Joe Simpson

Joe Simpson is the author of several bestselling books, of which the first, Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man's Miraculous Survival, won both the NCR Award and the Boardman Tasker Award. His later books include This Game of Ghosts, Storms of Silence, Dark Shadows Falling, The Beckoning Silence and two novels.

From his Q & A with Tim Lewis at the Guardian:

You went back to climbing after your accident, and only stopped in 2009. What’s taken its place?

Nothing. Nothing ever will. I actually surprised myself, I sat up on this peak in Nepal in 2009 and I could see however many 8,000-metre peaks: Everest, Lhotse. It was a gorgeous day. I knew I had a three-and-a-half-day descent and it was going to be murderous on my knee. So I thought: “It doesn’t get much better than this. This is the time to stop.” And I just went to Kathmandu and sold all my gear, and I never climbed again. But it was like grief in a way, and it’s because it’s something you spent your entire life doing. It’s what you live for and then suddenly...[read on]

Touching the Void is among Emma Barrett and Paul Martin's ten favorite books about and by people in extremes and Andy Cave's top ten books on Alpinism.

--Marshal Zeringue

Felicity Hayes-McCoy

Felicity Hayes-McCoy's new novel is The Mistletoe Matchmaker, the third title in her Finfarran series. From the author's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: The Mistletoe Matchmaker is the third of your Finfarran novels. How did you come up with the idea for this book in the series?

A: Each of the Finfarran novels works as a stand-alone, as well as progressing the series. Because of their rural setting on a fictional peninsula on the west coast of Ireland, they always involve an element of seasonality.

With The Mistletoe Matchmaker I wanted to write a winter book, and to delve deeper into the story of Pat Fitzgerald and her husband Ger, who’d appeared in the background of the previous novels.

Q: How do you think your characters have changed over the course of the series?

A: I don’t think they’ve changed, but they’ve certainly developed. One of the...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Scott Von Doviak

Scott Von Doviak is the author of three books on film and pop culture: Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema, If You Like The Terminator, and Stephen King Films FAQ.

His debut novel is Charlesgate Confidential.

From the author's Q&A with Clea Simon:

How does a book start for you?

I start with the setting. The setting gives me the characters and the characters give me the story. In the case of Charlesgate Confidential, I had long wanted to write about the former Charlesgate Hotel in Boston, in which I had lived during the ‘80s when Emerson College turned the building into a dormitory. I have current works in progress set in Austin, where I live now, and Los Angeles, where I spent five years. I need to feel a connection to the setting in order to be comfortable and inspired enough to write about it. While I was at the crime writers’ convention Bouchercon recently, I met someone who was writing a series set in a place they had never been, which is something I can’t imagine doing.

Who in your latest book has surprised you most – and why?

One of the characters surprised me by getting killed much sooner than I expected—and since...[read on]

Visit Scott Von Doviak's website.

The Page 69 Test: Charlesgate Confidential.

--Marshal Zeringue

Helene Dunbar

Helene Dunbar's new young adult novel is We Are Lost and Found.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for We Are Lost and Found, and for your character Michael?

A: In a way, this book was always in the back of my mind and I was just waiting until I was a strong enough writer to tackle it.

I was talking to someone recently who mentioned how impossible it is to explain how invasive and prevalent the AIDS crisis was in the ‘80s. I wanted to capture that time on the cusp of the crisis before much was known about AIDS and before it became such a defining element in so many people’s lives.

In 1983, those in Michael’s age group weren’t demographically at risk, but we didn’t know that. My friends and I didn’t know that. And, in a way, fear of the unknown is a special type of fear because anything - down to the worst things you can imagine - are possible.

I’d been waiting for a book that captured this in the same way that it felt to me at the time (1983 was my senior year of high school), but I never really found one.

As for Michael, I see him as a sort of “everyman.” He’s trying to hold his friends together, his family together, and ultimately hold himself together. And he needs to...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Esther Duflo & Abhijit Banerjee

Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, along with economist Michael Kremer. Banerjee & Duflo's new book is Good Economics for Hard Times.

From the transcript of their interview with Fareed Zakaria:

ZAKARIA: And one of the methods that you really pioneered is this idea of going in and observing what people do? Tinkering with some of the things you gives one - you do one thing for one group and one thing for another group? What does it reveal with in terms of this idea that we are all bound by economic incentives?

DUFLO: Yes. So one, for example, one series of experiments, not just one, but maybe a dozen experiments that revealed very much that the poor don't get discouraged from working when they receive free money is a series of cash - that they've happened now all over the world or in Latin America, even in the U.S. for a while.

So the people get some money as long as their kids go to school and they get the basic immunization and other preventive care services for their children. So one can then look at what happened to the people who get the money and the people who don't. And they are strictly equivalent because they were chosen randomly.

And across all of these experiments you never see a difference in the probabilities that people are working or in how many hours they work? If anything, whenever you see a small difference, it's actually the people who receive money work a little more.

ZAKARIA: You also work in some of the poorest parts of the world. You work in a part of India that is pretty poor. What is the - is there a simple answer to the question of what does one do about that kind of extreme poverty? For a government that doesn't have the resources of the United States?

BANERJEE: Well, I think in our book we make the case that it's probably - that is exactly where you may want to go for something like universal basic income maybe kind of an ultra basic income. Not really very much, but the government's attempt to help the poor has always been a little bit colored by this idea that if you give them free money, they'll be a bunch of lazy people who will - it's just take it.

So you basically have a scheme where what happens if you have to go to work to get the money. It's not clear that that's how you help the poorest people. We worked with some women who were - who had been abandoned by their husbands, and had small children. How do they go to work? Where do the children go?

They were not using these schemes. And as a result, they were instead begging, basically. And the loss of dignity from that seems extraordinarily costly. Nobody will have to be at that - nobody needs to be begging. I think that's not - that - that I think most countries can achieve. And we should try...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Donald L. Miller

Donald L. Miller is the New York Times bestselling author of ten books, the John Henry MacCracken Emeritus Professor of History at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, and one of the most respected authorities on World War II, the Civil War, and Modern US History. His latest book is Vicksburg: Grant's Campaign That Broke the Confederacy.

From Miller's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Why did you decide to write about Vicksburg in your new book?

A: In the public imagination, it’s vastly overshadowed by Gettysburg in the war. I became convinced the war was won in the West, and that starts with control of the Mississippi River, which was very important. And Grant emerges as the general who will win the war.

In the East, the battles were episodic—a huge three-day shootout and then months [of relative quiet]. Grant’s idea was fighting incessantly. He did that at Vicksburg, and then took the fight to the East. He became the general in charge after Vicksburg. Mississippi, Louisiana, parts of Tennessee were out of the war. He freed over 100,000 slaves. That’s the least-known aspect of the story.

In a sense Grant becomes to the slaves of the area the Great Liberator, not Lincoln. The Emancipation Proclamation was on the books, but could only be enforced by the armies of the North. The slaves in Maryland and Delaware were not freed. You had to be fighting for the Confederacy for slaves in that state to be freed.

There was a siege, there were great characters, there were women living in caves. It’s an interesting way to...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Bruce Forbes

Bruce Forbes's books include Christmas: A Candid History, co-editor of Rapture, Revelation, and the End Times, and co-editor of Religion and Popular Culture in America. From his 2016 Q&A with Patt Morrison for the Los Angeles Times:

In the Western world, in the Christian Western world, how was Christmas marked for a thousand, 1,500 years?

It was mainly an adult activity and it would be a midnight Mass — which, by the way, is how we get the term “Christmas.” It really means “Christ’s Mass.” And partying, maybe in the neighborhood tavern or in the home. That is Christmas for a long, long time.

The family-centered Christmas is really something that’s fairly recent. We talk about the Victorian Christmas — we’re talking about the 1800s, when that kind of Christmas we know now arose.

There were people who were Christians and believers who thought it was terrible to celebrate Christmas.

The poor Puritans have a bad reputation in terms of being killjoys and not allowing anyone to be happy. I think that’s not fair. Puritanism starts in England, when the Church of England breaks off from the Catholic Church. It still maintained many Catholic features and Puritans were Calvinists who felt, now that we’ve done these changes, we should get rid of a lot of those other things that are Catholic additions that are not really Christian.

And in the Puritan revolution in England, they sometimes even had town criers going around on Christmas Eve saying, “No Christmas”! No Christmas!” That carried over into the United States with almost all of the English-speaking denominations from England who were not Church of England.

