Ruth Rendell

Ruth Rendell's latest novel is Tigerlily's Orchids.

From her Q & A with Arifa Akbar for The Independent:

Choose a writer and say why you like him/her

My favourite book - The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, which I have read about 20 times - is different from my favourite author, who is Iris Murdoch. I find her books exciting and unputdownable. Her characters are so carefully studied and indepth; I love that.

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Which fictional character most resembles you?

I would find it impossible to say as I don't know how people see me, I only know how I feel.

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Who is your hero/heroine from outside literature?

Desmond Tutu because he appears strong and funny and for me, it's essential to be witty and amusing. I feel like that about him when I see photos of his lovely smiling face.

Read the complete Q & A.

Learn Ruth Rendell's answer to the question: What book do you wish you had written?

--Marshal Zeringue

P.D. James

P.D. James' many books include the Adam Dalgliesh mysteries. Her latest book, Talking About Detective Fiction, was published in 2009.

From her interview with Craig Sisterson:

Who is your favourite recurring crime fiction hero/detective?

Well, I do like Morse, Colin Dexter’s Morse. And I don’t know whether that’s popular in New Zealand, but it’s extremely popular here… They’re Oxford stories, and I was born in Oxford and know the city, and I suppose that’s one of the big attractions of the Morse series. [The TV adaptations] are very, very well done, and they’re also very true to the books, and also some of them are special to the - you know, they didn’t have their origin in a book by Colin, the company has carried on with the character. Very, very successfully I think.

What was the very first book you remember reading and really loving, and why?

Well, I suppose The Wind in the Willows, I liked very much. I loved The Wind in the Willows, which I guess was quite a reassuring book, as I could cuddle up with the little animals in bed, and feel safe. But the actual reading, the first thing I ever read were comics. I think that’s often true with children. My mother used to buy them for me, there was one called Tiger Tim, and one called The Rainbow, and I was desperate to be able to read, because as soon as they came into the house I’d say “Mummy, read me another story”, and she was usually busy. And then one day, I just found, and I remember in huge excitement, that I could read - [comics] were of course very easy, because you had the picture and then the words underneath, you know, and you just recognise the words in relation to the picture. But I can remember the huge excitement of...[read on]

A Certain Justice by P.D. James appears among John Mortimer's five best books about law and literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bret Easton Ellis

Bret Easton Ellis’s debut, Less Than Zero, is one of the signal novels of the last thirty years; his new novel, Imperial Bedrooms, follows those infamous teenagers into an even more desperate middle age.

From his Q & A with Anna Metcalfe for the Financial Times:

Who are your literary influences?

Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Stephen King.

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What book do you wish you’d written?

Sentimental Education by Flaubert. I think it’s a book I could have written whereas I could never have done something like The Great Gatsby.

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What are you most proud of writing?

“In the Islands” and “On the Beach”, two stories from The Informers [Ellis’s 1994 short-story collection]. I’m proud of them for some reason I can’t explain.

Read the complete interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lee Vance

Lee Vance is a graduate of Harvard Business School and a retired general partner of Goldman Sachs Group. His new novel is The Garden of Betrayal.

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

Q: In THE GARDEN OF BETRAYAL, protagonist Mark Wallace works for a hedge fund, advising a select group of investors on global energy pricing. At one point, he is given data on Saudi oil production. Why would this be valuable information for someone in Mark’s field?

A: No one knows how much oil there is in the world, or what percentage of that oil is recoverable. The only certainties are that the amount is finite, and that we’ll recover less than all of it. Hence long term – in twenty years, or fifty years, or a hundred years – we’re going to run out. The key questions are whether we’ll have time to make a smooth transition to an alternative source of energy, and what that source will be.

