Louis Bayard

With his most recent novels, Roosevelt's Beast, The School of Night, The Black Tower, The Pale Blue Eye and Mr. Timothy, Louis Bayard, in the words of the Washington Post, has ascended to "the upper reaches of the historical-thriller league." A New York Times Notable author, he has been nominated for both the Edgar® and Dagger awards and has been named one of People magazine's top authors of the year.

In Roosevelt’s Beast, Theodore Roosevelt—author, adventurer, and President—goes on expedition to the Amazon with his son Kermit.

From Bayard's Q & A with Bethanne Patrick at Washingtonian:

What was your “elevator pitch” for this book?

I described it as “Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’ ” When you’re writing about the jungle, you can’t avoid Conrad.

When did you realize you’d be telling Kermit’s story, not his father’s?

I was drawn to Kermit because his story is so untold. All I could find is that he was “a troubled soul.” Every family has that person who can’t seem to adjust to reality. That’s why I felt it was important to begin with Kermit at his end, as a failed Army officer shuttled off to a post in Anchorage, to see that he never recovered from his ordeal.

Kermit had some burdens of inheritance.

Yes, his uncle Elliott is a terrifying specter in my book, a man caught between depression and alcohol, the only antidepressant they had at that time. Kermit also has his father’s influence. Teddy...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Louis Bayard's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Black Tower.

The Page 69 Test: The Pale Blue Eye.

The Page 69 Test: The School of Night.

The Page 69 Test: Roosevelt's Beast.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mary Szybist

Mary Szybist is the author of two books of poetry: the eloquent and musical Granted, and winner of the 2013 National Book Award in Poetry, Incarnadine.

From her Q & A with Bo Olson for Omnivoracious:

Aside from its obvious connection to the word "incarnate," the word incarnadine, in a literal sense, refers to a particular shade of red. How did you settle on the title of this book?

Incarnadine swirls around one of the iconic scenes of incarnation, the annunciation of the angel Gabriel to Mary, the scene in which Christians envision God entering into this world, into a body, into time—so that obvious connection is an important one.

The color, however, is important too. "Incarnadine" originally meant pink or flesh-color, but since Shakespeare's famous use of it in Macbeth, it has come to mean blood-red. Incarnadine is especially haunted by the iconic figure of Mary, who is almost always portrayed by painters in blue and red; those are the two dominate colors in this collection. In the notes at the end of the book I include a short passage from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot explaining why earth appears blue from space: "And why that cerulean color? The blue comes partly from the sea, partly from the sky. While water in a glass is transparent, it absorbs slightly more red light than blue... the red light is absorbed out and what gets reflected back to space is mainly blue." I call the book Incarnadine, but blue is the color most often mentioned and described in the poems. In my mind, both colors are always at play.

If one reads about your work across the web, they'll often come upon the phrase "intimate spaces." How does space into play in poetry and Incarnadine, which speaks often to the Christian scene of The Annunciation and a literal inhabitance of the body?

I am interested in the distance between things: the distance between people, the distance between humans and animals, the distance between our conceptions of what is divine and what is human. Sometimes these distances can be...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Churchwell

Sarah Churchwell's latest book is Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby.

From her Q & A with Randy Dotinga for the Christian Science Monitor:

Q: You do a remarkable job of explaining how F. Scott Fitzgerald brilliantly exposed the deadly hollowness of the lifestyle he lived – yet was swept along almost helplessly. What do you make of the way he viewed the world that he embraced yet seemed to despise?

A: His ambivalence mirrors our own, it seems to me. "Gatsby" is a novel about a bust written from within a boom, and its ambivalence about materialism and aspiration certainly speaks to our society. We know that hankering for luxury and the good life is empty and toxic, and yet it doesn’t stop us from wanting it.

He had a fierce appetite for the gorgeous, an artist’s sensibility that meant he wanted everything to be beautiful, luxurious, sensual. Yet he was also a moralist, with a strong sense of right and wrong. He was in some ways far more straitlaced than people realize today.

