Marcus Noland

Devin Stewart recently interviewed Marcus Noland, co-author (with Howard Pack) of The Arab Economies in a Changing World.

Part of their exchange:

Devin Stewart: Tell me about this book. It is coming out very shortly. You mentioned to me earlier that it was divided up into several very, very hot topics. Can you just give us an overview of the book?

Marcus Noland: Sure. We argue that looking at the Middle East region as a whole, which we define as from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, that the principal challenge facing the region over the next decade or two is job creation. The demographics of the region are such that labor force growth is on the order of 3.5 percent a year. That is without increases in female labor force participation, which in fact has been rising. Given plausible assumptions about investment capital deepening and productivity, we calculate that the region as a whole will have to grow at a pretty steady rate of 5.5-6.0 percent a year over the next decade or so to absorb all that labor and create jobs.

Now, one of the principal ways that countries have rapidly expanded employment in the past is through a process of outward-oriented development. That allows countries to rapidly expand production in labor-intensive manufacturing or services sectors.

But the second driver that we identify in the book is globalization. Here the region's track record has not been good outside the petroleum sector. So while there is a demographic imperative to create jobs, one of the main ways that countries have done it in the past, through a successful process of globalization, is a question mark.

That uncertainty is deepened by the politics of the region, which combine in a unique fashion authoritarianism and political stability. So, while there is a kind of stability on the surface, we argue that these regimes may in fact be brittle and that there is a possibility for very abrupt political change. And as you know, the political opposition in most of these countries has an increasingly religious orientation.

So those things put together — a demographic imperative to create jobs, a questionable track record on globalization, and some deep uncertainty about political transitions — all work to create a very serious set of challenges for the region over the next decade or so.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Allen Dymmoch

Julia Buckley interviewed "Michael Allen Dymmoch on How She Became a Mystery Writer, A Blogger, and a Student of Life."

Part of the interview:

You have four novels with cat references in the title (well, two are cat, one is “tiger,” and one is “feline.”) Do you like cats? Is there a significance to the repeated theme?

Actually all of the books in the John Thinnes/Jack Caleb series were submitted with cat titles. Incendiary Designs was supposed to be called Cats Burning (no actual cats were injured in the production of that story) but St. Martin’s refused to publish it under that title. In those books, cats are a metaphor for detectives, who have a great deal in common with feline hunters.

Cool. What made you start writing mysteries? When did you start?

Just for the hell of it, I took a screenwriting course and had to write a screenplay about something. I’d seen a bad police/buddy film and decided to try to write a better one. That became a screenplay for The Man Who Understood Cats, which no one in Hollywood would look at. On Barbara D’Amato’s advice, I novelized the story and entered it in the Malice Domestic contest. After the story won the contest, my editor asked if I was going to write a sequel. What can you say to that but “yes”?

Read the entire interview.

My Book, The Movie: Michael Allen Dymmoch's Death in West Wheeling.

The Page 69 Test: Michael Allen Dymmoch's White Tiger.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joseph Finder

Ali Karim recently interviewed Joseph Finder, whose new novel Power Play is due out in August.

Part of their dialogue:

AK: I’ve heard a few things already about Power Play, your book for 2007. Care to tell us a little more?

JF: I think it’s my most exciting novel yet -- honestly! I’ve taken the sort of office-intrigue stuff of my last novels ... and moved it all way out of the office. The result is an action-packed story with a relentless pace. I was inspired by my favorite TV show, 24. I saw how you could maintain a breathless pace but at the same time have well-fleshed-out characters, and I thought, Lemme try that! Basically, [Power Play] is the story of a group of high-powered corporate guys -- the top officers of an aerospace company -- who go off on one of those offsite retreats to do “team-building” at a very high-end, luxurious lodge in the wilderness. No phones, no cell phones, no BlackBerries, no Internet. They’re totally cut off from the rest of the world. [Theirs is] also a company in trouble. Their brand-new CEO is a woman, and the whole leadership team is men, and they resent her. Plus, there are rumors of corruption going on, which the female CEO is threatening to uncover. And all of a sudden, a gang of backwoods hunters crashes in and takes them all hostage. And the hostages have no way to call for help. Among the hostages is one young guy, Jake Landry -- a last-minute addition, who wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. And he turns out to be the only one who’s willing to risk his life to try to save everyone else. I think it’s a pretty cool story.

Read the entire interview at The Rap Sheet.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tara Ison

BookFox interviewed Tara Ison, author of A Child Out of Alcatraz and, more recently, The List.

The interview opens:

BookFox: The two main characters in "The List", Isabel and Al, both see the world through particular frames – Isabel sees the world through medical spectacles, while Al views the world through a movie camera. How did you prepare yourself to channel such film-centric and medical-centric characters?

Tara Ison: I began with a rough idea of who Isabel and Al were, but they really developed as I researched their backgrounds, specifically the medical workings of the heart/eye/hand, and then a crash course in cinema history/technology. Studying facts and figures, for me, is like a treasure hunt – it provides the foundation for a character’s specific frame of reference and knowledge base, but also offers insight into how a character views the world, that “lens” the characters look through. I like the feeling of a core metaphor for each person, the defining characteristic you then develop and expand outward. Isabel is so frightened by the mess of simply “feeling” things and giving in to that, she really needs the assurance of what can be proven, tested, scientifically observed; Al relies on the more emotional/visceral/visual experience of life, but he’s still stuck in a kind of passivity, he wants to observe life rather than commit to participating. And writing the novel in alternating Isabel/Al chapters helped ground me in each character’s point of view.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stacey Richter

Aaron Gilbreath interviewed Stacey Richter, author of the story collections Twin Study and My Date with Satan, for The Portland Review.

The opening exchange:

Aaron Gilbreath: Many of your book’s stories start with incredible first lines. “We must love nature, and we must rape nature for Satan!” in “Goal 666;” “She smiled when she saw me coming, the Bitch, she smiled and stuck her fingers in her mouth.” in “The Beauty Treatment;” “It’s a boozy night, and the regulars are practically dry-humping the bar –” in “Rules for Being Human.” As a reader, how quickly do you lose interest in a story when the intro fails to move or pull you in?

Stacey Richter: I like things to start well. It is important to me. I think the first page or first paragraph should contain everything that’s in the story thematically, and lots of times when I read a story I love I go back and read the first page again. And although I’ll almost always finish a story once I start it, I do form an impression quickly. I can bore easily, but I usually try to keep going and let the writer redeem herself. I’m more likely to get angry at awkward grammar or something that doesn’t sound musical than a subject that’s not interesting to me. I’ll get more frustrated with the writer if there’s a long sentence with too many clauses and awkward descriptions than if it seems like a story I’ve read before; I’ll think, “Oh, that’s ok, let’s see what this writer does with it.”

Read the entire interview.

The Page 99 Test: Twin Study.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Ferrigno

Ali Karim recently interviewed Robert Ferrigno, author of Prayers for the Assassin, winner of the 2006 Gumshoe Award for Best Thriller of the Year.

From their exchange:

AK: So, tell us a little how you came upon this unusual story you told in the groundbreaking Prayers for the Assassin.

RF: I started it shortly after 9/11, when everyone was torqued and angry and certain that victory was easy. I started wondering, as authors with rather bleak points of view are wont to do, what would happen if the West lost? This was actually a radical position to take, the U.S. having the greatest and most sophisticated war capability on the planet. So I tried to imagine how it could happen, and that led me to the belief that while we couldn’t be defeated militarily, we could lose on a very different battlefield. We could lose because of an internal weakness, a failure of vision, a failure to see beyond the next television show, the next launch of some crap product designed to make our lives shiny and bright and fun-fun-fun. In a generation-long struggle, don’t count on technology to win the war; it’s going to take tenacity and strong belief. Most of us in the West have very short-term event horizons. Muslims fight to the death over theological differences that happened over 1,000 years ago. Americans can’t remember who won the Academy Award for Best Picture last year.

So that was the impetus: the potential for losing the war and the effect losing would have. I also wanted to write about a protagonist who has lost his faith and feels that loss acutely. A tough guy that has to continue on, making it up as he goes along, choosing right from wrong without any guidance other than his own morality. I had always wanted to write about this kind of character, and it’s kind of ironic that when I finally did it, the faith he had lost was Islam. My protagonist is Rakkim Epps, an elite Fedayeen warrior who aches when he hears the call to prayer, knowing he is no longer part of the faithful.

Read the entire interview at The Rap Sheet.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katherine Min

Katherine Min's debut novel Secondhand World was published by Knopf last year.

Here's part of a Q & A with Min from the publisher's website:

Q: Congratulations on your first book. When did you first realize that you wanted to be a writer?

A: I was, I’m afraid, an incorrigible liar when I was a child. The truth just didn’t hold appeal for me. And the lies I told were literally unbelievable, like that I was really Swedish but had had some sort of operation to disguise myself. From such ignoble beginnings, one has no choice but to become a fiction writer — or a felon, I suppose. I started writing stories when I was around six, and by the time I was twelve, when other girls dreamed of their wedding day or prom night, I dreamed of publishing a Borzoi book with Knopf. So, I’m living proof that some dreams do come true.

Q: Which authors are your biggest influences?

A: Two books that made deep impressions on me as a young writer were It Happened in Boston? by Russell H. Greenan, and Ghosts by Ursula Perrin. On my writing desk: The Great Gatsby, To the Lighthouse, Madame Bovary, Lolita, The Dubliners, Revolutionary Road. Contemporary authors I am consistently amazed by: Marilynne Robinson, Alice Munro, Jeffrey Eugenides, J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Strout, James Salter, Chang-rae Lee, Graham Swift.

Read the entire Q & A.

See--The Page 69 Test: Secondhand World.

--Marshal Zeringue

Victoria Redel

Victoria Redel is the author of Loverboy (Graywolf 2001, Harcourt 2002), Where the Road Bottoms Out (Knopf), and a collection of poems, Already The World (Kent State University Press).

Her new book is The Border of Truth.

Small Spiral Notebook's Felicia Sullivan interviewed Redel last year. Part of their exchange:

Felicia Sullivan: Who are some of your writing or literary/poetic inspirations? Which writers/poets do you revere?

VR: I read a lot. I feel that I'm reading all the time and still I have enormous, horrible, gaping holes in my reading life. It makes me sad. I love Dickinson and Shakespeare and Hopkins and Frost and Ahkmatova and I love so many of the poets I read when I first fell in love with poetry: Adrienne Rich, Phillip Le vine, William Bronk, Elizabeth Bishop, Jack Gilbert, Auden, Gerald Stern, James Wright -- I'm leaving out so so so many -- Gwendolyn Brooks, Muriel Ruykeyser, Ai, Kinnell, (perhaps you're thinking I should be stricter in my reverence) I remember the excitement I felt going into a bookstore and seeing on the shelf a new collection by say, C.K. Williams. It was like hunger, really. And I'd sit on the floor of the bookstore reading trying to figure out what he was up to in this collection. Then, always the great turbulence: was I going to buy it or resist spending the money for the book. I admit I sprang for the book most of time.

Oh, I haven't even talked about fiction (Where to start? Okay, say Flannery O'Connor to start) Or art (. Or dance (Balanchine, Pina Bausch).

I know so many people who claim to be disgusted with what is being written today. Sure, there's no shortage of junk, no shortage of books that are impoverished, have the basest expectations of readers. But I think there is remarkable, adventurous work being done. I'm awed, humbled all the time by new work I read. Go to the store and buy books by: Ralph Angel, Marie Howe, Dawn Raffel, Christine Schutt, Ben Marcus, Diane Williams, Mark Slouka, Michael Klein, Amy Hempel, Jason Shinder, Sheila Kohler, Douglas Glover, Gordon Lish, Garl Lutz, Noy Holland, Ishiguro, Mary Ruefle, Penelope Fitzgerald, David Rivard, Terese Svoboda. And I haven't even gotten to Cormac McCarthy or Grace Paley whose books you should also run out and buy.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mil Millington

Mil Millington's novels include A Certain Chemistry, Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, and Love and Other Near-Death Experiences.

Danuta Kean interviewed him about Love and Other Near-Death Experiences and "why there is humour in near-death experiences."

Kean's interview-article opens:

After 9/11 a story quickly circulated about a man who should have been at his desk in the Twin Towers as the plane hit. Instead he was in a shop exchanging the shirt his mother had bought for his birthday. His mother's poor fashion sense saved his life.

Similar stories of lives saved by random chance circulated in 2005 after the Asian Tsunami, the 7/7 bombings, Hurricane Katrina and the Asian Earthquake. It proves that our lives hang on mundane threads, says pink-haired author Mil Millington. "That man is alive because his mother was in a shop thinking, 'Do I get the green or the purple shirt?'" he says in his flat Midlands accent.

It also proves that the theme for Mil's latest novel, Love and Other Near-Death Experiences, could not be more prescient. Is that coincidence? No, says the convinced atheist, he has wanted to tackle the subject for a long time: the attack on the Twin Towers seems to have set off a chain of thought that resulted in the novel. "Even when I was writing my first book back in 2001 I was interested in the idea of randomness," he says. "I am fascinated by the basic questions of why am I here, what is happening and do I have any control over where I am going?"

Read on.

The Page 99 Test: Love and Other Near-Death Experiences.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allan Guthrie

Allan Guthrie's latest book, Hard Man, releases in the U.S. in June. Sandra Ruttan interviewed him for Spinetingler Magazine.

Here's a taste:

Sandra: How do you define noir?

Al: It depends what day of the week it is, but since it's Tuesday, I'll offer my most straightforward answer: noir is non-supernatural horror.

Sandra: There's a lot of pain in HARD MAN, a lot of violence. Where does your interest in writing about those themes come from?

Al: Yeah, apparently there's a lot of violence in HARD MAN. Everybody says so. I didn't notice until it was pointed out to me. But that might be because by the time anybody read HARD MAN I was well into the next book, which is much more violent. I actually think that HARD MAN isn't any more violent than my previous books, but it feels like it is because the writing's better. For instance, in HARD MAN there's a scene where Rog goes to visit Wallace with the intent of shooting him. One thing leads to another and there's a scene that lasts several pages which is apparently extremely violent. But if you read it over, the violence is almost all in Rog's head. All that happens is that a gun is placed against the stitches of someone's lip. That's it. Almost a cosy, really (ahem).

Interesting you mention pain, though. I believe that writing's about creating sensory experiences. If a character's eating a hamburger, I want the reader to taste it. So if a character's in pain, I want the reader to feel it. Violence in my books always hurts. And it always has a lasting effect. None of this getting knocked unconscious and waking up two minutes later with a little bump that's completely forgotten about ten seconds later. That annoys me almost as much as gratuitous scenery. I also try to write from the point of view of the victim where possible. But even my aggressor's get hurt. Hit somebody with your bare fist and you're liable to break a finger. In my books, anyway.

As to where my interest in writing about violence comes from, it probably started with the Bible (seriously). Deuteronomy is one of the most relentlessly violent books I've ever read, and as for all the suffering in the New Testament... I also love Jacobean Revenge drama, and guzzled loads of Middleton and co when I was at school. Shakespeare, too. Check out TITUS ANDRONICUS. And the body count in Hamlet's pretty high. I like drama. I like reading and writing about characters placed in extreme situations. That often involves violence. Also, HARD MAN is a modern revenge tragedy. Couldn't write one of those without it being violent. That'd be like asking Jack Bauer to relax, go home, take a bath. What'd be the fun in that?

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue