Sonia Shah

Sonia Shah is the author of Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond.

From her Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You write that "for most of the twentieth century, the conventional wisdom...was that developed societies had vanquished infectious diseases for good." What were the key factors leading to the discrediting of this belief?

A: Probably HIV, which first came to national attention in the early 1980s. It came along with a flurry of other novel pathogens that routed our medications: new forms of influenza, coronaviruses like SARS, Ebola and others.

Q: In the book, you note, "Many experts believe that a cholera-like pandemic looms." Why did you focus much of the book on cholera, and why do many experts believe a similar pandemic will arise?

A: Only a handful of pathogens have been able to cause pandemics in modern times. Among them, cholera stands alone--it has caused no fewer than seven global pandemics, and the latest one is going on right now.

The conditions that allowed cholera to cause pandemics--human invasion of wildlife habitat, urbanization, acceleration of global trade and travel, weakening of public protections--are...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephanie Danler

Stephanie Danler's new novel is Sweetbitter.

From the transcript of her interview with NPR's Rachel Martin:

MARTIN: So let's talk about sex.

DANLER: Yeah, I'd love to.

MARTIN: Let's (laughter).

DANLER: I love to write about it, I love to talk about it.

MARTIN: So talk to me about how you figured out technically how to write a good literary sex scene.

DANLER: Oh my God, I love that question. So yes, sex is the undercurrent of the whole book because what we're really investigating are Tess' appetites across the board and also her becoming more of a woman, this transition from girlhood to womanhood. And sex is a big part of that - or figuring out lust and desire.

So I knew I wanted - it was essential to the novel that I write a sex scene. And you have all of these technical choices as a writer, which is, am I going to fade to black? What kind of language am I going to use? Like, how far am I going to go with this? And there were drafts in which I went much further.

MARTIN: Where are those?

DANLER: Oh, God.

(LAUGHTER)

DANLER: There'll be another novel down the line. You'll know. You'll know when you see them. And then I went back and I thought, what is true of Tess' voice? This entire book is in the first person. You have this 22-year-old girl. And what is true of her voice? What matches her experience? Sometimes...[read on]

Visit Stephanie Danler's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Wein

Elizabeth Wein was born in New York City, grew up abroad, and currently lives in Scotland with her husband and two children. She is an avid flyer of small planes. She also holds a PhD in Folklore from the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include the acclaimed Code Name Verity, Rose Under Fire, and Black Dove, White Raven.

From her Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You write, "I see myself as slipping plausible characters and situations into a historical setting without changing the actual facts--a bit like a discreet time traveler." As you wrote this particular book, what did you see as the right blend of the historical and the fictional?

A: Actually, the most fictional thing about the book is the characters and their home. It’s 1930. Take the most unlikely American family possible: a black woman and a white woman and their children – give them the most unlikely of jobs, aerial photography – and take them to the most unlikely of places, the invented village of Tazma Meda in the Ethiopian highlands. It wouldn’t have been impossible, but it would have been unlikely.

I loved developing the unlikely family. I based Rhoda and Delia, the grown-ups, on my mother and her best friend in Jamaica, where we lived for three years when I was in elementary school. My mother Carol and her friend Rona raised their babies together for a couple of years, sharing clothes and chores, and often plunking their children into the same baby buggy or playpen.

I loved figuring out a plausible back-story for these two women that would allow them to work and...[read on]

Visit Elizabeth Wein's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Black Dove, White Raven.

--Marshal Zeringue

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel, The Sympathizer. From the transcript of his interview with Terry Gross:

GROSS: Viet Thanh Nguyen, welcome to FRESH AIR. Why did you want to write this novel from the point of view of a spy?

VIET THANH NGUYEN: Well, when my agent told me I should write a novel, the first thing that came to me was a spy novel and partly it was because it's a genre that I really enjoy and I wanted to write a novel that was actually entertaining, that people would actually want to read because I knew that I would also be dealing with a lot of very serious political and literary matters. And then the other inspiration for that was that there really were spies in South Vietnam that rose to the very highest ranks of the South Vietnamese bureaucracy and military.

And there was a very famous spy named Pham Xuan An who was so important that during his time as a mole he was promoted to a major general by the North Vietnamese. And he was friends with people like David Halberstam and all the important American journalists. And they had no idea that he was a communist spy who had studied in the United States. So all these factors were in my mind.

GROSS: The war in Vietnam was central to your whole family's story. Your parents are from the north of Vietnam and fled to the South in the mid-50s when the country was divided. They were teenagers then. Why did they choose to leave North Vietnam and flee to the South?

NGUYEN: Well, they were part of a great migration of about 800,000 North Vietnamese Catholics who had been persuaded by their parish priests that the communists were going to massacre them or at the very least persecute them. And that idea...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Brendan Jones

Raised in Philadelphia, Brendan Jones took the Greyhound west at the age of 19, ending up in Sitka, Alaska. He graduated from Oxford University, where he boxed for the Blues team, then returned to Alaska to commercial fish. He was a general contractor for seven years in Philadelphia, before heading back to Sitka, where he now lives, commercial fishing and renovating a WWII tugboat.

Jones's new novel is The Alaskan Laundry.

From his Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Do you think this novel could have been set somewhere other than Alaska, and how important is setting to you in your writing?

A: Alaska represents both end of the line, and land of new beginnings. It is a gateway that some don’t quite step through. Each country (even state) has similar lands where the imagination plays strongest. Bretagne in France, Galicia in Spain, Scotland in Great Britain, Siberia in Russia, Inner Mongolia, and so forth.

So this novel could have been set elsewhere, but not in the United States. If the novel played out in Montana, I couldn’t have taken advantage of...[read on]

Visit Brendan Jones's website.

