A.F. Brady

A.F. Brady's new novel is Once a Liar.

From her Q&A with Heather Gudenkauf:

Heather: Tell us more about Peter Caine. What drew you to this character? What challenges did you face writing about a not so nice main character?

AF: I really enjoy writing flawed, anti-heroic characters. I feel in life and literature the focus often falls on the loveable ones, and I think it’s unfair. Not everyone is a stupendously likeable person, but everyone has a story. My stories are almost always based in redemption in some way. Seeking it, failing to find it, finding it, or continuing the search forever.

Peter Caine is a mix of a number of people I’ve known in life, both personally and professionally. I have worked with a lot of true sociopaths, and I find them unbelievably fascinating. Perfection and adoration are a little slow for me, a little boring. I’d rather have dinner with a villain, just to see how he ticks. That was the idea behind Peter Caine. Who are you, and why are you like this?

ONCE A LIAR also explores how people aren’t what they appear to be on the surface, whatever the surface may be. We should always look a little deeper to see the truth. We’re all M&Ms; whether you look at is as hard outside and soft inside, or shiny outside and dark underneath.

Heather: Both ONCE A LIAR and your first novel THE BLIND take place in New York City. Why did you choose to set your stories in Manhattan?

AF: I’m…[read on]

Visit A.F. Brady's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amanda Sthers

Amanda Sthers's new novel is Holy Lands.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for the Rosenmerck family, and why did you decide to write their story as an epistolary novel?

A: I read an article in a very serious French newspaper explaining how to raise pigs in Israel. For once, Muslims and Jews were agreeing on something or more precisely against the same thing. I found the paradox hilarious; it was the starting point.

Then, I wanted a metaphor on what is happening between Israelis and Palestinians. At the end it’s a big family affair. How can you fix a broken family?

I felt that letters will give a sense of immediate promiscuity and help us enter in a very personal story. Also, in a dysfunctional family like the one I am describing, silences are as important as words and only letters could give this feeling. I think we all instinctively hear what is...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Audra Wolfe

Audra J. Wolfe is the author of Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science (2018) and Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (2013). A Philadelphia-based writer and editor, her work has appeared in the Washington Post, TheAtlantic.com, Slate, and the popular podcast American History Tellers, as well as more scholarly venues.

From Wolfe's Physics Today interview with Melinda Baldwin:

PT: In your book you argue that the Cold War bolstered and spread a vision of science as a neutral, apolitical activity. Tell us a bit about how that happened.

WOLFE: The idea that science is neutral or somehow apolitical existed before the Cold War, but it took on new significance in the ideological struggle that pitted capitalism against communism. As they looked out at the international political landscape in 1947, US policymakers were alarmed at the evident appeal of communism, particularly in Western Europe. The Marshall Plan, the massive economic assistance program to rebuild war-torn Europe, was one response to that crisis.

The Soviet Union retaliated by relaunching its international propaganda operation, the Communist Information Bureau, usually known as the Cominform. That prompted the US to step up its own propaganda campaign, including everything from overt information programs like the Voice of America broadcasting agency to covert cultural campaigns like the CIA’s funding of the British literary magazine Encounter.

Science was just as much a part of those campaigns as art, music, literature, or sports. US propaganda boasted of an American commitment to empiricism, objectivity, basic research, and internationalism in science and contrasted that with a caricature of Soviet science as based on state authority, political litmus tests, practical applications, and nationalism.

We still hear echoes of those ideas nearly 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s an institutional legacy. Many of our most important scientific institutions...[read on]

Visit Audra J. Wolfe's website.

The Page 99 Test: Freedom's Laboratory.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke's latest novel is The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux Series #22).

From his CrimeReads interview with Dwyer Murphy:

Alcoholism and addiction are important strands to the books. So many of these characters battle with addiction of one kind or another. Do you see that condition as something that binds them and their world together?

Alcoholism and other forms of addiction seem to accompany the gift of creativity. But addiction is also the enemy of the artist. As Pablo Neruda once suggested, alcohol seems to free the writer from distraction, but if he continues to use it to write and to enhance his life he will destroy his art and then his mind and finally his soul.

In New Iberia Blues, Dave gets a new partner, Bailey Ribbons, a former middle school teacher who’s relatively new to the detective ranks. With a long-running series and a sometimes prickly protagonist like Dave, do you worry about introducing a new partner? Any concerns over upsetting Dave’s world, or is that the point?

The young detective with whom Dave is working is based on the character Clementine Carter in John Ford’s famous film about the passing of the American frontier. For Dave the young detective, Bailey Ribbons, is a symbol of ...[read on]

Visit James Lee Burke's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

N.D. Galland

N.D. Galland is the author of the new novel On the Same Page. Her other books include I, Iago, Stepdog, and The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.

From Galland's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for On the Same Page, and for your character Joanna?

A: There really are two newspapers on Martha’s Vineyard, and they really do have a complicated relationship. Years ago, it occurred to me that this would make a fun premise for a novel, but I wasn’t writing contemporary novels, so I didn’t think it should be “my” project.

After a decade, nobody else had claimed it as a premise, and by then I’d written Stepdog, so I’d demonstrated to myself that I could, in fact, write a playful contemporary story (instead of my usual psychologically-intense historical fiction).

The looming lawsuit of the story was inspired by an actual legal conflict between a wealthy summer resident and the town government, although all other details were different.

Joanna is about 50 percent a younger version of me (a writer who grew up on the Vineyard, returning home as an adult) and 50 percent...[read on]

Visit Nicole Galland's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

The Page 69 Test: Stepdog.

My Book, The Movie: Stepdog.

Writers Read: Nicole Galland (August 2015).

Coffee with a Canine: Nicole Galland & Leuco.

--Marshal Zeringue

Barry Eisler

Barry Eisler's new novel is The Killer Collective.

From his Q&A with Matthew Turbeville:

MT: Can you tell our readers (as few spoilers as possible, please!) about what and who Livia Lone and John Rain are in relation to this new book—how they have evolved and if this is the first of your books our readers buy, can you give us just enough clues to figure out how to read the book as a standalone? What essentials must the reader know before diving in?

BE: All my books are designed to function both as series entries and as standalones, so anyone can appreciate The Killer Collective with or without having read any of the previous Rain or Livia books.

If I had to compare Rain and Livia…well, they’re both survivors, they’re both killers, they’re both exceptionally methodical. But the differences are probably more significant: Livia was created by trauma, while Rain’s origins lie in an innate attraction to conflict. Livia is motivated by a deep-seated need to protect, while Rain’s motivations are less noble. And Livia is primarily a sheepdog, intent on guarding the sheep, while Rain is much more a wolf, grappling with guilt about having preyed on others.

Rain has been around for a while—he was first published in 2002!—and in some ways he’s changed. He’s less the lone wolf he was at the outset. He has a clan now, which creates complications. He’s older, and grappling with an increasing awareness of his own mortality, and with the increased weight of the life he’s led and what he’s done. He’s been trying to retire—to kill his way out of the killing business—but never quite seems to make it.

And Livia teamed up with Rain’s partner, former Marine sniper Dox, in the previous book, The Night Trade, and that turned into an interesting relationship. So I started wondering…what would happen if Livia, in the course of her Seattle PD sex-crime detective duties, uncovered something so big that she was targeted in an attempted hit? Would she call on Dox for help? Would Dox call on Rain?

And what if Rain had...[read on]

Visit Barry Eisler's website.

The Page 69 Test: Livia Lone.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rachel DeWoskin

Rachel DeWoskin's new YA novel is Someday We Will Fly, which takes place in Shanghai during World War II.

From the author's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You note that two photos of Jewish refugee children in Shanghai inspired the idea for Someday We Will Fly. How did you create your character Lillia and her family?

A: My novels are all concerned with human beings in trouble, people on the peripheries, trying to figure out how to transcend contexts that are unfamiliar or excruciatingly difficult. Lillia is that kind of character; she's tough and imaginative, and although her life circumstances are tragic, she manages to demonstrate the sort of resilience teenagers often do.

I came up with Lillia from those photos of children who had escaped Nazi-occupied Europe and were living in Shanghai--their toys and clothes and scrubbed faces made me want to explore how their parents had managed to come to Shanghai in terror, land in a place as unfamiliar as any place could possibly be, and then still build childhoods for their children. They made schools, sports teams, and beautiful dolls for their children.

Of course Lillia is also a composite of my daughters, an imaginary rendering of them forward. She's in many ways parts of me, and I tried to make her both of her own era and recognizable as one of us--someone with the same hopes and dreads we have now.

Part of the way Lillia survives is by...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Barbara Lee

Congresswoman Barbara Lee was first elected to represent California's Ninth District in 1998. She is the author of Renegade for Peace and Justice: A Memoir of Political and Personal Courage.

From her Q&A with Slate's Christina Cauterucci:

I’ve been thinking a lot about power in numbers when it comes to race and gender representation in Congress. Some studies of women in business leadership suggest that there needs to be a critical mass of people from underrepresented groups to make a tangible difference, because one person alone can be more easily ignored or tokenized. Does that resonate with your experience in Congress?

Absolutely. You know, it’s really good to have allies. And coming to Congress then, as a progressive African-American woman, it took a while to build the level of collegiality that others have, especially white men, because there were so few of us.

In terms of speaking out in a meeting or at a hearing with new ideas—folks would shake their heads and say “Great,” or whatever. Then 10 minutes later they would reiterate the same thing I just said, as if it were new. [Laughs.] It’s just like being invisible. You know what that’s like, being invisible? But let me tell you: I wasn’t gonna let that happen. I was working for former Congressman Ron Dellums, who passed away in July. And when I started working as a chief of staff on Capitol Hill, there were maybe two African-American women as chiefs of staff, OK? Maybe three, but I think it was two. I had to represent Ron at meetings with Cabinet officials. And I’d walk into those meetings, and primarily white men were there, and I would engage in the meeting, and it was almost like I just wasn’t there. Or they didn’t recognize me as a chief of staff, or they would never call on me to ask my question or make my point. Or they sometimes didn’t know that I was a chief of staff, they thought I was another staffer just taking notes to take back to the congressman. You know, it was very ugly and demeaning, disrespectful.

So I remember those days, and we’ve made a lot of progress, but let me tell you, we have a long way to go. You still have institutional biases, you have to break through all of that sexism and racism. You have to really confront that all of the time, whether it’s subconscious or conscious.

[Congress is] still just a microcosm of America. It takes a while. But...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Mesha Maren

Mesha Maren is the author of the new novel Sugar Run. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, Oxford American, Crazyhorse, Southern Cultures, Hobart, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation grant, an Appalachian Writing Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She is the 2018-2019 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and also serves as a National Endowment of the Arts Writing Fellow at the Beckley Federal Correctional Institution.

From Maren's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Sugar Run, and for your character Jodi?

A: Sugar Run came to me as Jodi--like she showed up in my mind and started talking to me, I don’t know where she came from, there is no particular person that I modeled her off of, she just showed up and I became smitten.

I started writing down little scenes, bits of things, most of it came to me as sharp images at first: a curtain blowing in the wind, a plastic cup of whiskey with melting ice, the smell of lemon cleaning product, the way your skin feels when you slide below the surface of the swimming pool after lying in the sun for a long while.

I spent years just gathering these snippets and then following the snippets until a plot began to appear, but at first it was Jodi--her voice and perspective--and images, lots and lots of images.

It was like I had to widen the lens, I would start with this tight perspective on a chandelier and then ask...[read on]

Visit Mesha Maren's website.

Writers Read: Mesha Maren.

--Marshal Zeringue

Taylor Adams

Taylor Adams directed the acclaimed short film And I Feel Fine in 2008 and graduated from Eastern Washington University with the Excellence in Screenwriting Award and the prestigious Edmund G. Yarwood Award. His directorial work has screened at the Seattle True Independent Film Festival and his writing has been featured on KAYU-TV’s Fox Life blog. He has worked in the film/television industry for several years and lives in Washington state.

Adams's new novel is No Exit.

From the author's Parade Q&A with Lambeth Hochwald:

We have to know how you came up with this storyline.

The first thing I do is keep a draft document open with tons of half-formed ideas, possible settings and characters and match them together. I’ll then come up with a premise of something I might not mind spending a year working on. In this case, it was the rest stop as a setting, wayward college student as a heroine and the villain underestimating the heroine. I wanted to play with their shifting perception of each other. I also wanted to convey the idea of witnessing a crime worthy of intervention and what happens next.

You sound really nice, but I have to say No Exit is really scary. How does a nice guy like you write such terrifying stuff?

I’ve gotten that before. One of my dad’s co-workers read one of my books and asked if it bothered him that there’s so much darkness in it. I totally get it. I don’t think I’m different in person as I am as a writer. It’s more that...[read on]

Visit Taylor Adams's website.

The Page 69 Test: No Exit.

--Marshal Zeringue