited her parents in Singapore, Cairo, Berlin, the Persian Gulf, Beijing, Delhi and Warsaw by the time she was sixteen. She came to the U.S. in 1980 and worked as an H.R. recruiter for the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee for the 1984 Olympic Games, where she interviewed her future husband for a job. She lives in Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Arlen's new novel is Death of a Dishonorable Gentleman.

From her Q & A with LuAnn Braley:

What attracts you to the Edwardian Age?

The first decade of the 1900s was a completely different world from ours today, but it is extraordinarily accessible. My great-grandmother was Edwardian and I remember her quite clearly. She was in her late seventies when I was a little girl, always immaculately turned out and she was a stickler for little things like good manners, ‘being as quiet as a mouse’ and washing your hands (a lot!). Research for the era is rich in so many available sources so it is easy to be well informed about the time. I particularly appreciate that the age seemed to abound in eccentrics, people with strong characters and forceful personalities. Edwardians conformed to social convention very thoroughly, but were often flamboyant in their individuality. It was also an age of great change in...[read on]

Visit Tessa Arlen's website.

The Page 69 Test: Death of a Dishonorable Gentleman.

My Book, The Movie: Death of a Dishonorable Gentleman.

Coffee with a Canine: Tessa Arlen & Daphne.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lynn Chandler Willis

Lynn Chandler Willis has worked in the corporate world, the television news business, and the newspaper industry. She was born, raised, and continues to live in the heart of North Carolina within walking distance of her children and their spouses and her nine grandchildren. She shares her home, and heart, with Sam the cocker spaniel.

Willis's latest novel is Wink of an Eye.

From her Q & A with Susan Storer Clark at the Washington Independent Review of Books:

Wink of an Eye is about private eye Gypsy Moran, who has returned to his hometown of Wink, Texas. Wink is a real town in West Texas, with a population of less than 1,000. In the novel’s acknowledgements, you thank the people of Wink for welcoming you. Did they know your book would feature a corrupt sheriff, a couple of crooked deputies, and a ring of criminals kidnapping teenage girls? Can you tell us what their reaction was, or what you think it might be?

I discovered the Wink, Texas, Facebook page long after the book was written. I introduced myself and asked to join and told them about the book. We had some great conversations about what it was like to grow up in Wink. I'm from a very small town myself, so I understand completely the good and the bad. Most often, the good wins out. In Wink of an Eye, although he's been gone 20 years, when Gypsy's in trouble and his life is in danger, the first place he runs to is home —Wink, Texas. And in Gypsy's case, like many others, "home" is so much more than just a location. It's a living, breathing emotion. There are bad people, police corruption, and criminals doing horrible things everywhere — but the number of good people far outweighs the bad, and in Gypsy's mind...[read on]

Visit Lynn Chandler Willis's website.

My Book, The Movie: Wink of an Eye.

The Page 69 Test: Wink of an Eye.

Coffee with a Canine: Lynn Chandler Willis & Sam.

--Marshal Zeringue

Adrienne Rich

Poet and essayist Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) was one of America’s foremost public intellectuals. Widely read and hugely influential, Rich’s career spanned seven decades and has hewed closely to the story of post-war American poetry itself.

From her 2001 Q & A with Magdalena Edwards, published at The Critical Flame:

Magdalena Edwards: How do you perceive the relationship between poetry and politics? Do you write “political poetry”?

Adrienne Rich: I have written a good deal in prose on this relationship (which I do not regard as static) particularly in my book What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993). I was trying to confront the strange “American” belief that poetry and politics should exist in separate realms, that a politically engaged poetry must sacrifice aesthetic standards, and that the poet is socially irrelevant. I started the book at the beginning of the Gulf War and the decade of the so-called triumph of free enterprise, the so-called “end of history,” (especially revolutionary or socialist history). What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century. I used a great many of these voices in the book, both poetry and prose, to suggest the power and vitality of this tradition.