Writers Read: Brendan Jones.

My Book, The Movie: The Alaskan Laundry.

Coffee with a Canine: Brendan Jones & Colorado.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeremy Whitley

Jeremy Whitley is a comic book writer and artist, perhaps best known as the creator of the series Princeless. From his Q & A with EmbraceRace co-founder Melissa Giraud:

Melissa: Thanks so much for writing the Princeless series! What were you trying to do in regard to race with the story?

Jeremy: In part, I wanted my daughter to be able to see a character that looked like her in the story. I’m white, my wife is black, and my daughter is mixed race. There’s already not a lot of representation in comics for girls of color.

Also, I remember my wife and I being kind of excited about “The Princess and The Frog” [Disney’s 2009 movie featuring a black princess], and then actually watching it and being hit with, Whoa, this isn’t quite what I was looking for!

And that’s become a trend with me. Why I write the books I write is I find that I’m looking for something and it doesn’t seem to exist. I start working on it and sometimes it turns into a thing, sometimes it doesn’t. In the case of Princeless, it’s proven to be something that a lot of other people were looking for as well.

Melissa: Why start with Princesses at all; why not a superhero?

Jeremy: A lot of kids like princess stories, they’re looking for them whether that’s what we want them to read or not. Those kids are bound to read about princesses, they want to read about princesses. So starting with a princess and ...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Pamela Rotner Sakamoto

Pamela Rotner Sakamoto's new book is Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds.

From her Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: At what point did you decide to write the story of the Fukuhara family, and how long did it take to write and research the book?

A: I met Harry [the son who fought on the American side] in Tokyo in 1994. He eventually told me his story, over four years. He was in San Jose and I was in Tokyo; he would go to Tokyo several times a year, and he would call me to have lunch. Slowly, the story would trickle out.

Part of it may be that he was coming to terms with telling a story he hadn’t told. He was a career military intelligence colonel and wanted to be sure he could tell his story to someone he could trust.

I was doing Holocaust Museum work at the time. I was so fascinated—I was an East Coast Jewish girl raised in the Boston area, and I was never exposed to the [Japanese-American] internment at school.

I said, in 1998, Harry, this would be an important story on multiple levels: Japanese-American relations, the Japanese-American story, your generation, your own legacy for your family….I think you should be thinking about a book…

Harry was the patriarch of the surviving family. They were on...[read on]

Visit Pamela Rotner Sakamoto's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joe Hill

Joe Hill's latest novel is The Fireman.

From the transcript of his interview with NPR's Rachel Martin:

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Novelist Joe Hill has a pronouncement to make.

JOE HILL: The world is really divided into two kinds of people - people who adore plague novels and wimps.

MARTIN: Joe Hill's newest apocalyptic plague novel puts me firmly in the first camp. Here's the premise. A highly contagious pathogen is burning across the country. It's known as Dragonscale for the lovely black and gold marks that appear on your body. Eventually, though, you'll burst into flames.

The heroine of the book is a school nurse named Harper who is infected and pregnant. She is determined, however, to survive her pregnancy. And she knows there's a chance the baby will be born healthy. I ask Joe what it was about Harper that hooked him.

HILL: You know, I'm not sure exactly why I settled on her. I know I wanted to write about pregnancy. I do think it's kind of interesting, the idea of a life forming inside you and hijacking your body's biology to serve its own ends. And when I began to think about the Dragonscale as this kind of living organism painted on your skin that's making use of your biology, I saw a connection to that.

So I sort of wanted to explore almost the way this one woman's body has become a battleground between two opposing forces. The other thing is is Harper is very sunny and optimistic. And so many end of the world stories are grim and bleak, which is totally understandable 'cause it's sort of a grim subject.

But I like the idea of this plague as an unstoppable force pouring over the nation. And I sort of had this picture of Harper as...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

David Satter

David Satter's new book is The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep: Russia's Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin. From his Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You begin the book with an examination of the 1999 apartment bombings in Russia. Why did you choose to start with this?

A: The apartment bombings were actually the most important event in Russian history in the last 25 years. They aren’t understood as such because many in the West are not willing to face the implications…

It’s the greatest political provocation since the burning of the Reichstag. [Russian leader Vladimir] Putin would have had no chance at [taking over] were it not for this attack. Putin was able to depict himself as a savior…

Q: Why would you say people in the West are unwilling to face it?

A: It’s a difficult thing for Western people to imagine. We are accustomed to elections with dirty tricks, or where one candidate will show a nasty picture of another’s wife, or where a candidate will call another nasty names.

But it doesn’t...[read on]

The Page 99 Test: It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chris Cleave

Chris Cleave's latest novel is Everyone Brave If Forgiven.

From his interview with NPR's Lynn Neary:

LYNN NEARY, HOST: Writer Chris Cleave had a false start on the way to his latest novel. Intrigued by his grandfather's World War II experience on Malta, he set out to write a book about Randolph Churchill's visit to the besieged island. But then Cleave realized his own grandfather was much more interesting, so were his grandmothers, who were back in London coping with the Blitz. So in the end, Cleave's World War II novel, "Everyone Brave Is Forgiven," was inspired by his own family's wartime experiences. Chris Cleave joins us now to talk about the book. So good to have you with us.

CHRIS CLEAVE: Hello, Lynn. Thank you for having me.

NEARY: Did your grandparents talk to you much about their war experiences?

CLEAVE: The amazing thing is that they didn't, and not until I asked. I think it's typical of that generation, that they suffered a lot, they endured a lot, they did stuff that we would think of as incredibly brave and then they kept quiet about it, sometimes for 40 or 50 years. That was just part of their makeup. And they wouldn't talk until I went and asked them. And at that point, my grandfather...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue