Charlotte Gordon

Critically acclaimed author Charlotte Gordon's newest book is Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley. Earlier works include Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Story of America's First Poet — a Massachusetts Honor book for non-fiction — and The Woman Who Named God: Abraham's Dilemma and the Birth of Three Faiths.

From her Q & A with Alison Nastasi at Flavorwire:

Both Marys had unconventional romantic and sexual relationships, but both women were married and a part of their legacy is dominated by the men they loved. Can you talk more about this and why they chose to pursue marriage despite their beliefs?

Mary Wollstonecraft truly did not believe in marriage. She saw what had happened to abused wives — an older sister who was abused by her husband and a mother who was abused by her alcoholic father. In the 18th century and the 19th century, if you became a wife, you surrendered all your economic and legal rights to your husband. Anything you had was his. You were really rendered legally, economically, and politically powerless. Divorce was almost impossible without an act of Parliament. I think there were three divorces in the 18th century. You were trapped. Forget ethics, Mary Wollstonecraft thought marriage was a dangerous and oppressive institution. However, she also experienced first-hand what it was like to be an unmarried mother. So, with her first unconventional relationship — she didn’t marry the man — everyone thought she was married, and she wasn’t exiled for that. She was worried about what was going to happen to her little girl after she was abandoned. So when she falls in love with Mary’s father, William Godwin, who was also hugely against marriage, they decided they were going to have to compromise because they didn’t want the baby to be a social exile, especially since Mary had already been on the brink herself. They decided to get married. They were greatly ridiculed by all their radical friends. In the case of Mary Wollstonecraft, she did it to protect the child.

So, 16-year-old Mary Godwin, who will become Mary Shelley, sees herself as the carrier of her mother’s ethical principles. No way is she going to get married. But then...[read on]

Visit Charlotte Gordon's website.

My Book, The Movie: Romantic Outlaws.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Hofmeyr

David Hofmeyr was born in South Africa and lives in London and Paris. In 2012 he was a finalist in the SCBWI Undiscovered Voices competition, and in 2013 he graduated with distinction from Bath Spa University with an MA in Writing for Young People. He works as a Planner for Ogilvy & Mather in the UK.

Hofmeyr's first novel is Stone Rider.

From his Q & A at My Bookish Ways:

Will you tell us about Stone Rider and what inspired you to write it?

Stone Rider follows 15-year-old Adam Stone who has lost everything and joins a brutal race on semi-sentient ‘bykes’ to win the chance to escape a dying future Earth. Think The Hunger Games meets Mad Max meets Cormac McCarthy. An adrenalin-fuelled race across an epic desert.

The idea was born in a dream. Crossing an alien desert came a group of riders, like horsemen of the apocalypse. Only here, instead of horses, they were riding other-worldly bykes. I knew I wanted fear and adrenalin, dust and blood and vengeance. A primal story. I suppose it sprang from the Westerns I loved as a kid. The Dollars Trilogy. Pale Rider. Once Upon a Time in the West. But also something futuristic. Alien. Mad Max. Blade Runner. Star Wars.

What do you think makes Adam a compelling character?

Adam undergoes a huge change in the book. In the beginning he’s hesitant – both physically and mentally – and unable to express himself, or stand up to bullies. By the end of the story Adam finds an inner strength that allows him to endure. Adam is a loner and a misfit and I think all readers can relate to being an outsider in some sense. Adam has...[read on]

Visit David Hofmeyr's website.

Stone Rider is one of Rachel Paxton-Gillilan's top five YA books for Mad Max fans.

My Book, the Movie: Stone Rider.

The Page 69 Test: Stone Rider.

Writers Read: David Hofmeyr.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tracy Daugherty

Tracy Daugherty's new book is The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion.

From his Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Why did you decide to write a biography of Joan Didion?

A: I first read Joan Didion in 1978. I was 23, and wanted to be a writer, though I had no ambition then of becoming a biographer.

I was a Beatles fan and probably bought Didion's essay collection, The White Album, because of its Beatle-esque title and the promise on the jacket flap that this book perfectly captured the spirit of the 1960s.

And sure enough, the title essay seemed to me to embody the spirit of the decade that had shaped my young sensibilities.

Its fragmented, collage-like structure was a revelation--not only because I didn't know you could write like that (all those white spaces! all those silences!) but because it showed me...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Margaret Verble

Margaret Verble is an enrolled and voting citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and a member of a large Cherokee family that has, through generations, made many contributions to the tribe’s history and survival.

Verble's new novel is Maud's Line.

From her Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with your main character, Maud, and with the idea for this book?

A: I came up with Maud because I had been told by several people that in order to get a first novel published, it was best to have a single story character.

I knew I wanted to write about Cherokees; I wanted to set the novel earlier than when I set it, but if I did that, I would have to write about a group because it was still such a tribal setting. I had to set it at the time period where a sense of individuality was arising—that was around the 1920s.

Q: So did you come up with the time period first or the story first?

A: The time period first. I wanted to write about the land. It’s my family’s land; it has sustained me through my life. I started reading and thinking about the time period…

Steinbeck had written about the Depression. I went to the 1920s. 1927 and 1929 had been written about a great deal. I settled on the year 1928. Then I settled on ...[read on]

Visit Margaret Verble's website.

My Book, The Movie: Maud's Line.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stefanie Pintoff

Stefanie Pintoff's latest novel is Hostage Taker.

From her Q & A with Taylor at NewInBooks:

Tell us a little bit about your new release, Hostage Taker.

Hostage Taker represents a new direction for me – specifically a change of genre and time-period. The idea for the novel came to me shortly after Saint Patrick’s Cathedral began its massive renovation project—and I first saw the Cathedral buried in scaffolding. I looked at the chaos and upheaval, and began to think: what if … ?

Those what ifs built upon one another until I conceived a story where the fates of a beloved landmark and an unknown number of hostages were at stake. Where the only hope would be FBI agent Eve Rossi and her unconventional team of ex-convicts—a secret unit with extraordinary talents, oversized egos, and contempt for the rules. Where as a writer, I could blend my love of this city’s history with my desire to write a page-turning contemporary thriller.

Hostage Taker was great fun to write – and I hope readers will enjoy it!

If you could have dinner with anyone, alive or dead, who would you choose and why?

It’s almost impossible to pick just one person, but if forced to choose, I would pick...[read on]

Learn more about her books at Stefanie Pintoff's website.

The Page 69 Test: In the Shadow of Gotham.

The Page 69 Test: A Curtain Falls.

Coffee with a Canine: Stefanie Pintoff & Ginger.

The Page 69 Test: Secret of the White Rose.

--Marshal Zeringue

Louise Penny

Louise Penny's new novel is The Nature of the Beast, the 11th book in the Inspector Gamache series. From the author's Q & A with Tessa Berenson at Time magazine:

What first sparked your idea for this series?

It was just after 9/11 that I started writing it. At the time, the world seemed a very frightening and threatening place and I felt the need for security and for connection and company and a sense of belonging, and of course the peace and security that comes with that. And so I created this village. To be honest with you, every decision I made in Still Life [Penny’s first novel, published in 2006] was selfish. I created it just for me. So I created Three Pines, and I created these characters that I would choose as friends, mostly because also I realized, having been a journalist for many years and spoken to many people in publishing, the chances of people published were so tiny. I realized that really writing it had to be reward enough because it may be the only reward I would get. So I created characters whose company I would enjoy, I created a main character who I would marry, I created a village I would love to live in. And as it turns out, other people feel the same as I do, thank God.

Your books take place in the fictional village of Three Pines, but the portrait of the place so intimately drawn. Did you take anything from your own small town in Quebec to create it?

It’s definitely drawn from a whole bunch of things. Absolutely from the...[read on]

Visit Louise Penny's website.

The Page 69 Test: Still Life.

Coffee with a Canine: Louise Penny & Trudy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alexandra Kleeman

Alexandra Kleeman's new novel is You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine.

From her Q & A with Corinne Gould for Late Night Library:

CG: One of the things that is so arresting about your novel is the absolute strangeness of the story world. Literary dystopia is now ubiquitous among American bestsellers, making the genre crowded and stale. One of the things that sets You Too Can Have a Body like Mine apart is the emphasis on internal and relational conflict. Rather than an oppressive government serving as the villainous entity, television commercials for Kandy Kakes, celebrity-endorsed fliers for veal cutlets, and the enticing pamphlets of the Church of the Conjoined Eaters cult draw the characters into their habitual destruction (seemingly) by their own volition. Can you speak to what it means for the damaging and cyclical behaviors to be products of choice?

AK: I think it’s interesting that so many dystopian novels put a governmental entity at the center of the problem—it seems like an almost nostalgic fear, the stuff of classic post-war dystopias like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. They’re clear, authoritarian, and never as slippery as I feel a real dystopia would be. In this novel I wanted to depict a decentralized dystopia, a dystopia of choice that arises from being forced to choose between two inadequate options.

Choice is not the same thing as agency, though it can feel like it is when orchestrated correctly: you can choose to buy an Vitamin Water instead of a Coke and feel good about yourself thinking that the water will be better for you, but there are 33 grams of sugar in a Vitamin Water, and the company is still owned by Coca Cola. Choosing is part of our national identity (and we believe that we have more access to choices than other countries, hence those “In Soviet Russia” jokes—“In Soviet Russia, Coke drinks you!”), but there are so many decoy alternatives and false opposites that it’s difficult to escape that thing that you tried not to choose.

What sort of agency is there for someone who is choosing not to choose? Choosing an unnamed option, I suppose...[read on]

Visit Alexandra Kleeman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Naomi J. Williams

Naomi J. Williams was born in Japan and spoke no English until she was six years old. Her debut novel, Landfalls, is a fictionalized account of the 18th-century Lapérouse expedition.

From her Q & A with Henri Lipton at ZYZZYVA:

ZYZZYVA: You dedicate the novel to your grandmother, “who also loved maps.” How did your love of maps inform the strong sense of place in your writing? How many of the “landfalls” did you visit, if any, and how does visiting a place, or not visiting it, affect the way you write about it?

Naomi J. Williams: I’m so delighted you’ve mentioned my grandmother. She was Japanese, and one of my early memories is of sitting on the tatami floor in her tiny apartment in Fukuoka, a city in southern Japan, and poring over a map of the city. I remember being fascinated by the notion that you could have this logical, colorful paper representation of where you lived.

I’ve loved maps ever since, and indeed, the whole idea for Landfalls came from a misidentified antique map my husband bought for me about fifteen years ago. I tell that story in some detail in a recent blog post, but briefly, it’s a map from the Lapérouse expedition, of Lituya Bay, Alaska, the setting for two chapters in the novel.

Maps were very important in the research and writing for this book. I was able to visit only a few of the places that appear in the novel—Monterey, California; Paris; Albi in the south of France—that’s about it. So I relied heavily on maps, both paper maps and online maps. The chapter that required the most in that regard was “Dispatches,” which describes a trip across Russia. I spent hours poring over Google Maps and wandering around in Street View to get a sense of the landscape.

I think it’s always better to visit a place in real life, if you can. One of the first people to read parts of this book was...[read on]

Visit Naomi J. Williams's website.

The Page 69 Test: Landfalls.

Writers Read: Naomi J. Williams.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Markoff

John Markoff is the author of Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots.

From his Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross:

GROSS: So it in part is a question of will machines help us do our work or leave us unemployed?

MARKOFF: It is. It's an increasingly intense question that's being debated now in society. But it goes way back to the dawn of interactive computing. And I noticed this first in these two laboratories that were on either side of Stanford University in the mid-1960s. There were two pioneers of modern computing. One was John McCarthy, who was actually the person who coined the term artificial intelligence. And he was on one side of campus, and he created a laboratory in 1962 called the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. And at that point, he thought it would take just a decade to design a working AI - something that was as intelligent and as capable as a human being. On the other side of campus, there was another engineer whose name was Douglas Engelbart. And we know him probably because you've heard that he invented the mouse, and he was one of the people who pioneered the idea of hypertext that led to the World Wide Web. And Engelbart really believed deeply that we should use machines to augment our senses and our intelligence and sort of bootstrap the collective intelligence of the human species to benefit mankind. And I realized those were two different philosophical stances. And it created two different communities within the computer science world. One was the AI community and the other with the IA community, which later became called the human-computer interface community. And since then it's been, you know, more than 40 years, 50 years, those communities have largely progressed without speaking to each other, in isolation. And it seems like now is a good time that they maybe should work on converging their powers.

GROSS: What's an example, in each category, of a robot that we're using now and that one we'll probably be able to use in the near future?

MARKOFF: Well, so an artificial intelligence robotic device that I think probably will become familiar to all people is a self-driving car. We...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Nick Holdstock

Nick Holdstock is the author of The Casualties: A Novel.

From his Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:

I always want to ask, what sparked this novel? What was it that was obsessing you that made you know you had to write this?

I think that sometimes we, as writers, are surrounded by a lot of great material without realizing it. We’re too stuck in our various ruts and complacencies to wonder why, for instance, our Italian neighbour calls loudly out of her window at almost the same time every day but never receives an answer. A lot of the elements of this book were part of my life without me thinking they might fit together. Like Sam, the book’s main character, I was working in a second hand bookshop, and was thus exposed to all kinds of different people, both the customers and the volunteers who staffed the shop. Like him, I opened many bags and boxes of books that had been donated by the public, and on each occasion made some automatic (and probably unfair) judgment about them based not only on the books they had given away, but on the photos, letters and other personal items that were sometimes left inside. And as a long-term resident of Edinburgh, which is a very small (even intimate) city, I was used to seeing the same kinds of unusual characters as those depicted in the novel. I saw a woman who always wore a bridal veil, a man with a beard so long and matted that birds could nest in it. My friends and I would talk about these people as if we knew something about them, but for the most part we were guessing.

So you could say that there was all this kindling around me. The spark that made me think all this could combine was Sherwood Anderson’s novel Winesburg, Ohio, a book about a small town in the 1920s populated by people that the narrator calls ‘grotesques’, but then depicts as anything but. Though apparently eccentric, even extreme, they are better seen as...[read on]

Visit Nick Holdstock's website.

Writers Read: Nick Holdstock.

--Marshal Zeringue