I learned a great deal in writing that book, not least how without poetry’s presence in the social realm the society’s imaginative powers are diminished and shrunken; how much community and poetry have to do with each other. I’ve written on art and politics often since—notably in my forthcoming book of essays Arts of the Possible. I define “politics” in this sense as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create—not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions. There is no way I can see that the poet can stand outside all that. How to make a poetry adequate to the crisis we’re now in, is...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Chuck Palahniuk

Coming soon from Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club 2 – a serial graphic novel illustrated by Cameron Stewart and David Mack.

From the author's Q & A with Adam Linehan for Maxim:

When we last spoke you told me that Fight Club, the original, was very much a product of your circumstances at the time. Do you feel that way about the sequel?

Oh yeah. The sequel is so much about the protagonist getting away from medication and getting back to an aspect of himself that was the best part of him that he now has to suppress with all these prescription medications. Now that I’m taking Ambien and Ativan, Xanax - everything I can get my hands on just to kind of maintain my lifestyle and keep from going crazy - I kind of long for some way to leave all those things behind.

At the Comic Con announcement, you said that your biggest fear in diving back into Fight Club 2 was the “feverish ill-fed exhausting stint of writing.” Did that turn out to be the case?

No, not as much as I thought. Writing the script took a long time, about a year, but I’ve been able to go back as the illustrator does each issue. I can go back and revisit the issue and rewrite the script, as I want, so I can bring more ideas to it every time. So it hasn’t been a nightmare that way. In fact, collaborating with the illustrator and finding out the stuff he can depict that I don’t need to spell out in the script is a whole different way of working.

Are there any other advantages of working in the graphic novel medium?

The collaborative nature of it is...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Denis Hayes

Denis Hayes is a globally recognized environmentalist, the national coordinator of the first Earth Day, and CEO of the Bullitt Foundation. Gail Boyer Hayes is a writer, editor, and former environmental lawyer who has authored books on solar energy and health issues.

Their new book is Cowed: The Hidden Impact of 93 Million Cows on America's Health, Economy, Politics, Culture, and Environment.

From Denis Hayes's Q & A with Tracy Fernandez Rysavy at Green American:

GA/Tracy: Let’s talk impacts. Our diets have a big impact on the environment and the climate. But your recommendation, surprisingly, was not to go vegetarian or vegan.

Denis: My wife and I admire vegetarians and vegans. We’ve been mostly vegetarian for decades. The more meat a diet contains, the greater its environmental impact, definitely including climate impact. But, according to a poll done for the Vegetarian Times, just 3.2 percent of American adults are vegetarian. I wish that number was ten times larger, but wishing won’t make it so.

Cowed is aimed at the other 97 percent. Unless we can significantly shift that vast majority who are still eating meat—often a lot of meat— we are not going to achieve enough environmental change fast enough to matter.

America has the third-highest beef consumption in the world (behind Argentina, and, of all places, Luxembourg.) The average American male eats 85 pounds of beef a year! And that beef is mostly marbled (a Madison Avenue word for fat) and is typically produced under inhumane conditions in CAFOs.

Someone who eats 85 pounds of beef—and remember that is merely the average for men—is not a prime candidate to go vegan. But if we can persuade those people to reduce their consumption from 1.6 pounds of bad beef every week to, say, one-half pound of good, healthy beef from the right sources, the benefits for human health and the environment will be profound.

Our goal with Cowed is to significantly reduce the amount of beef consumed overall while shifting people to healthier, organic, grass-fed and -finished beef. Because of the way federal subsidies for agribusiness operate...[read on]

Visit the Cowed website.

The Page 99 Test: Cowed.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lindsay Hunter

Lindsay Hunter is the author of the story collections Don’t Kiss Me and Daddy’s. Originally from Florida, she now lives in Chicago with her husband, son, and two pit bulls.

Hunter's first novel is Ugly Girls.