You probably by now roll your eyes when you hear the phrase “the war on Christmas.”

Yes, I do. First of all, it’s because I think a lot of it is built on this assumption that everyone always celebrated Christmas and somebody recently — whoever it is you don’t like — they’re to blame because they wrecked it. And I just don’t think that’s the case.

The idea that even the alternate phrases like “happy holidays “or “season’s greetings” — those are not new phrases. Those we can trace back a long, long way. The problem with the “war on Christmas,” in addition is...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom Piazza

Tom Piazza's novels include A Free State.

From his Q&A with Clea Simon:

Who in your latest book has surprised you most – and why?

My most recent novel, A FREE STATE, actually did start with a plan, which I had to dismantle completely before the thing came alive. But it really came alive, to the extent that everybody in the book surprised me. I had to let them surprise me, or the book would have been dead on arrival. That book was a very spooky experience to write, but I guess they all are. Maybe without revealing too much I can say that the narrator of the final chapter probably surprised me the most, just by appearing.

When and/or where is your latest book set and is there a story behind that setting?

A FREE STATE is set in Philadelphia, mostly, in 1855, and it deals with the moment when the argument over slavery was coming to a boil at the same time that blackface minstrelsy was the dominant form of popular entertainment. The central character is an escaped slave who is also a very brilliant musician. I had started...[read on]

Visit Tom Piazza's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robin Oliveira

Robin Oliveira is the New York Times bestselling author of Winter Sisters, My Name Is Mary Sutter and I Always Loved You. She holds a BA in Russian and studied at the Pushkin Language Institute in Moscow. She received an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is also a registered nurse, specializing in critical care.

From Oliveira's Q&A with Leslie Lindsay:

Leslie Lindsay: WINTER SISTERS picks up about fourteen years after the Civil War. In your previous book, MY NAME IS MARY SUTTER, we’re introduced to a brilliant, headstrong midwife who eventually becomes a Civil War surgeon. Dr. Mary Sutter (now married to Dr. William Stipp), is back in this tale, but this isn’t exactly a series, is it? Is there a literary term for this type of character cross-over? And what is it about Mary that you—and readers—love so much?

Robin Oliveira: I know,it isn’t quite a series, is it? Shall we invent a term? Connected novels, like connected short stories? Though I have received many requests from readers over the years to ‘bring Mary back,’ I could never find a story that seemed as necessary or compelling to tell as the one I had already told about her. I felt as if I’d solved all her problems, and that nothing else would ever be as exciting or interesting as becoming a surgeon in the midst of war. What I think compels readers—and me—to love Mary Sutter is that she is a bright, clear-headed, courageous woman who speaks her mind, ignores societal conventions, slices directly into the heart of things, runs into trouble rather than away from it (the definition of a hero), and persists no matter the roadblock. I particularly love her verbal comebacks. She thinks of and says the apt rebuke or bon mot we all wish we were able to say in similarly fraught moments. There are many situations in my life where I think, Well, Mary wouldn’t have let that person speak to her like that. Why did you? Of course, it took me three or more drafts to write the words she wields as deftly as a sword. But what I think I adore most about Mary is that she is at heart an entirely moral human being. She rejects the frivolous—fashion, status, appearance—for the pursuit of...[read on]

Visit Robin Oliveira's website.

The Page 69 Test: My Name Is Mary Sutter.

The Page 69 Test: Winter Sisters.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Avery Sutton

Matthew Avery Sutton's latest book is Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War.

From his Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Why did you decide to focus your new book on missionaries who spied for the U.S. during World War II?

A: I am a historian of American religion and politics. I stumbled across the story of some missionaries who had worked for the CIA during the Cold War. I was curious about the origins of this history, and what I discovered was that the U.S. government began recruiting missionaries as spies during World War II.

So from there I embarked on a long research process, which essentially entailed finding needles in haystacks. But once I started finding a few elusive missionary-spies, I got really excited about what I was learning, about the role they played during the war, and about what they tell us about the role of religion in American foreign policy, American culture, and American intelligence.

Q: You look at the careers of four men. Why did you choose these four, and what is the relationship between John Birch, one of the four, and the John Birch Society?

A: I had a few goals in mind as I selected the main characters.

First, I wanted to tell the story of...[read on]

The Page 99 Test: American Apocalypse.

--Marshal Zeringue