The Saudis are particularly important at this moment in history because they’re the one major oil producer thought to have proven, developed, excess capacity i.e. established wells that they aren’t currently pumping. But no one outside the Kingdom knows what that excess capacity is, nor do we know much about the rate at which their active fields are running down. There’s a school of thought that holds that the Saudis don’t actually have any excess capacity, and that their production is set to plunge in the near future. If so, the unexpected shortages would wreak massive global economic damage, spark famine, and almost certainly lead to further military conflict in the Middle East. Hence any information about Saudi capacity would be enormously valuable to a wide variety of business, political, and social institutions.

Q: What sort of research did you do into energy markets?

A: I co-managed Energy Trading at Goldman Sachs for a number of years, so...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Zoë Ferraris

From a Q & A with Zoë Ferraris about her new novel, City of Veils:

How has your presentation of life in Saudi Arabia developed since your first novel, Finding Nouf?

I wrote City of Veils to give a broader view of the country, because there’s so much going on there. The people are trying to adapt Western ideas and trends while cherishing their Islamic traditions. For example, in a beauty pageant in Riyadh, women are judged on their moral beauty—how they treat their parents, and so forth. Yet young people’s musical groups like the Spice Babes! perform to huge outdoor crowds, and the religious police can’t do anything about it.

What seems to be responsible for more relaxed attitudes in Saudi Arabia vis-à-vis Western culture?

Young people are becoming more open, because technological advances like cell phones, FaceBook, and Bluetooth have made communication easier and virtually unstoppable.

How then do today’s devout Muslim men and women deal with the strictures of shariya law, especially concerning relations between the sexes?

Many ...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Zoë Ferraris' website.

The Page 69 Test: Finding Nouf.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gail Caldwell

From a Q & A with Gail Caldwell, author of Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship:

Your best friend Caroline Knapp died in 2002 at the age of 42. At what point did you achieve the distance to be able to write about her?

There's a trick to the narrative. You say that the narrative is yours: I wrote this and can keep this forever. But it's also transformative. Putting it into prose crystallizes it, but it also does something to muck the intensity of your own private loss. For years I thought I could not write about losing Caroline. Then came the five-year anniversary; we had a family gathering for her. A lot of people seemed okay, and I was sitting on my back porch and I thought, I am really not okay. And I went inside and wrote my editor—my wonderful editor, Kate Medina. I wrote her a long where-are-we-going letter, and when I talked to her on the phone that night, I remember one word she used: "prism." That is, this book is the prism through which all other light shines—and she understood this.

Your memoir also speaks about your alcoholism for the first time—your "ménage à trois" with whiskey. Was this also the original intention of the book?

I swore I would never write about that either. Caroline was my compass—--I heard her saying as I was writing, you have to do this! It's totally dishonest not to write about my drinking, and when you get to a certain age, you say, oh, come on. Plus, this is a great story. The story always trumps the ego. Writing about my alcoholism was...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Simon Schama

Simon Schama's books include Patriots and Liberators: Revolution and Government in the Netherlands 1780-1813 (1977); Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (1979), The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age; (1987) Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989), Landscape and Memory (1995); Rembrandt’s Eyes (1999); the History of Britain trilogy (2000-2002); Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (2006), and The Power of Art (2007).

From his Q & A with Boyd Tonkin for The Independent:

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

Italo Svevo. I return to 'Confessions of Zeno' every few years. It's poignant, clumsy, elegant, funny - and the greatest novel ever written about failing to give up smoking.

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Which fictional character most resembles you?

It has to be [AA Milne's] Tigger.

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Who is your hero/ heroine from outside literature?

[Philosopher and theologian] Martin Buber. Because for him the core of being Jewish is an understanding of other people. "I-Thou": to put yourself in someone else's shoes.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

A. E. Roman

A. E. Roman is the author of the Chico Santana mystery series: Chinatown Angel and The Superman Project.

From his 2009 interview about Chinatown Angel with La Bloga:

You've chosen to make your main character, Chico Santana, a private investigator operating out of the Bronx. Why a P.I. and why the Bronx? Why (to get to it) a mystery?

Maybe this goes back to the idea of writing what you know. I was born and raised in the Bronx. I don't know much, but I know the Bronx. And why mysteries? I love reading. I read mysteries. I love writing. I write mysteries.