From her Q & A with Luke Goebel for Electric Lit:

Luke Goebel: Alright! Hi, Lindsay Hunter. You wrote the book Ugly Girls (great title, by the way) and it’s a jaw rattler. I keep saying it used my heart as a rag. To clean what is the next question…the heart of the world? The heart of all of us? The holy secular heart? I mean there’s a lot to say on this one, and it’s BIG. FSG release. Kind of book everyone will want to read. Mass appeal, all that, killer speed book, craft out of the top of the head, with all the best prose anyone could want, plus the big story, mindblower, like at times I’m reading something written so good I think it’s As I Lay Dying only it’s 2014 or ’15 or ’16 and it’s Ugly Girls and it’s set in this trailer park – other times I’m clearly reading Lindsay Hunter and it’s still set in that trailer park— but it’s like one of those great books you read in school as a kid (though this one isn’t going to be taught in any kids’ schools anytime soon I doubt, not with some of these scenes!) and thought, HOW THE HELL DID THIS WRITER DO THIS? They must just be one of them [sic] magic writer people, one of them [sic] AUTHORS, who sit away in some lonely place of beauty to write this GOLD that just comes out of them, like, erupts, because they live the Earth into its being, and are geniuses, and all that… I’m trying to give you a compliment… say your book is killer… and with a difference from those old greats, because you do things they would have been shot if they wrote. Really. Killed.

SO… here’s the question, and it’s the ONE I think everyone wants to know when they read a book that rattles their jaws and makes the world seem at once familiar and strange, so the reader thinks “Maybe I don’t know myself, or life at all, maybe I can try again and do better this life.” Question being: HOW DID YOU DO IT?

Where did this novel come from? Who are these characters you found? Did you have help? Was there an editor? How did you write this? At what times of day? From what hilltop or plantation or moor or whatever wetlands? On what machine or by hand? Where did you figure out to have that quarry that is in the book? How did you find this novel inside you? Well… Hunter, will you tell us?

Lindsay Hunter: Luke, thank you so much for saying all of that. It is an enormous compliment coming from you!

I think I trusted that I had a novel-sized story to tell inside me, and then I just kept trusting that every single day. It was very hard at times and it haunts me to this day! Eventually, after years of doubts and self-hatred and all of it, a writer must come to a place where she can trust herself. Or give herself permission, at the very least, to write. So this novel is kind of the culmination of years and years of self-flagellating and wheels-spinning. Eventually I just decided to forge on into the abyss, or whatever that saying is. Is there a saying? I decided to trust the abyss.

You know, this is something I’m learning as a mother, now, too. I resist...[read on]

The Page 69 Test: Ugly Girls.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby's best-known books are the internationally bestselling novels High Fidelity, About A Boy, How To Be Good, A Long Way Down and Juliet, Naked. His non-fiction books include the football memoir Fever Pitch and The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, a collection of his essays on books and culture. He is also the author of Slam, which is vintage Hornby for teenagers.

Hornby's new novel is Funny Girl.

From his Februrary 2015 Q & A at Goodreads:

GR: [In Funny Girl] you have a central character in Sophie who's pointedly unhip about music. Tell me how you decided to make that an attribute of her character and what you feel it says about her.

NH: When I was thinking about the book, I decided for various reasons to set it in the 1960s. I wanted to try and avoid a straightforward swinging '60s theme, which I feel I've seen and read before. Also, the more I thought about it, I felt that to set the book in that world of BBC entertainment, the characters would be a bit squarer, which is different than we're used to thinking about characters in the 1960s. There was a quote, I think from a photographer at the time, "Swinging London was 200 people, and I knew all of them." Their myth has cast a shadow over the whole decade. But there were lots of people doing creative work who weren't aware of that scene, were right on the edge of it, and wouldn't actually feel the effects of it for years to come. Sophie comes from a different tradition, and the Beatles-y, Stones-y mod stuff was just starting as she was beginning to work, so she wouldn't necessarily have seen it coming.

GR: She's also very much her father's daughter.

NH: Right. She works hard, and she hangs out with people who would also be a bit mystified by it all.

GR: I loved the scene where her unquestioned appropriation of her father's politics is disabused. It felt like a major step forward for her from her life in Blackpool, which outside of your book is not a place I'd ever read about. As an American reader, I am tempted to find an equivalent American town.

NH: It'd have to be a fading seaside town that no one goes to anymore because they have more money, so I guess it'd be like an Asbury Park, except Blackpool, being in the north of England, is cold and wet pretty much all the time. It's sort of tragic that people ever went there for...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Martha Hodes

Martha Hodes's new book is Mourning Lincoln.

From her Q & A with Ruth Graham for the Boston Globe:

IDEAS: My impression had always been that there was pretty universal grief at Lincoln’s assassination. That clearly wasn’t the case. Were there certain reactions that particularly surprised you?

HODES: Not just grief on the part of the mourners, of which there was a great deal, but also anger—fury in fact. There were soldiers’ diaries where the men would write about wishing there was one more battle....They wanted to exterminate the enemy they were so angry....And then of course reading the responses of Confederates, the utter glee they expressed when they got the news of Lincoln’s assassination. They thanked the assassin, they praised God. It was clearly a reprieve from the horror of defeat, which they had just experienced.

IDEAS: How did black Americans in particular react to the news?

HODES: African-Americans, North and South, claimed that their loss was greater than the loss of Lincoln for white Americans. White mourners who noted that down did not dispute that fact. They understood that that was true. African-Americans had...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Martha Hodes's author website.

Cover story: Mourning Lincoln.

The Page 99 Test: Mourning Lincoln.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Robson

Jennifer Robson is the international bestselling author of Somewhere in France. She holds a doctorate in British economic and social history from Saint Antony’s College, University of Oxford, where she was a Commonwealth Scholar and an SSHRC Doctoral Fellow.

Her new novel is After the War is Over.

From Robson's Q & A with Katie Noah Gibson:

Can you talk about the genesis of After the War is Over? (Readers of Somewhere in France will recognize Charlotte as a dear friend of Lilly, the main character of that book.)

When I first wrote Somewhere in France, I thought of it as a stand-alone book, but as I worked on later drafts, and the character of Charlotte became clearer, I knew she deserved a book of her own. I included a few details of her backstory, such as her childhood in Somerset and her studies at Oxford, but left myself enough room that I wouldn’t feel too hampered later on when it came time to write her book.

How did you decide what work Charlotte would be doing – i.e. helping the poor and those devastated by the war?

It’s only a small detail in Somewhere in France, but at one point Edward and Lilly talk about Charlotte and what she did after leaving work as Lilly’s governess. I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to send her to Liverpool and put her to work for Eleanor Rathbone, an actual Liverpool politician and social activist. I’m so glad I did, for Miss Rathbone is a personal hero of mine for her pioneering work as a feminist and social activist. As well, Charlotte’s devotion to her, and determination to live up to her mentor’s high standards, became...[read on]

Visit Jennifer Robson's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Jennifer Robson & Ellie.

My Book, The Movie: After the War Is Over.

The Page 69 Test: After the War Is Over.

Writers Read: Jennifer Robson (January 2015).

--Marshal Zeringue

Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane's latest novel is World Gone By.

From the author's Q & A with Ivy Pochoda at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

I know that you value story above anything else, but [World Gone By] does seem to have themes that pop up over and over again. No good writer sits down and says, “I’m going to write about the theme of death,” and, “I’m going to write about the theme of this and that,” but there are some overwhelming recurrences. One of them is parenting, a question of fathers and sons. I believe you became a father while you were writing this series, right?

Yeah. I entered into The Given Day as the most cynical human being on the planet, and I exited the entire coffin with two children. I have never been an autobiographical writer, but I am always obliquely writing about whatever I’m going through. The last three books I’ve written have been very child-centric, and partially that’s because I’ve got two kids constantly interrupting me while I’m trying to write.

The strange thing about the parent/child story in this book and in Live by Night is it’s a worst-case-scenario story. It’s not happy. If you’re drawing on your own experiences, you certainly translated them into something tragic.

Basically, these men [in these books] should...[read on]

Learn about Dennis Lehane's five most important books.

--Marshal Zeringue