So he was torn, as was Zelda. They loved the high life, and didn’t want to admit what it was costing them emotionally, psychically, physically. I don’t think that’s so hard to understand or to sympathize with.

Q: We know that both Fitzgeralds had amazing perceptive powers about their era. Looking back, what do you think they missed or purposefully ignored?

A: No one in their era sufficiently understood the perils of addiction: They didn’t realize...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Michelle Huneven

Michelle Huneven's first two books, Round Rock and Jamesland, were both New York Times notable books and also finalists for the LA Times Book Award. Her third novel, Blame, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and also a finalist for the LA Times Book Award.

Huneven's latest novel is Off Course. From the author's Q & A at Rosemary & Reading Glasses:

How would you describe the inception of Off Course? What was the writing process like?

MH: As often happens with me, I started out with one book in mind, but another one happened. I had wanted to write a novel that charted a woman’s life from childhood to a version of stable adulthood with some years en route spent lost to trouble. Well, that book didn’t happen. In Off Course, I started right where my heroine, Cressida Hartley, at age 28, turns off the beaten path. She’s at a perilous, vulnerable stage, when she’s done with school and about to set forth in life. She should be settling into a career and making at least general decisions about marriage and family. But first, she has to write her dissertation. For whatever reason, she can’t get going on it. She just can’t. She makes herself ever-available to distraction and gets lured away from her friends, family, and self. Or, to quote the epigraph, “demons arrive singly and in droves, often taking the form of men.”

In terms of process, I tried something new with Off Course, which was to write a certain number of words a day. 1000, I think, which is a lot. Too many. This was not an effective method for me. To meet my daily goal, I wrote a lot of dreck, some of which stuck to the book for a long time and interfered with plot and shaping. Also, I had to go back and fix every damn sentence. Did forcing myself to produce at such a rate prove a worthwhile exercise for my imagination? No.

The setting for much of the novel sometimes seems like another character in Off Course. How did you decide to set the novel in the Sierras?

MH: My parents had a cabin high up in the Southern Sierras, so it was a geography and community with which I was deeply familiar. I went up to the cabin as a kid, although not...[read on]

Learn more about the author and her work at Michelle Huneven's website.

The Page 69 Test: Blame.

The Page 69 Test: Off Course.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel Levine

Daniel Levine studied English Literature and Creative Writing at Brown University and received his MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Florida. He has taught composition and creative writing at high schools and universities, including the University of Florida, Montclair State University, and Metropolitan State College of Denver. Originally from New Jersey, he now lives in Colorado.

From Levine's Q & A with Mysterycenter.com, The Strand Magazine's blog, about his new novel, Hyde:

TSM: Have you always been a fan of Stevenson?

DL: I didn’t truly come to appreciate Stevenson until I started researching Hyde. I had read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in high school, and the story clearly pressed its imprint into my fifteen-year-old mind. But other than Kidnapped and a few short stories, I didn’t read much of Stevenson in the years leading up to Hyde. Even when researching my novel, I certainly didn’t read everything of Stevenson; there are still many works of his I haven’t opened. But I have read a good deal of his personal essays and travelogues, and I read Claire Harman’s fabulous biography, Myself and the Other Fellow, which truly brought the man to life for me. He was an incredibly sympathetic person, and I feel that we shared an affinity of nature—a passionate spirit, a distaste for overly traditional society, a yearning for achievement and recognition, a certain tendency toward self-indulgence, and a restless wanderlust. Stevenson was exceedingly prolific (my impression is that he wrote a few clunkers along with his masterpieces), and more than the great body of his work, I came to love the easy flow of his sentences, his light, elegant style. It’s been said that he was the least-Victorian Victorian, that his early death sealed him into the Victorian age and thus that’s how he is categorized. But he was quite modern in his voice and grace, and every line he writes—even, or especially, in his letters—is infused with his charming, self-aware, slightly rascally soul. I have a deep affection for him that goes beyond his authorship.

In fact, I’ll admit to having entertained the whimsical notion that Stevenson was somehow guiding me through the composition of Hyde. For instance—I read Claire Harman’s biography twice: once in New Jersey at the very beginning of my research when the idea was extremely nascent, and once, three years later, in Colorado after I had finished the novel and was waiting for responses from the publishers. Reading the biography this second time was strangely reassuring. I would have these uncanny déjà vu moments where I’d realize that I had used in my book, or been influenced by, some subtle aspect of Stevenson’s life, without having...[read on]

Visit Daniel Levine's website and Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: Hyde.

My Book, The Movie: Hyde.

--Marshal Zeringue

Heather Brittain Bergstrom

Heather Brittain Bergstrom has won fiction awards from The Atlantic Monthly, The Chicago Tribune, Narrative Magazine, and others, and a story was named a distinguished and notable story for The Best American Short Stories in 2010. Her short fiction has been published in several literary journals and anthologies. She holds an MFA in creative writing.

Bergstrom's new book is Steal the North, her debut novel. From a Q & A at the author's website:

Q: Your protagonist’s mother runs away from her hometown and the fundamentalist Baptist Church. Do you have a personal connection to the church?

A: I grew up in two different Baptist churches, the second one being far more fundamentalist. I have many anecdotes. I remember, as a teenager, rafting down the Snake River in a long dress. Girls weren’t allowed to wear pants, let alone swimsuits, even for outdoor activities. Each year on the Fourth of July, families gathered at the church to watch apocalyptic movies. I was educated through the tenth grade in an unaccredited basement academy by deacons’ wives, some of whom, like my mom, hadn’t even finished high school themselves. Students were instructed to circle the church should state or federal agents try to close down our school. For a while our church became paranoid of devil worship (it was the 1980s after all). Signs and symbols became evil: McDonald’s golden arches, Proctor & Gamble’s astrological logo, and so forth. A segment of our church didn’t believe in going to the doctor for any reason. My parents weren’t part of this segment. We weren’t allowed to own a TV, radio or secular books. The public library was as off limits as the movie theatre—in part because of the atheist manifestoes and pornography that supposedly lined its shelves, but also because by the door was a totem pole. I snuck to see E.T. with a cousin when I was a young teenager and literally feared...[read on]

Visit Heather Brittain Bergstrom's website and Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: Steal the North.

Writers Read: Heather Brittain Bergstrom.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson's latest book is One Summer: America, 1927.

From his Q & A with Emma Chastain for The Barnes & Noble Book Blog:

Did you ever consider writing a baseball book?

I always wanted to do a baseball book; I love baseball. The problem is that a very large part of my following is in non-baseball playing countries. So I have to factor that in. And I’ve always been keenly fascinated with Babe Ruth as a person. You don’t have to know anything about baseball to respond to Babe Ruth because he’s just this magnificent human being. And a really good story because he was this kid who grew up essentially as an orphan, you know, had a tough life, and then he became the most successful baseball player ever. But he was also a really good guy. He was good to kids and he was very, very accommodating to his fans. If you look at photographs, he’s always surrounded by hundreds of kids, and they obviously loved him and he loved them. You don’t have to know baseball to respond to that. So I thought Babe Ruth would be a good way for me into baseball.

I did realize that Lindbergh was at the same time. I thought, “That’s got to make for an interesting story, the fact that you’ve got these two things happening.” And what I found—to my complete surprise—was there were all these other things happening at the same time in the summer of ‘27. Things like the Great Mississippi Flood and the execution of Sacco-Vanzetti, Al Capone and Prohibition. There’s lots and lots of books on all of those things individually but nobody’s ever seen them as part of a package. What I found was that all these things interlinked in interesting ways, and influenced each other in ways that hadn’t been noticed before.

Did you discover anything that surprised you about the way Americans lived their daily lives in 1927?

A lot of it was just...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Daryl Gregory

Daryl Gregory was the 2009 winner of IAFA William L. Crawford Fantasy Award for his first novel Pandemonium. His second novel, The Devil's Alphabet, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and was named one of the best books of 2009 by Publishers Weekly. His short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and The Year’s Best SF.

Gregory's new novel is Afterparty.

From his Q & A with Andrew Liptak for SF Signal:

Andrew Liptak: Afterparty takes place in a reasonably near future US where computer and pharmacological technology has reduced the cost for manufacturing drugs. How did you come to a story about this?

Daryl Gregory: I like how you asked that: How did I come to this? And now all I can hear in my head is David Byrne shouting, “Well? How did I get here?”

It’s a tricky question to answer. For every novel of mine there’s a long chain of half-baked ideas, plot requirements, mistakes, and in-the-moment improvisations that lead to whatever story ends up on the table. Sometimes I’m just grabbing stuff from the fridge and throwing it in the skillet. After it’s published, I can’t quite remember all the steps in the recipe, but I’ll take a stab at it.

When I started brainstorming this new book, I knew I wanted to write about neuroscience and religion. Over the years I’d written several hard SF stories about weird questions in consciousness, but it felt like it was time to tackle the subject at length.

So, I needed a character whose brain gets modified to experience “the numinous,” that ecstatic feeling that you’re in touch with a higher power. But for that kind of rewiring, you have a couple narrative options: Disease, Drugs, or Disaster (AKA, head trauma). I love writing about neurological diseases, but I realized that if I used drugs, I could construct a fast-paced thriller, and I’m a huge fan of crime novels. I worship at the church of Elmore Leonard.

All the science needed to construct such a drug is possible now, if you have a reasonably-equipped lab, and you get lucky. But I knew I wanted the story to...[read on]

Visit Daryl Gregory's website and blog.

My Book, The Movie: Afterparty.

The Page 69 Test: Afterparty.

Writers Read: Daryl Gregory.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Oppegaard

David Oppegaard is the author of the Bram Stoker-nominated The Suicide Collectors, Wormwood, Nevada, The Ragged Mountains and And the Hills Opened Up. Oppegaard’s work is a blend of science fiction, literary fiction, horror, and fantasy. He lives in St. Paul, MN.

From Oppegaard's Q & A at This is Horror:

Do you prefer all out gore or psychological chills?

For fiction I’d say 85% chills and 15% gore. This lets the gore really stand out, like blood on a wedding dress.

Why should people read your work?

When I was in middle school (around ten years old) everybody in my grammar class had to write a story and read it in front of the class. I got really into it and wrote ten pages on our black and white Macintosh and then printed the story out and bound it with yarn, using black and red construction paper for the cover. The story was called ‘Deadly Forces’ and concerned a man named Axel Gibson (I was really into GNR and Lethal Weapon) who underwent various ordeals as he passed through a violently haunted castle in a quest for a magical amulet. I read my story last. The bell rang for the end of class while I was still in the middle of the story, but nobody made a move to leave (and we normally flew out of that damn grammar class) so I kept reading until the end of the story – Axel Gibson triumphed and I received a loud ovation. I’ve...[read on]

Visit David Oppegaard's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Suicide Collectors.

The Page 69 Test: Wormwood, Nevada.

The Page 69 Test: And the Hills Opened Up.

My Book, The Movie: And the Hills Opened Up.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Priest

Science fiction writer Christopher Priest's books include The Prestige, The Islanders, and The Adjacent.

From his Q & A with Nicole Hill at The Barnes & Noble Book Blog:

The Adjacent, much like The Prestige and your other works, uses misdirection (and the presence of a stage magician or two) to great advantage. What’s your particular fondness for that technique?

Magicians and novelists use similar techniques! An illusion is a story, it has a plot, it has surprises, it’s inventive, it’s a form of entertainment—and none of it is real. Magicians misdirect by playing to the audience’s assumptions.

A novelist misdirects the reader with plot: it’s a contrivance, a way of telling the story. Details are leaked out one at a time. Some things are not revealed or discussed until later. The reader knows from the outset that it’s fiction, it’s not real. But (like magic) fiction can seem real enough, can contain elements of reality that the reader will recognize. The book might be set in New York, Geneva, Caracas…all real places, and the reader will have some kind of pre-knowledge of them, sometimes a close knowledge, sometimes just a vague knowledge. But the novel will do something different with the setting, something made up. The reader is misdirected.

To answer your question, when I was researching The Prestige, I realized...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue