Natalee Caple

Natalee Caple's newest novel is In Calamity's Wake.

From the author's Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:

What sparked this novel? Why Calamity Jane?

I had just finished writing a novel about a mother-daughter counterfeiting team in the Upper Laurentians influenced by films from the French New Wave and I was living in the Canadian West, in the Rockies, for the first time. The idea of a Western appealed to me because the connection between landscape and culture was so palpable. In Canada, at least, the connection to landscape in the West means that the distance between Canada and America seems less than the distance between Western and Eastern Canada. I fell in love with the mountains, the prairies, the Badlands. I had my children there. I also discovered that the West was so much more diverse and international than I had seen in Westerns and I wanted to put the stories of women, indigenous peoples, Black America, Chinese America, back into the landscape and show the rest of the West. Calamity Jane was an ideal because she travelled and met so many people. She helped the sick and the poor and she was herself a kind of social outcast who was overwritten in popular culture. I wanted a story about the masses and their heroism, about the irreducible value of every human life. When Calamity Jane cared for people dying of yellow fever she risked her own life. When she went into battle and did not shoot another human being but instead pulled people out of battle, she emphasized the value of life. Whether those events happened as they were told or not she became a symbol of North America that was different to me, that showed a desire to resolve conflict, to protect and shelter human life beyond politics.

What was the research like? Did you have a preconceived notion of Calamity Jane? (Mine is actually from that old Doris Day movie about her) and what, if anything, surprised you?

Once I gave up the idea that I would find...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His debut story collection, Drown was a national bestseller and won numerous awards. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao “a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices.” Díaz's latest book is This Is How You Lose Her.

From his Q & A with Jacob Sugarman at Salon:

A few months back, Claire Messud lit into a Publishers Weekly interviewer for suggesting the protagonist of her latest novel wasn’t especially likable. She argued that we’d never question whether we like Raskolnikov or any of Jonathan Franzen’s characters or even Oscar Wao. Does she have a point?

I’m going from hearsay here, but I can imagine the sort of umbrage she took. There’s a profound trivialization of literature in the way that it is used and, yes, if you’re a woman or a person of color, there are certain biases that are built in. There’s no fucking question.

But I get people saying “I don’t like Yunior” or “I don’t like Oscar” all the time. When people say that to me, I always remind them that in the same way that I’m a more complex person when I write, you’re a more complex person when you read. The real question for me as the writer is why you’re friends with the people you’re friends with. Most of us are friends with people we don’t like, so what’s the big deal? We’re used to hanging out with people we don’t like, so this should be...[read on]

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is among Jami Attenberg's top six books with overweight protagonists, Brooke Hauser's six top books about immigrants, Sara Gruen's six favorite books, Paste magazine's list of the ten best debut novels of the decade (2000-2009), and The Millions' best books of fiction of the millenium. The novel is one of Matthew Kaminski's five favorite novels about immigrants in America and is a book that made a difference to Zoë Saldana.

The Page 99 Test: Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lisa Brackmann

Lisa Brackmann has worked as a motion picture executive and an issues researcher in a presidential campaign. A southern California native, she currently lives in Venice, California. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Rock Paper Tiger, set on the fringes of the Chinese art world, made several “Best of 2010″ lists, including Amazon’s Top 100 Novels and Top 10 Mystery/Thrillers, and was nominated for the Strand Magazine Critics Award for Best First Novel.

Brackmann's new novel is Hour of the Rat.

From the author's Q & A with Colby Marshall:

CM: Both your bestselling debut Rock Paper Tiger and your newest thriller, Hour of the Rat, are not only set against the backdrop of China, but the premises of the books delve deeply into the geopolitical and economic situations of the country. When writing about a land foreign to much of your audience, how do you go about making the settings and states of affairs depicted in your novels more real for readers?

LB: I think having a character who is both an outside and an insider is helpful. She knows more than the reader, but she’s not totally a part of the scene that she’s observing—so she doesn’t take much for granted. This makes for a good filter for readers. What’s key is just to describe what’s there without ascribing too much to it. I don’t need to be telling readers over and over again, “China is different.” You know, it’s a place. Yeah, it’s not like California, where I’m from, but then, California isn’t much like New York, either. I just want readers to be able to form a vivid picture of a place that I try to make as accurate and specific as I can.

CM: In Rock Paper Tiger, your main character, Iraq War veteran Ellie Cooper, finds out she can safely communicate via online role-playing games. Where did the idea to use role playing games come from?

LB: I wish I could remember! In part it came from hanging out in a lot of dingy internet cafes in China and noticing the passion with which young people, mostly young men, played online games, and just how much social time they spent in these places. I also always liked the idea of a conspiracy that is rooted in something banal and more or less out in the open. There’s a book called The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon that I read while I was in China over thirty years ago that influenced me in a subtle way. It had nothing to do with China, but there was a conspiracy whose purpose was never really explained. I think it might have been just to exist and to...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Lisa Brackmann's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Hour of the Rat.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom Perrotta

Tom Perrotta's new story collection is Nine Inches.

From his Q & A with Alexandra Alter for the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog:

All of your books have been set in suburbia. Why is it such a compelling setting for you and do you think you’ll ever get tired of it?

It’s just laziness. This is what’s right in front of me. I’ve chosen to live there. I’ve never been the kind of writer who goes off in search of a book. There would be a crisis for me if I felt like I’d exhausted all the stories. You have somebody like Roth who was writing about Newark over the course of 50 years. Cheever wrote about the suburbs for pretty much his whole career. The only crisis is if the stories become repetitive.

This is your first short story collection since your debut collection, “Bad Haircut,” which came out almost 20 years ago. What drew you back to short fiction?

I edited “The Best American Short Stories” [anthology] last year. Sometimes reading a lot can be paralyzing, but for some reason it energized me to write stories.

In the meantime you’ve written six novels since your first collection came out. Do you find short stories harder to write than novels?

It’s more difficult in the sense that...[read on]

Learn about Tom Perrotta's ten favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sheri Fink

Sheri Fink's new book, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, is investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.

From her Q & A with Marjorie Kehe for the Christian Science Monitor:

Q. The doctor and two nurses charged with euthanizing patients were never prosecuted. Do you feel that justice was done?

I really prefer to let the people who were involved in these events give their opinions on that, and they have very strong opinions about it in all directions. What I can say is that American medical ethics are very clear on this question of whether it is ever appropriate to hasten death in the case of a crisis, and the answer is no.

The families, for the most part, are very upset about what happened. I think the medical professionals may have thought that the families would [have wanted their loved ones] to be given comfort and helped to die in that situation. But you can’t just presume what people would feel in that situation.

Different people had different opinions and they are represented in the book. A lot of people did focus their anger on the hospital corporation and look to some compensation for the lack of preparedness.

There was a class action lawsuit that was settled for $25 million on behalf of anybody who either was in the hospital, lost a loved one, and a lot of people are very upset about the amount they received, especially after it had been strung out for so many years. They didn’t get their money till this year.

I think that there are a lot of families who feel that justice was not done. But......[read on]

Visit Sheri Fink's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Kolker

Robert Kolker's latest book, Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, is an account of the true-life search for a serial killer still at large on Long Island, a tale of unsolved murder and Internet prostitution.

From his Q & A at Randy Dotinga for the Christian Science Monitor:

Q: What about these women drew you into this story?

A: While they never knew one another, they all came from parts of America that the media tends to overlook.

They're the struggling parts that haven't recovered from the recession, where options are narrowing for young people. No matter how well you did in high school, and some got As, the only options seemed to be Dunkin' Donuts or Walmart.

The Internet and Craigslist provided them with an option that they found irresistible. They decided to take a risk and make more money in a night than their friends could make in a couple weeks in their day jobs. That was the real constant.

Q: What else did they have in common?

A: There were things that one might expect like childhood trauma or addiction or dysfunctional families or poor parenting. But it wasn't consistent.

It was more the promise of social mobility that they shared. They and their families were all in environments where they're trapped. There's no hope of moving up. A chance to make so much money so quickly is a chance to get a leg up.

I wanted to investigate the question of why someone makes a decision to become a prostitute. It's a seismic decision to make. The reasons are not always what the stereotype is.

The other goal is to talk about...[read on]

Visit Robert Kolker's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alex Bledsoe

Alex Bledsoe is the author of the Eddie LaCrosse novels (The Sword-Edged Blonde, Burn Me Deadly, Dark Jenny and Wake of the Bloody Angel), the novels of the Memphis vampires (Blood Groove and The Girls with Games of Blood) and the Tufa novels, The Hum and the Shiver and the recently released Wisp of a Thing.

From Bledsoe's Q & A with Sunweaver at Patheos:

Sunweaver: Well, hey there. I’m going to jump right in here and say that I’ve just finished The Hum and the Shiver and I think it’s some of your best work. In this book, religion is sort of tangential to the plot, but you also write short stories about a Wiccan priestess where religion is a little more front-and-center. Would you like to tell our readers a little about how you came up with the idea for the Firefly Witch series?

Alex Bledsoe: The idea had been floating around in my head since the 80s, but it was the early 90s before I decided to really write about a witch in a modern setting. I knew that real witchcraft was based on a religion, but like a lot of people, I assumed it was something vaguely dark, and possibly Satanic. I started researching it, though, and learned the real tenets of Paganism in general, and Wicca in particular. Then I met some actual witches, and discovered that Wicca codified things that I already believed, but had assumed were unique to me; and what I learned allowed me to...[read on]

Visit Alex Bledsoe's website and blog.

My Book, The Movie: Blood Groove.

The Page 69 Test: Burn Me Deadly.

The Page 69 Test: Wisp of a Thing.

Writers Read: Alex Bledsoe.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Sean Greer

Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of The Story of a Marriage and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named one of the best books of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and received a California Book Award. He lives in San Francisco.

Greer's latest novel is The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells.

From his Q & A with Andrew Dudley at Haighteration:

H: Your book is set in three specific time periods — 1918, 1941, and 1985. How did you arrive at these specific eras?

ASG: When I threw away the first draft of this book, I was living in New York on a fellowship from the New York Public Library Cullman Center. That caused me to reset the book in New York. And by reading old books, pamphlets, newspapers and accounts, I began to sense which times interested me most. One day, I realized that each era was a mirror to another — through war and disease — I scribbled out a map of the novel on a cocktail napkin. Those reflections work throughout the book, and it was great fun to have her husband head to war in one era, only to return from a different war in another.

H: You have said that this book is not a time travel novel, and that’s true, though the protagonist does visit different time periods in a sense. One thing that struck me in reading this new book is that, if I were able to visit an earlier era, I would want to use my knowledge to my advantage. You know, profit on the stock market, warn people of upcoming catastrophes, that sort of thing. Without spoiling anything, the protagonist in your book generally does not do that. Was that a specific choice you made? If so, why?

ASG: At one point in the novel, she looks around a room in 1918 and thinks that somebody there would be an important force in history. Somebody else, if they had traveled to another world, could have warned people and changed things. But she was, herself, too small to move history. Too small to stop WWII or profit on stocks a decade before the crash; she can barely manage her love affairs! Personally, of course, I wasn’t interested in those time travel bits; the trick of alternative universes is just an excuse to experiment with how a woman’s life would be different depending on the time in which she lived. By which I mean her emotional life. I was too baffled by those complexities to consider working in a...[read on]

Visit Andrew Sean Greer's website and follow him on Facebook.

Writers Read: Andrew Sean Greer.

The Page 69 Test: The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells.

My Book, The Movie: The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker's latest novel is Traveling Sprinkler.

From his Q & A with Noah Charney for The Daily Beast:

In The New York Review of Books you wrote a great article called “The Charms of Wikipedia.” Why do you like Wikipedia so much?

Wikipedia is great because it can be gigantic without being gigantic. It can grow like some vast underwater reef, with eels hiding in the shadows. It has proven that a heterogeneous, sometimes irritable community can do something revolutionary and life-improving, without leaders.

Were you surprised at the response to your book on World War Two, Human Smoke, which got a lot of knickers in a twist?

If you think about the Second World War for any length of time, it will make you terribly sad, or angry, or both. It’s sometimes easier to be angry at an amateur historian like me, than at the real villains whose words I quote.

You have a number of books that are considered works of literary erotica. May I ask for your thoughts on the Fifty Shades of Grey hoo-ha?

Haven’t read the book. I’m not wired for dominance or submission—it seems a distraction. Misuse of...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Lauren Grodstein

Tom Perrotta interviewed Lauren Grodstein about her new novel, The Explanation for Everything.

Part of their Q & A:

Tom Perrotta: The Explanation for Everything is a novel about evolution and creationism, but it doesn't take sides. Why not?

Lauren Grodstein: I think it's easy to take sides on all sorts of things (I root for the Mets, for instance, and prefer my coffee black). But in this novel I wanted to do something more complicated, and maybe more interesting--I wanted to try to figure out why people believe what they believe, and why they need their own particular sets of beliefs to operate in a complicated world. I also wanted to try out other faiths, as far as my characters went, and write about the beauty in them. It made my world a little bigger, creating people whose faiths are so far from mine. Besides, I never write fiction to take sides on an issue, or to push any particular agenda. I write stories to investigate other people. I’m kind of a voyeur that way.

Perrotta: Andy, your protagonist, is a biologist, but you've mentioned that you barely passed your high school science classes. What kind of research did you have to do to make Andy’s job skills convincing?

Grodstein: A good friend of mine is a scientist at Columbia, and she hooked me up with a tour of the school's rodent labs. I saw the rodent cages, the rodent babies, and the rodent guillotine, which basically looked like a cheese slicer. I took lots of notes but found I didn't even have to refer to them, because the things I saw had become indelible. Once you see a bunch of rats (squeaking, scrabbling rats) with...[read on]

Visitt Lauren Grodstein’s website.

The Page 69 Test: A Friend of the Family.

--Marshal Zeringue