Michael Kimball

Michael Kimball's recently released Dear Everybody is the story of Jonathon Bender told through a series of his own suicide letters, as well as his mother's journal entries, his brother's narrative, and other media.

He talked to Jonathan Bergey at Keyhole Magazine. Their opening exchange:

Jonathan Bergey: How did you develop Dear Everybody from the initial idea to completion, from the concept of suicide letters to its final form, which ended up including not just the letters but interviews, newspaper clippings, journal entries, and a narrator?

Michael Kimball: It went through a few different, very distinct stages. The whole novel actually started as just one letter, which then morphed into about 100 letters. At that point I actually thought I just had a longish short story, something like that, and that the thing was done. A few months later it happened again—I wrote another 100 or so letters, and so I just had this bigger bunch of letters. But at that point it started to open up a bit. I added an introduction to it. I added the last will and testament, a couple other things. So there began to be this frame around it. And it was really after I sort of recognized the possibilities of the frame that other things started to open up. And then I got to the newspaper articles, the encyclopedia entries, the psychological evaluations, all the weather reports, year book quotes, all that other stuff.

Read--or listen to--the complete interview.

Read an excerpt from Dear Everybody, and learn more about the book and author at Michael Kimball's website and blog.

Michael Kimball's first two novels are The Way the Family Got Away (2000) and How Much of Us There Was.

The Page 99 Test: Dear Everybody.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rose George

For Library Journal, Wilda Williams interviewed Rose George about her new book, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters.

One exchange:

In The Big Necessity, you tackle a rather unpalatable topic. Why did you decide to write a book about bodily waste?

I used to work as a writer at the magazine Colors. Its editor, a rather eccentric photographer, decided to do a glossy coffee-table book on excrement. I didn't like the pictures, but the research I did for the stories accompanying them stayed with me. That's when I was introduced to such memorable characters as Bindeshwar Pathak, an Indian sanitation activist who has installed half a million toilets in India. I noticed that every so often the topic would make the news but only ever in a jokey way. I found this odd, having learned the astonishing fact that four in ten people in the world have no sanitation whatsoever. When it came to writing a second book—my first was about refugees—the topic of toilets and sanitation transformed from a background noise in my brain to the obvious and compelling choice.

Read the complete Q & A.

Read more about The Big Necessity, and visit Rose George's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sean Chercover

Sean Chercover is the author of two excellent novels featuring P.I. Ray Dudgeon, Big City, Bad Blood and Trigger City.

From his ITW interview with Tasha Alexander:

What do you think is the most important influence on a writer?

Reading. By a mile. It saddens me to meet aspiring writers who say they don't read much. They will never make it. You've got to read, every day. There's no substitute for reading good books. Reading is how we first learn the craft of writing.

Life experience is also important, and I gained enormously from my time working as a PI ... but it didn't teach me how to write.

Trigger City is simply impossible to put down. How do you write like this?

First of all, thank you. I'm thrilled that you enjoyed it.

I think my inability to outline may be a blessing in disguise. Sometimes you read a thriller, and you can't avoid "seeing" the writer's bag-of-tricks. You "see" the writer thinking, "I must end every chapter (better, ever scene!) with a question or revelation or new peril or startling plot twist." But because you see the man behind the curtain, it all feels formulaic and you don't buy into it emotionally. The tension is lost.

But I'm not good at outlining in detail. I know how I want the story to end, and I know some major scenes that have to happen in order to get there, but most of the stuff that happens along the way comes to me as I write. So in many ways, I'm like the reader; as I'm writing the book, I want to know how it all turns out. Since I'm surprised by it, I assume the reader will be too. I actually have a piece of paper taped to my wall that says, "Just write the story that you would want to read." That advice has gotten my past many stumbling blocks, and I think it helps keep the tension high.

Read the full interview.

The Page 69 Test: Big City, Bad Blood.

Visit Sean Chercover's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Larry Beinhart

Larry Beinhart's new novel is Salvation Boulevard.

One exchange from his January Magazine Author Snapshot:

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?

That’s tough. I’m basically unemployable. I might try to make a go of it as a ski instructor, but the money is really insufficient. To even try you have to be a gung ho member of a team! Which is probably beyond my capacity.

I could, I suppose, be entrepreneurial again. I once co-owned a film production company. We did quite well. But the talent you need as a producer is to be a salesman, which I’m not that good at. You also have to be detail oriented, keep accounts, keep track of nickels, also not my forte. I was a director as well as a producer. But I know people, like my wife, who are much better at that than I am.

Perhaps, in desperation, I might try to found a new religion, or a new non-religion religion. That can be exceptionally lucrative. But it may require being more intuitively exploitive than I naturally am. I don’t know and wouldn’t find out until I tried it.

But, now that you’ve asked, I will give serious consideration to it.

Read the complete profile.

Visit Larry Beinhart's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nick Harkaway

From a Q & A with Nick Harkaway about his debut novel, The Gone-Away World:

Gone-Away World has been compared to everything from Dickens to Rushdie to Terry Pratchett. Have you heard any parallels that you feel are really off the mark?

The Observer said it was "Thackeray on acid," and that caught me off balance. But the Vonnegut comparison makes me extremely happy.

But the authors you acknowledge yourself predate dystopian satire: Dumas, Doyle, and Wodehouse.

I would guess that if you could track down Vonnegut and his guys, they'd also point to those adventure-story writers. I think lots of boys sat down with The Three Musketeers and felt it was a really long book, but then discovered that it's a really gripping swashbuckling story. Pynchon's still around. You don't want to be doing something just like Pynchon. I want Pynchon to come up to me at a bar and say, "That book you wrote — it wasn't bad."

Read the complete Q & A.

About all these comparisons, January Magazine editor Linda L. Richards writes: "As the son of one of the top-selling authors in the world, one can imagine Harkaway has had it to here with comparisons. And, truly, The Gone-Away World demonstrates a clear voice and sharp vision. And, whatever else, with everyone scratching about for all these wonderful comparisons (Pynchon, Vonnegut, Rushdie and Dickens, for crying out loud!) it’s clear, boyfriend can write." [read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

John Shors

From a Q & A with John Shors, author of Beneath a Marble Sky and Beside a Burning Sea:

Was it hard to go from writing about the Taj Mahal in Beneath a Marble Sky to World War II in Beside a Burning Sea?

I think that transitioning from one book to another is a difficult process. After spending such a long time writing Beneath a Marble Sky, I became quite connected to its characters. And having to create a batch of new characters for Beside a Burning Sea felt somewhat like learning a new language. The voices in both novels are fairly unique, I believe, and giving life to such voices was a time-consuming process.

Your first novel took place in India, and your second novel occurred in the South Pacific. Why do you like to write novels set overseas?

I was lucky enough to grow up reading, and have consumed a couple of books a week for most of my life. I have always most enjoyed novels that took me to a new place, and that taught me something. Such novels prompted me to explore much of the world, in fact. And after visiting so many wonderful places, I decided that I wanted to share such locales with my readers.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Linda Robinson

From Brian Lamb's C-SPAN interview with Linda Robinson, author of Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq:

BRIAN LAMB, HOST, Q&A: Linda Robinson, why did you want to write a book about David Petraeus?

LINDA ROBINSON, AUTHOR, ”TELL ME HOW THIS ENDS: GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS AND THE SEARCH FOR A WAY OUT OF IRAQ”: Well, I’d been spending, as you know, Brian, a lot of time in Iraq since the war began. And I’d met David Petraeus when he was writing the counterinsurgency manual – and in fact, even before that.

And retired General Barry McCaffrey said, ”This is an officer you need to take a good, hard look at.” He was very high on Barry McCaffrey, even though – I mean very high on David Petraeus – even though he was against the war.

So, I had numerous indications that Petraeus was one of the generals in the Army to take a good look at.

LAMB: Where did you get the title for your book, ”Tell Me How This Ends”?

ROBINSON: That, in fact, is his phrase. He said this to Rick Atkinson, who was an embedded journalist with him in the major combat phase at the outset of the war. And around about April, Petraeus turned to Rick and said, ”You tell me how this ends.”

And he began repeating that phrase to other journalists. It kind of showed his skepticism early on that this was going to be a quick war.

LAMB: Why did you compare General David Petraeus to General Matthew Ridgway?

ROBINSON: Well, there were two comparisons as we got started on this book project. One of them was the possibility that this war would go the way of Vietnam, and ”Abe” Abrams – Creighton Abrams – would be the general that Petraeus would most be compared to for having been a bright man with some good ideas, but coming along way too late to apply them successfully.

The other one, Ridgway, was, of course, one of Petraeus’ heroes, a fellow airborne soldier. But he was credited with getting the Korean War at least to a steady state, pushing the North Koreans back. And I think that was the closest historical parallel that some of the historians I talked to could find.

Read the complete interview transcript or watch the interview.

Learn more about Tell Me How This Ends : General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dave Zeltserman

Dave Zeltserman's latest novel is Small Crimes.

From his Q & A with novelist Allan Guthrie, for Pulp Pusher:

AG: You mentioned earlier that you’re a ‘crime writer from Boston,’ yet Small Crimes is a rural noir. What made you decide on the small-town setting and how important is location to this particular story?

DZ: A rural setting was a must. There were a lot of reasons for this; two big ones being the claustrophobic atmosphere of the book and the damage that Joe Denton ends up doing to the town. Plus the best scene in the book involves a dried-up quarry, so I needed that. Also, with the police and Sheriff’s office being as corrupt as I made them, I had to make the area fictional.

AG: Joe Denton, the protagonist, is a complex individual with an unusual – some might say, abnormal – personality. There’s the suggestion that there might even be a name for his condition – if indeed he has one. How did you go about creating such a convincing psychology?

DZ: You’re right, it is suggested, but it can really go either way, and it’s left up to the readers own interpretation. I have my own personal opinion which I’ll be coy about and keep to myself for the time being. I do research such things using the Internet, which is a great source for articles on all sorts of personality disorders. For Small Crimes I ended up reading a number of papers on the disorder you’re referring to. Also, for whatever reason, I have this talent of being able to get into the heads of sociopaths and other broken individuals. It’s a skill that makes my wife and parents proud.

Read the complete Q & A.

Visit Dave Zeltserman's website and his blog.

My Book, The Movie: Small Crimes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alafair Burke

From the Powells.com Q & A with Alafair Burke:

Name the best television series of all time.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Simultaneously funny, dark, and sweet, this series gave viewers seven seasons, each with an identifiable arc as carefully crafted and well layered as you'd find in any novel. Only Joss Whedon could create a character who credibly transitions from bouncy cheerleader to sacrificial savior to death-savoring self-abuser, all while turning in the requisite snark during the "slayage."

Make a question of your own, then answer it.

Q: What's the deal with your name?

A: I was named after my father's maternal grandmother. I spent my childhood hating my name and trying to get a nickname to stick (including "Farrah" in the early '70s). Then a drag queen to whom I sold clothes at this cheesy Kansas boutique called Cricket Alley used my name and won the Miss Gay Wichita pageant. I figured that if she could make it work in designer knockoffs, I could suffer through.

Read the complete Q & A.

Visit Alafair Burke's website, Facebook page, MySpace page, and blog.

A former deputy district attorney in Portland, Oregon, Alafair Burke now teaches criminal law at Hofstra Law School and lives in New York City. She is the author of the Samantha Kincaid series—which includes the novels Judgment Calls, Missing Justice, and Close Case—and Dead Connection, her first thriller featuring Ellie Hatcher, and Angel's Tip, the sequel.

The Page 69 Test: Dead Connection.

The Page 69 Test: Angel’s Tip.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul A. Cohen

From a Q & A at China Beat with Paul A. Cohen, professor of history emeritus at Wellesley College and associate at the Harvard Fairbank Center and author of the forthcoming Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China:

China Beat: I assume you've seen Orville Schell’s recent piece in Newsweek, in which he mentions your work on the power of the idea of “national humiliation” in Chinese historical memory. I was wondering if you had any thoughts to share about Schell’s essay—or about the longer version that appeared in the New York Review of Books?

Paul Cohen: I liked Schell’s piece (which I read in the NYRB version). His take on continuing Chinese sensitivity to “national humiliation” is well-articulated and persuasive. At the same time it must be said that this is a large and complicated topic, one that cannot easily be covered in a short article. Let me touch briefly on a few points that would need to be dealt with to create a fuller understanding of the issue:

(1) The views of different sectors of the population—urban/rural, highly educated/less well educated, young/middle-age/elderly—need to be disaggregated and analyzed carefully. It shouldn't be assumed that they’re all identical either in nature or origin.

(2) The mystery of the young, who are identified in the article as being among the most intense in their sense of victimization in spite of having been born in the post-Mao years, is a conspicuous example. There was a major effort beginning in the early 1990s to indoctrinate this part of the population with the importance of “not forgetting” (buwang) the suffering and humiliation of the imperialist interval in China's history—an interval they themselves hadn’t experienced. This was part of the broader phenomenon of resurgent nationalism that marked these years and was strongly pushed by the state, in part to supply a substitute form of legitimation for a Communist party whose original Marxist-Leninist-Maoist vision had lost much of its shine. It’s important to look at the content and approach of the modern Chinese history this sector of the population has been exposed to. Yuan Weishi got into trouble a few years back for pointing out how little it has to do with reality.

(3) The situational character of many nationalistic outbursts...[read on]

Read the complete interview.

--Marshal Zeringue