I appreciated the feel for the city (and the love/hate relationship with the city) that comes across in Chinatown Angel. You infuse the story with cultural and street life details that put me, as a reader, right on the scene with your characters. You reference the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Central Park, various streets and neighborhoods of the Bronx, music (oldies and the new stuff), movies (many movie references that I thought were cool), so on and so on. Was this a conscious effort as you wrote, or did the verisimilitude just happen? And Mimi's Cuchifrito - can I stop by and pick up a papa rellena?

Yeah, I'm all about the verisimilitude. No, there was no conscious effort in terms of what I referenced. I'm a New Yorker. I've read poetry at the Nuyorican. I'm all over Central Park. I love movies, the old and the new. I love music, the old and the new. Mimi is a make-believe character in Chinatown but I can give you directions to my favorite cuchifrito in the Bronx for six papa rellena, and directions to Lincoln Hospital for an angioplasty.

Also, I used to be a teen rapper. I won't tell you what my M.C. name was, but it rhymes with "blue," because during an M.C. battle, the word "blue" goes a long way: "Your rhymes are wack! My rhymes..[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Salley Vickers

Salley Vickers is the author of Dancing Backwards. She has worked as a dancer, an artist’s model, a university professor of literature, and a psychoanalyst.

From her interview with Jonathan Ruppin:

Q. The story interweaves Violet’s past and present. Do you write the two strands separately or concurrently?

A. No, I wrote the strands concurrently, always waiting in the present strand to see what would be thrown up from the past. I had no idea myself what had happened to Violet, or what the nature of the rift with Edwin was. So it was intriguing to find this out as I wrote. I never do know what is going to happen or what has happened in my books.

Q. Dino, the dance host with whom she strikes up a friendship, has a reason to feel guilty about something, but Violet forgives him; is this because her trip is motivated by her own guilt at betraying Edwin the old friend she is going to see?

A. I think it is a bit more complex that that. She has a fellow feeling with Dino – an affinity of damage, perhaps because both have lost, in a sense, mothers. As she thinks later, when considering her relationship with Dino, In sparing others we our selves may be spared. So it is in the sparing of him that she feels herself forgiven. For me that is the key line in the novel.

Q. The cruise ship setting for the book came to you after you gave a talk on the Queen Mary II and took ballroom dancing lessons while on board. Are any of the characters in the book based on anyone you encountered at sea?

A. I...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Chandra Hoffman

From a Q &A with Chandra Hoffman, author of the forthcoming debut novel Chosen:

Question: Tell us the story behind the story. How did Chosen come to be?

Answer: This story grew out of three defining experiences: the first was my time in Romania post-Revolution as an aide worker in the infamous Orphanage Number One. It was overwhelming—I was given fifty infants my first day—but inspiring to see the human spirit surviving in spite of the bleakness. Romania led me to the second experience, a job in the United States as the director of the domestic adoption program for a private agency, the sole caseworker managing birth and adoptive parents. My goal was to create happy endings, everything I hadn’t been able to do in Bucharest. But I quickly learned that there was another side to this, the business side, and that it was very difficult to meet the needs of everyone in the adoption triangle and keep a boss happy. I left the adoption world when I became a mother myself—my skin had become predictably thin.

This was the final defining point that shaped this novel: our first son's birth and diagnosis with Pierre Robin Syndrome, nearly losing him as an infant. As a new mother to a child with huge medical hurdles, I pondered some of the deeper issues that form the backbone of Chosen: How does parenthood change you? How will the challenges you face shape you as a couple? What happens when your expectations of parenthood are so far from the reality? What makes a good parent? A good person? What happens when you get what you thought you wanted?

The story is fiction-characters and settings and scenarios are as though I took a handful of experiences, threw in a well-marinated childhood paranoia about abduction, seasoned them with the salt of my vivid imagination, put them all in a bag and shook it up. But the themes are real, straight from....[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue