Lauren Belfer

Lauren Belfer's new novel is And After the Fire.

From a Q & A at her website:

What draws you to historical fiction?

My father taught history, and my mother taught art and is still an artist, so history and creativity have always been part of the fabric of my life. From discussing history with my father throughout my childhood, I learned to place myself into different historical eras and to imagine what living in those times would have felt like. As I became a writer, I wanted to use my knowledge and love of history to portray how the events of the wider world affect the course of individual lives.

* * *
Did you always want to be a writer?

I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was six years old. I started out by writing short stories about magical animals and also about princesses – but strong princesses who ruled their kingdoms and rode into battle on white horses. In high school, I began to write poetry, which I submitted to literary magazines. I received rejection letters from all the best places.

Once I was out of college, I still wanted to be a writer, but I had to earn a living at the same time. So I got up early, before going to work, and wrote for an hour or so. I worked in a variety of jobs: in the photo department of a newspaper, at an art gallery, as a paralegal at several law firms, as an associate producer on documentary films, even as a fact-checker at magazines. Having a wide variety of jobs is terrific for a fiction writer, because...[read on]

Visit Lauren Belfer's website.

Writers Read: Lauren Belfer (July 2010).

The Page 69 Test: A Fierce Radiance.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anita Hughes

Anita Hughes was born in Sydney, Australia and had a charmed childhood that included petting koala bears, riding the waves on Bondi Beach, and putting an occasional shrimp on the barbie. Her writing career began at the age of eight, when she won a national writing contest in The Australian newspaper, and was named "One of Australia's Next Best Writers." (She still has the newspaper clipping.)

Hughes received a B.A. in English Literature with a minor in Creative Writing from Bard College, and attended UC Berkeley's Masters in Creative Writing program.

Her novels include Monarch Beach, Market Street, Lake Como, French Coast, and Island in the Sea.

From her Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for your characters Juliet and Lionel in Island in the Sea, and why did you decide to have the characters work in the music business?

A: Actually, first I came up with the idea of setting the book in the music industry, then I came up with the characters. I wondered what it would be like to be a famous songwriter who writes love songs but has been betrayed in love. Could you still write about love?

Then, I thought, what if a beautiful young woman appeared who held your career in your hands and you began to fall in love with her. I also threw in Lionel's boss as the person who betrayed Lionel and the man who Juliet answers to.

Q: The novel takes place on the island of Majorca. How important is setting to you in your writing, and could this novel have taken place in another location?

A: Setting is...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Anita Hughes's website.

My Book, The Movie: Market Street.

My Book, The Movie: Lake Como.

My Book, The Movie: French Coast.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fred Kaplan

Fred Kaplan's new book is Dark Territory: The Secret History Of Cyber War. From the transcript of his interview with Daniel Zwerdling for All Things Considered:

ZWERDLING: So let's jump ahead in history now. We all know that hacking has become a part of life. You write that there was a huge turning point in the kinds of cyberattacks almost exactly two years ago.

KAPLAN: That's right. A couple years ago, Sheldon Adelson - who is the majority stockholder of Vegas Sands Casinos and a well-known right-wing political supporter with very pro-Israel views - made a statement at a public forum saying that if the Iranians didn't get serious on getting rid of their nuclear weapons, that maybe we ought to drop an atomic bomb in the middle of the desert and say if you don't stop this, the next bomb we drop is going to be on Tehran.

So in retaliation for that, the Iranians hacked into his casino chain, causing tens of millions of dollars' worth of damage - melting their hard drives, stealing a lot of data about Social Security numbers, and then planting on everybody's screen, don't make statements like this about weapons of mass destruction.

So this is a new wave in cyber war done not for espionage, not for money, not to get military secrets, but to affect the political speech of individuals or corporations. When you hack into a casino - you know, if you're looking for money, there's a lot of money there that you can get. The Iranians didn't take a dime. They even stole credit cards to...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Renée Rosen

Renée Rosen's latest novel is White Collar Girl. From her Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for White Collar Girl, and for your main character, Jordan Walsh?

A: After I finished What the Lady Wants, my editor, agent and I started brainstorming on what my next book should be.

We were all intrigued by the idea of the Chicago Tribune and the Daley Machine, but it wasn’t until I met Marion Purcelli, a woman who started at the Tribune in 1949 as a “copyboy,” that the story really began taking shape. Marion took me under her wing, sharing many wonderful stories of her days at the paper.

Jordan Walsh and her mentor Mrs. Angelo are both based on Marion Purcelli, and after meeting her, the book pretty much wrote itself. I really did not know what would happen from one chapter to the next. The characters took the story and ran with it and I was just along for the ride.

Q: You’ve written three historical novels about Chicago. How did the writing and research process compare this time with the previous two?

A: The biggest difference between this book and my previous novels, Dollface, which was set in the 1920s, and What the Lady Wants, set in the Gilded Age, is that ...[read on]

Visit Renée Rosen's website, blog, and Facebook page.

The Page 99 Test: Every Crooked Pot.

My Book, The Movie: Dollface.

The Page 69 Test: Dollface.

Writers Read: Renée Rosen (November 2014).

The Page 69 Test: What the Lady Wants.

My Book, The Movie: What the Lady Wants.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peggy Orenstein

Peggy Orenstein's books include the New York Times best-selling memoir, Waiting for Daisy; Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Kids, Love and Life in a Half-Changed World; SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap; and Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture.

Her new book is Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape. From her Q & A with Isaac Chotiner at Slate:

A lot has been written about the way porn has influenced the expectations of boys. Can you talk about how is has influenced the expectations of girls?

In fact, my understanding is that Time magazine is about to have a cover story on that, like, next week or something.

It affects girls in a few ways. It affects how they look at their own bodies: are they good enough, are they adequate, are they going to please their partner because they aren’t like the girls in porn, things like that.

A lot of girls would say to me—and, this really began to irritate me, not at the girls, but just at the fact that they had to think about this—“My boyfriend wants to know why I don’t moan during sex like the girls in porn.” I got so irritated at that that I started dropping my journalistic remove, and I would say, “Look. It’s a movie. Movies need soundtracks. If people didn’t moan, it would be a silent movie. That’s why they’re moaning like that.” That was kind of like a revelation. They’re like, “Oh, I never thought of it that way!”

I think that porn has also probably been responsible for the rise in...[read on]

The Page 69 Test: Waiting for Daisy.

The Page 99 Test: Cinderella Ate My Daughter.

Writers Read: Peggy Orenstein.

--Marshal Zeringue

James F. Brooks

James F. Brooks is the author of Mesa of Sorrows: A History of the Awat'ovi Massacre. From his Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You’ve lived in the American Southwest for many years and been fascinated with the history of the region. How did you come up with the idea for Mesa of Sorrows, and what has been the importance of the Awat’ovi Massacre in Hopi history?

A: I was a fellow at the School of American Research in 2000-2001, and was finishing Captives and Cousins, a history of intercultural slavery in the Southwest.

I was wrapping the book up, and was wondering if there were any cases in transactions of women and children between or within indigenous people.

Ruth Van Dyke, a colleague, said there was a terrible event where some of the survivors were women and children, and were distributed over other villages.

I don’t think I would have done the book unless the story was revealing itself in a way that you could get a sense of redemption and forgiveness…

I really believe these guys [in a Hopi delegation who attempted to negotiate with the Spanish] were trying to figure out a way to avoid all this, but it didn’t work out. Once I was to that point, I thought the book could do some good in the world.

It’s something that’s haunted them [the Hopi people] for a long time. It shaped their fundamental cultural views around communitarian commitments and pacifism.

Q: You write that your previous research on the Southwest involved violence between different groups of people, and this time you wanted to look at violence within a group of people. How did this book develop?

A: I imagined this early on as intra-cultural violence, except I realized it’s the social product of difference even within a group. You may imagine yourself as a community, but when tensions erupt...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Rock

Peter Rock is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. His adult novel My Abandonment won the Alex Award.

Rock's new YA novel is Klickitat.

From his Q & A with JP Kemmick for Eleven PDX:

ELEVEN: Do you want to tell me about the genesis of Klickitat?

Peter Rock: There’re sort of practical reasons why I wrote it and then there are other reasons. Certainly one of the big things that drove me to write it was just thinking about sisters. I have two sisters who are very strange. My wife has two sisters who live about half a mile from us. And I have two daughters, who are, in fact, sisters of each other. And my wife’s sister also has two daughters who are about the same age. So I’ve spent the last eight years, especially before they got into elementary school, driving these four girls. At the same time, reading a lot of things … starting kind of younger, with Beezus and Ramona and then, traveling on through all of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which is very sister-intensive. I guess, you know, I’m always interested in writing about things I don’t understand very well and that’s something I will never understand.

I think writing The Shelter Cycle changed the way I think about the world in general, but it also made me want to write about things that are invisible in some way, that are ineffable in some way, the ways in which we might be communicating with things that we can’t easily see or apprehend. There’s a story in my book, The Unsettling, called “The Sharpest Knife,” which is partially about a girl who finds writing in a notebook. It’s a story, for something that I wrote, that I like quite a bit, but there was a question of whether or not I was going to answer where this writing was coming from. And in the story there is an answer for it, which I think is a good answer for that story, but it always seemed like I … not exactly bailed, but that there was another way to take that. So that was an idea I wanted to think about.

I had, from The Shelter Cycle, and also from My Abandonment, somewhat, I had so much information about survivalism and children surviving in the wilderness that I was kind of curious about. So those were all things that were sort of around. As you no doubt know, everything we write is in some ways a reaction to what we just wrote, or an attempt to get away from what we just wrote or to make...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Peter Rock's website.

The Page 69 Test: My Abandonment.

The Page 69 Test: The Shelter Cycle.

Writers Read: Peter Rock.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Greenberg

David Greenberg's latest book is Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency. From his Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Republic of Spin, and was there anything that particularly surprised you in the course of your research?

A: My first book was called Nixon’s Shadow. It’s not a biography of Nixon but a study of Nixon as a symbol…I came to see that although Nixon exemplified that [focus on image], it didn’t originate with him. Politics in the 20th century were consumed with anxieties about authenticity, and the way the tools of image-making—spin—were threatening to corrupt democracy.

No one had written a book about the White House spin machine, and pulled it all together into a single narrative…

As for what surprised me, I found that the standard narratives about certain historical episodes were wrong.

On an individual level, you could tell a story about how my research [shows] revisionist portraits: George Creel, who ran the Committee on Public Information, a World War I propaganda agency.

In the history books, Creel is made out to be a right-wing monster, whipping up hatred of Germans. In fact, Creel was a liberal guy attacked more by the right wing for being insufficiently jingoistic.

He was not wild and out of control. There were some excesses, but the backlash against Creel was buyer’s remorse about World War I. The war didn’t turn out the way we wanted, and people were looking for a scapegoat. The story of Creel was told wrong, over and over…

In one chapter of history after another, I found significant twists. Many historians suffer from propaganda anxiety. They’re not always clear-eyed in assessing [this issue]. We have an ambivalent attitude toward spin—we denounce spin doctors but deep down we like it if it’s wielded by politicians we support.

Just today, there was an article about negative ads about Trump. It was free of the scolding tone you get when you’re told about negative advertisements against Obama. It’s not the negative ads that people are against, it’s the negative ads against their candidates. If it’s deployed by a candidate or president we support, we applaud it, and don’t realize it’s spin.

Also, one reason I read the sources differently is that...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Lyndsay Faye

Lyndsay Faye is the author of the critically acclaimed books: Dust and Shadow, The Gods of Gotham, which was nominated for an Edgar for Best Novel, Seven for a Secret, and The Fatal Flame. Her newest novel Jane Steele re-imagines Jane Eyre as a gutsy, heroic serial killer who battles for justice with methods inspired by Darkly Dreaming Dexter.

From Faye's interview at Read It Forward:

RIF: What inspired the idea for this novel, and gave you the confidence you could pull it off? After all, Jane Eyre as a serial killer is a pretty outrageous concept, and it re-imagines one of the most beloved and famous novels of all time.

Lyndsay Faye: Um, unwarranted hubris? I’m kidding. It’s absolutely outrageous, and I think that the outrageousness of the concept was freeing. I’m very open about the fact that it’s a ridiculous notion to conceive of Jane Eyre as Dexter. So I was enabled by that rather than hampered, if that makes sense? She wants to get rid of truly evil people, and there’s something satisfying about the notion of a female protagonist accomplishing what Darkly Dreaming Dexter did. I don’t ever condone murder, of course. But I will point out that Charlotte Brontë actually lived at that horrible school she describes in Jane Eyre, and two of her sisters later died after having been terribly weakened by lack of care at the Cowan Bridge facility. What ought to be outrageous is that any such thing was ever allowed to happen in the first place—children were fairly routinely abused in the 19th century at such boarding schools, like the one equally vividly brought to life in Nicholas Nickelby by Charles Dickens. My absurdities are usually responses to real social injustices.

Additionally, this novel is unabashedly...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Lyndsay Faye's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Gods of Gotham.

The Page 69 Test: Seven for a Secret.

My Book, The Movie: The Fatal Flame. 

Writers Read: Lyndsay Faye.

--Marshal Zeringue

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen's new book is Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. He just won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Sympathizer. From his Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You note that wars take on identities, with World War II as “the Good War” and Vietnam as “the bad war.” What would you say is the legacy of the Vietnam War today, both in the U.S. and in Vietnam?

A: For the United States, there are two basic lessons, the positive and the negative. The negative lesson is that the U.S. should never engage in this type of criminal war again, one that involved occupying another country and compromising morality. This is the motivation of the antiwar movement, and while it remains visible, its power seems to be fading.

The positive lesson is the opposite. Those who have absorbed this lesson believe the war was noble and just, but flawed in its execution. They blame the media, the government, the antiwar movement, and military policy for the failure, and have crafted various strategies to prevent that failure from happening again.

The belief here is that wars after this one can be conducted more successfully if we learn from this war’s failure. This is the lesson put forth by both generals and politicians, including every president of both parties since the end of the war.

It is the basis for the continual expansion of American power globally, the increase in American military bases all over the world, the ever greater expenditure of treasure on the military budget, the detachment of the American military from American society, and the increasing entrenchment of the military-industrial complex. All of these factors practically guarantee our engagement in perpetual war of both high and low intensity.

For Vietnam, the lesson is that the Communist Party must do whatever it can to control the memory of this war as a heroic, revolutionary effort that was worth the sacrifice of one million soldiers and two million civilians.

This war was fought to unify and liberate the country, and also to bring to the people both freedom and equality. But while the country is unified and independent, the people are neither equal nor free. Class inequality is great and growing, and while some few become rich, and while a middle-class is expanding, the majority of people struggle.

The irony of living in an unequal communist society is exacerbated by the fact that the country is a de facto crony capitalist economy, run by a corrupt Communist Party. Everyone knows this to be true, but no one is allowed to say so in public.

This corruption, inequality, and hypocrisy is a betrayal of those three million lives, and so the Communist Party continually repeats the idea that the war was worth all the blood because...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue