Paula Hawkins

Paula Hawkins is the author of The Girl on the Train.

From a Q & A with Alex Clark for the Guardian:

Your debut thriller, The Girl on the Train, has just beaten a record held by Dan Brown by spending 20 weeks in a row at the top of the bestsellers chart. How do you feel?

It’s great to break a record. It’s also, though, a slightly artificial thing, isn’t it? I’m not even sure when those records began, and from an author’s point of view, that’s not the most important thing.

Having worked as a financial journalist, you borrowed money from your family to support yourself while you wrote the book, which must have given it an extra edge?

Yes. If this didn’t work I was either going to have to go back to being a journalist or come up with something completely new to do. It was the last chance.

The story revolves around what Rachel, whose life has more or less fallen apart, sees from the 8.04 at the start of the day and the 17.56 at the end. We get glimpses of London life, but this is not a city novel, is it?

No, it’s more suburban than metropolitan. It felt right to me that...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Idra Novey

Idra Novey's new novel is Ways to Disappear.

From her Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How important is setting in your work, and could this novel have taken place somewhere other than Brazil?

A: This book is very much a response to the particular joys and chaos of Brazil. I translated three different Brazilian authors before writing it and getting to know them and their work and Brazil itself was what led me to write it. It is my love letter to Brazil and the lush images in its literature.

Q: How did you choose the book’s title, and what does it signify for you?

A: I started the book before having children and chose the title with travel and translation in mind, how they both create opportunities to disappear, but over the many drafts of the book I had two children and began to write about the way...[read on]

Visit Idra Novey's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

C. Joseph Greaves

C. Joseph Greaves spent 25 years as an L.A. trial lawyer before becoming a full-time writer. In addition to penning historical/true crime fiction (beginning with 2012’s Hard Twisted, from Bloomsbury), he writes (as Chuck Greaves) the award-winning Jack MacTaggart series of L.A.-based legal mysteries (Hush Money, Green-Eyed Lady, and The Last Heir) for St. Martin’s Minotaur. Greaves won the 2010 SouthWest Writers International Writing Contest and has been a finalist for many national honors including the Shamus, Rocky, Reviewers’ Choice, and Audie Awards, as well as the New Mexico-Arizona, Colorado, and Oklahoma Book Awards.

His latest book is Tom & Lucky (and George & Cokey Flo) (Bloomsbury), a novelization of mobster Lucky Luciano’s colorful and controversial 1936 vice trial.

From Greaves's Q & A with KL Wagoner for SouthWest Writers:

What is your elevator pitch for Tom & Lucky?

My short pitch is: Boardwalk Empire meets House of Cards. My longer pitch, from the book flap, is: The year is 1936. Lucky Luciano is the most powerful mobster in America. Thomas E. Dewey is an ambitious young prosecutor determined to bring him down, and Cokey Flo Brown—grifter, heroin addict, and sometimes prostitute—is the witness who claims she can do it. Only a courtly Long Island defense attorney named George Morton Levy stands between Lucky and a life behind bars; between Dewey and the New York governor’s mansion. This is their story.

What inspired you to write the book? What made you choose to focus on the trial of gangster Lucky Luciano and expand on the lives of those involved?

In 1999, I was having lunch with a friend whose father, George Morton Levy, had been one of the most successful New York trial lawyers of the Depression era. My friend casually mentioned that after her father died in 1977, her family packed up all of his office files and stored them in a barn in upstate New York. Intrigued, I flew to New York, rented a car, and drove to that barn where, as advertised, I found fifteen or so rusting file drawers under a moldering tarp. I spent the better part of a day rummaging the drawers until I found what I was looking for—Levy’s file entitled “People v. Charles Luciano.”

I didn’t...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at C. Joseph Greaves's website.

Writers Read: C. Joseph Greaves.

--Marshal Zeringue

Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith

Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith are the authors of Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X. From their Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You write of the two men, “Theirs was an improbable relationship.” Would you describe it as an actual friendship, or more a relationship where each was somehow using or getting something from the other?

RR: I would describe it as something that certainly developed into a friendship, but both were a little wary of each other.

They did want to get something from each other. Malcolm wanted more from Cassius, but Cassius used Malcolm to find his voice. Malcolm would read one of his speeches, and [soon] Cassius was saying something that was just about the same thing.

Muhammad Ali was a little bit of a mimic—he did it spectacularly well. Many of his ideas were not his ideas; he was adopting many from Malcolm X, and Malcolm from Elijah Muhammad.

JS: I would echo what Randy said. It’s remarkable how we’d be reading a news story with Clay, and obviously he had come from a meeting with Malcolm in New York.

You knew [based on] what Clay was saying about the civil rights movement—he had said he was in favor of the NAACP, and a couple of days later he was saying that the NAACP was ignorant.

By 1963, Clay had embraced the message of the Nation of Islam, and the rhetoric of Malcolm X. You can see the evolution of Cassius Clay into Cassius X.

RR: If ...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Joe R. Lansdale

Joe R. Lansdale's latest novel is Honky Tonk Samurai.

From his Fresh Air interview with Dave Davies:

DAVIES: When you look at your body of work, there's quite a range of stuff here. There's horror and science-fiction and Westerns and detective stuff. What inspired your imagination as a kid?

LANSDALE: When I was a kid, comic books were the first thing. They were - the most important thing I ever discovered were comics, DC Comics in particular. And I could read very early - 4 and 5 - and so I would read comics. And the comics then led me to be interested in just stories in general. And back then TV was just actually starting to be something and they were putting on old movies like the Johnny Weissmuller "Tarzan" movies and these old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers movies and stuff. And I watched those with great enthusiasm, and I watched old movies, like "Casablanca" and "The Big Sleep" - whatever they put on. I watched "Hopalong Cassidy." All of those things just inspired me. And then when I began to realize that a number of these things came from books, I began to search for books and stories.

Now, where I lived there wasn't even a library at that time so we would go to Gladewater. We lived in Mount Enterprise. I was born in Gladewater but we lived in place called Mount Enterprise. And when we would go to Gladewater, I would check out a bunch of books on my library card. And then later they started having a bookmobile that came through Mount Enterprise, and I used that to my advantage. Neighbors loaned me books. And once people knew I was nuts for books, they would give me books. My mother was nuts for books. She loved nonfiction in particular, but she was always getting books somewhere and bringing them home, and I read anything I could get my hands on because it was like I was born to it. Now, I don't think that's true since writing is a man-made art, but I think the creativity was something that I was born to, and...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Alice Oseman

Alice Oseman is the author of Solitaire. From her Q & A with Between the Covers:

Are there elements of Solitaire that resemble your own experiences at high school?

Definitely! I went to an all-girls grammar school which accepts boys into the two final years (Sixth Form), just like Tori does. I based the school on what I knew from my school – the school assemblies, the common room, the cliques, the layout, even the nameless town in which the book is set. Solitaire’s backdrop is completely taken from my world. And while the characters are all fictional, they are definitely inspired by types of people I knew at school. Hipsters, sassy teachers, pessimists, partyers – school really is full of stereotypes, and part of the fun I found in writing Solitaire was smashing those stereotypes into pieces.

If you could invite five fictional characters to dinner, who would you choose?

Firstly, I’d invite Jay Gatsby. Actually, I’d let him just take over the organisation of the dinner. He’d be sure to make it fabulous. I’d invite Kathy from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go so she could tell me about her life, and then with Artemis Fowl, because he’s my most extreme literary crush and also a well-known genius, I would plot how we could rise up against the dystopian regime Kathy is stuck in. So I guess I’d have to get...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Melvin I. Urofsky

Melvin I. Urofsky's latest book is Dissent and the Supreme Court: Its Role in the Court's History and the Nation's Constitutional Dialogue.

From his Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Why did you decide to write about Supreme Court dissents, and what do you see as some of the most important ones?

A: The book in some ways grew out of the Brandeis biography. Brandeis wrote very important dissents in the 1920s. After that book was finished, the editor at Pantheon, Victoria Wilson, wanted another book.

My wife suggested I write about dissent…the question was how to do it. I did not want the book to be a law school textbook. I did not want the book to be a book only lawyers and scholars would read…

I try to give an overview of how dissent can play an important role, and it’s interspersed with entr’actes, a look at specific dissents—Brandeis in Olmstead, Hugo Black in Betts v. Brady. I show how important some dissents can be, and how [they can eventually become] the law of the land.

Q: In the book, you write, “All of the justices agree that dissents, if well reasoned, almost invariably make the majority opinion stronger.” What are some recent examples?

A: There’s a dialogue here. A really good example is told by Justice Ginsburg about writing the majority opinion in the VMI case. She says her majority opinion went through several drafts, and each was made stronger by the fact that she knew what Justice Scalia was going to...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Yona Zeldis McDonough

Yona Zeldis McDonough is the author of novels such as A Wedding in Great Neck and You Were Meant for Me as well as dozens of books for children. She is the editor of and a contributor to The Barbie Chronicles: A Living Doll Turns Forty, as well as All the Available Light: A Marilyn Monroe Reader.

McDonough's latest novel is The House on Primrose Pond.

From the author's Q & A with John Valeri for Hartford Books Examiner:

John Valeri: What first inspired you to write “The House on Primrose Pond”—and, after six previous novels, what about this particular premise struck you as fresh and resonant?

Yona Zeldis McDonough: In the past, writing a novel began when I heard a voice—a character that was speaking in my ear—and this one was no different. The first voices I heard belonged to Susannah Gilmore, and her elderly neighbor, Alice Renfew. Susannah’s voice was both sad and angry; she was widowed when her husband was killed in a bicycle accident (and not wearing a helmet, despite her frequent nagging) and she moves from her home in Brooklyn to New Hampshire with a good deal of resentment. Alice’s voice is also sad and angry though both these emotions are more muted as she has had more time to live with, and adjust to, her emotions.

But there were some new elements here, including the setting (more on this later), the idea of a novel-within-a-novel, and the inclusion of three poems that form an essential part of the narrative—and which I had to write myself. I felt that these formal components forced me to go both wider and deeper than I had in the past. It was hard, but it was ultimately very satisfying.

JV: Your protagonist, Susannah, is a novelist. How were you able to draw upon your own career experiences to achieve authenticity—and what, in your opinion, makes writers innately intriguing characters?

YZM: I think it’s hard to make a writer...[read on]

Learn more about the author and her work at Yona Zeldis McDonough's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Yona Zeldis McDonough & Willa and Holden.

Writers Read: Yona Zeldis McDonough.

The Page 69 Test: The House on Primrose Pond.

My Book, The Movie: The House on Primrose Pond.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrea Davis Pinkney

Andrea Davis Pinkney has written many books for children and young adults, including The Red Pencil, winner of the 2015 Children's Africana Book Award, and Rhythm Ride.

From her Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Your book The Red Pencil takes place in Darfur. Why did you decide to set the book there, and how did you research the recent history of Sudan and Darfur?

A: In the year 2003-2004, Darfur and the crisis in Sudan was everywhere in the news. My own children were in middle school at that time. I asked them, Do you know what’s going on in Darfur? They sort of knew. I thought, How do middle schoolers make sense of the complexities of war, and a crisis like that? They need to know.

The other piece was that as an author I visit schools all over the globe—practically every state, and on the continent of Africa. People were saying, You’ve got to tell this story, and I was saying, I agree.

Aside from the specifics of Sudan and Darfur is the larger question: How do any of us make sense of any war?

The research came in many forms, first through my school visits here and abroad, talking to students about war, Sudan and Darfur.

It was one of those things where intention and longing meet up---people from Sudan and Darfur started entering my orbit. I...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessa Crispin

Jessa Crispin's new book is The Creative Tarot: A Modern Guide to an Inspired Life.

From her Q & A with Kristen Evans for the Los Angeles Times:

What is it about tarot that helped you and your work, or has helped others’ work?

Well, for my own work, it was more about how integrated my life was going to be with my creativity. I’m trying to be thought of as an intellectual, and here I am reading tarot cards. I think the weirder you allow yourself to become and admit that you already are, then the more fun you have. But at the same time, public perception does change.

I’ve already gotten a lot of weird pushback about the tarot book, from mostly men, and when I wrote a piece about St. Theresa for "The New York Times," I got weird email about how sorry people felt for her that she had this belief in God. And I was like, “It worked out fine for her! She did a lot with it.” Why not have critics writing about mystical topics? I’m fine with being known as a mystical weirdo.

There’s something really grounded about this book, though. It’s extensively researched, talking about historical artists and writers and the ups and downs of creativity.

I was 19 before I ever went to an art museum. It just was not valued in my family. The access you get then comes from biopics about artists, and always has this stupid narrative about genius, knowing from a very young age that you’re meant to be a great painter or composer. But if you actually read people [describing] their process, you realize that it’s mostly trying, failing, trying, failing. That it’s not...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue