George Pelecanos

From Arifa Akbar's "One Minute With: George Pelecanos" in the Independent:

Choose a favourite author and say why you like her/him

I would say John Steinbeck for the reason that he writes simply and for the people, and about everyday people. It's rare in American literature, which is mostly about succeeding or winning. He often writes about the opposite and I appreciate that.

* * *

Which fictional character most resembles you?

Arturo Bandini, from Ask the Dust by John Fante. The character is the son of an immigrant who is trying to be a writer and is very conflicted by it; the idea kind of goes against his working-class roots.

Read more of the interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul McGeough

At the Columbia Journalism Review, Katia Bachko interviewed Paul McGeough, author of Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas, about covering conflict in Gaza. One exchange:

KB: My sense is that it’s very hard to write about Hamas and Gaza and not be accused of ignoring Hamas’s history of violence. As a journalist who has worked to expand the public’s understanding of the region, how do you respond to that criticism?

PM: The Middle East crisis is a war, and war is a measure of failure, a point in human relations beyond which both sides have the capacity to do terrible things. That is the context in which, to use a cliché of the region, Hamas has become a fact on the ground—by dint of its own resourcefulness and determination as much as by the actions of others. To examine the movement is not to endorse its aims or tactics. It is a perfectly reasonable and—I would argue—necessary role for journalists and authors to dig into, to explore and explain the internal terrain of such an organization. To do so certainly does not suggest to me either anti-Semitism or ignoring the role of violence and terror in the Hamas modus operandi.

To my mind, when an organization like this is at the crossroads of a conflict that hadsstraddled generations and drawn in superpowers, it is incumbent on us to attempt to understand exactly how it works and how it is changing or evolving—if in fact it is. In this context, I don’t see anyone in the media failing to observe or to examine the resort to violence by Hamas, either...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her novels include Passing On, shortlisted for the 1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, City of the Mind, Cleopatra's Sister and Heat Wave. Her new novel is Family Album.

From her Q & A with Anna Metcalfe at the Financial Times:

What book changed your life?

WG Hoskins’ The Making of the English Landscape. It taught me how to see the presence of the past in the world around me.

Who are your literary influences?

Everything I’ve ever read, some in a negative sense, of course. Elizabeth Bowen, Henry James, John Updike, Carol Shields, Dickens, among many others. I admire precision, stylistic energy and the ability to use exactly the right words.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joanna Hershon

From Rebecca Honig Friedman's interview with Joanna Hershon, author of The German Bride--“a stylish account of a German Jewish young woman’s often brutal odyssey to the post–Civil War American Southwest” (Publishers Weekly):

JEWESS: What drew you to write about this oft-neglected period in history? How typical is Eva’s story of the period?

JOANNA HERSHON: I was looking to write a novel that required research but I didn’t know about what, exactly. One day I heard a friend make an off-handed comment: “My ancestors were Jewish cowboys,” and I was hooked. I started researching his family, which led to years of reading about Jewish pioneers in America. What is typical about Eva’s story are the cultural details of her family’s home, the facts of a German Jewish merchant coming home to Germany to find a German Jewish bride, and that pregnancy and childbirth are central struggles in her life. The specifics of her situation — her secret past, her husband’s profligate behavior — I can’t say any of that can be found in any historical records.

Why did you want to write a novel that required research? Wouldn’t it have been easier to just make stuff up?

I was interested in...[read on]

Learn more about the author and her work at Joanna Hershon's website.

The Page 69 Test: The German Bride.

My Book, The Movie: The German Bride.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nic Brown

Nic Brown lives with his wife and daughter in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His first book, Floodmarkers, was published in July, 2009. His fiction has appeared in the Harvard Review, Glimmer Train, Epoch, The South Carolina Review, and Time Out Amsterdam.

From a Q & A with Brown at Bookslut:

Why did you choose to center your novel around Hurricane Hugo? You've mentioned a feeling of disappointment at the hurricane for passing over your town when you were younger. Does that figure into Floodmarkers? If so, how?

When I was 12, I wanted Hugo to destroy Greensboro, North Carolina. Whenever I see a storm forecast, I still feel this perverse desire. I think it's something a lot of us feel. I have no research to back this up, but I'm standing by it. Especially in a smallish town, or one in which not much happens, natural disaster offers the chance to become suddenly special. Hugo ended up just glancing Greensboro, which I should have been glad for, since it devastated Charleston and Charlotte. As it was, I still got out of school and jumped on a trampoline in the rain - which was weird and sort of magical and memorable. And that's what this book is all about: a storm doesn't have to destroy your town to still change your daily routine just enough to allow room for the singular.

Describe the process you went through in writing this book. How did you formulate the characters? Did you know from the beginning that you would use interwoven, yet markedly separate, stories?

My friend worked the graveyard shift in a hotdog factory. My wife...[read on]

Visit Nic Brown's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Glenn Stout

From a Q & A with Glenn Stout, author of Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World:

What attracted you to the story of Trudy Ederle? How did you first hear about it?

I stumbled across her story nearly a decade ago while working with the late David Halberstam on the collection we did together, The Best Sports Writing of the Century. Although a story about Trudy did not make it into that volume, I was nevertheless intrigued by the brief account I read. Despite the fact that I had previous written a great deal about women’s sports figures and sports history, writing profiles of pioneers like Eleanora Sears and Louise Stokes, and ghostwriting biographies of people like Mia Hamm, the tennis playing Williams sisters, skater Tara Lipinski and others, Trudy’s story had somehow eluded me. Over the next five or six years, as I fulfilled other commitments, I periodically researched her story until I was able to determine there was enough for a book – no one had ever written a biography of her before. You know, when she swam the Channel she was only nineteen years old, the first woman to do so. Only five others – all men – had ever swum the Channel at the time, and Trudy beat the men’s record by nearly two hours! That stunned me, particularly after I learned that fewer people have swum the Channel than have climbed Mount Everest. Even today, swimming the Channel is one of the most difficult athletic feats on the planet.

So I started poking around at the story. Even a cursory look at old newspaper accounts convinced me of...[read on]

Read an excerpt from Young Woman and the Sea, and learn more about the book and author at Glenn Stout's blog.

The Page 99 Test: Young Woman and the Sea.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom Cain

From UK novelist Tom Cain's Q & A with Ali Karim at The Rap Sheet:

AK: Considering the controversial aspects of your work, what with the death of a popular princess in a Parisian tunnel in The Accident Man, followed by a manically fundamentalist Christian nutter who tries to bring on “the Rapture” in your second novel, were you nervous about reader reactions?

TC: Well, I’m used to writing about controversial subjects as a journalist and (though this hasn’t happened for a while). I’ve faced about as much in the way of abusive reviews, snide profiles, and general media poison as any writer is ever likely to get. I’m pretty much immune to it now. My only concerns would be if I actually wrote something that attracted the attention of the authorities (ever more possible as antiterrorism laws are used to stifle free speech), or I somehow antagonized a special-interest group--or a criminal one, come to that. I wouldn’t want my family to get caught up in any crap of my creating. But, hey, I’ve just written a short story about an attack on a British prime minister, so clearly any worries aren’t inhibiting me thus far!

All that said, I’m pretty careful not to give offense just for the sake of it. Carver is not a remotely political character, the books take no party/political line, and I do let my villains state their case. I always admired the way that The West Wing, while it clearly offered a liberal Democratic fantasy of a hero president, at a time when the real one was George W. Bush, often gave really good arguments to its Republican characters. So I try to let the devils have some reasonably good tunes ... and it’s kept them quiet so far....[read on]

Read "Bloodsport," a never-before-seen, three-part short story by Tom Cain, the creator of shadowy “accident man” Samuel Carver [Assassin].

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Russo

From a Q & A with Richard Russo about his new novel, That Old Cape Magic:

Q: Apparently there is a wedding phenomenon you have termed "Table 17". What exactly is that and how does it relate to this novel?

A: A few years ago my wife and I were invited to a wedding and were seated at what was clearly a "leftover" table. It reminded me of the final teams who get into the NCAA tournament. You can tell by their seeding that they were the last ones in, that they almost didn't make the grade. Table 17 works thematically in the novel because being among strangers, not sure whether you belong, may be the main character's future if he can't find a way to slow his downward spiral.

Q: You have said that That Old Cape Magic began as a short story. What was the moment you knew it was calling out to be a novel?

A: Griffin, my main character, begins the story on his way to a wedding with his father's urn in the trunk of his car. I planned for him to scatter the ashes (his past), put his future in danger at the wedding (his present) and then pull back from disaster at the last moment. But then he pulled over to the side of the road in his convertible to take a phone call from his mother, at the end of which a seagull shits on him. At that moment, in part because Griffin blames her, he and I both had a sinking feeling. You can resolve thematic issues of past, present and future in a twenty page story, but if you allow a shitting seagull into it, you’ve suddenly...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

David W. Orr

From a Q & A at TreeHugger with David W. Orr, author of Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse:

TreeHugger: Religion is such an enormous part of American identity, is environmentalism finding its place in patriotism and American values on the whole?

David: Well, it calls for a higher kind of patriotism, doesn't it? A patriotism that recognizes the value of land, water, biological diversity, climate stability. And patriotism, I think, in this country was too easily confused by too many people as simply waving flags and being involved in wars and violence.

In fact, I would put people like Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson at the top of the list of patriot heroes of this country, that were in fact defending the land that we live on. But I think that’s in the offing—I think that the country has done something of a 10-year walkabout and is now hopefully coming to its senses. We have seen, I think, the ruination of the right wing creed, this neocon creed, that has been so destructive of virtually everything that we value.

I think a lot of people, conservatives and liberals alike, are seeing the need for something new. I noticed on a bookstand a new book on the environment by Newt Gingrich, of all people. I saw a column by David Brooks in The New York Times last week that is a really good column on genuine conservatism that goes back to Edmund Burke. So, I think there are lots of signs that things are changing, and changing very quickly.

But what you are describing is really an attempt to overcome what George Orwell described as "double speak" and the corruption of language that I think went on pretty rampantly over the past 20 years.

Read the complete Q & A.

Visit David W. Orr's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Moustafa Bayoumi

Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America.

From a Q & A at his publisher's website:

Can you explain the significance of your book’s title?

It comes from W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1903 classic The Souls of Black Folk. In that book, Du Bois was determined to counteract the hatreds of the Jim Crow-era by pulling back the “veil” separating black and white Americans. He wanted to show his readers a fuller, more accurate picture of the black experience, including “the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls.” And he also understood that the treatment of African Americans was really a kind of social thermometer—an index of how healthy American society as a whole was.

Now, a century later, Arab and Muslim Americans are the newest minorities in the American imagination, and they aren’t much better understood than African Americans were in 1903. I believe their treatment too reflects much about the state of American society today.

How have things changed for the Arab American or Muslim American community since September 11th?

Prior to September 11th, Arab and Muslim Americans lived...[read on]

Visit Moustafa Bayoumi's website.

--Marshal Zeringue