David Gordon

David Gordon was born in New York City. He attended Sarah Lawrence College and holds an MA in English and comparative literature and an MFA in writing, both from Columbia University. His first novel, The Serialist, won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and was a finalist for an Edgar Award. His second novel, Mystery Girl, was picked as one of The New Yorker’s best books of the year. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, the New York Times Magazine, and other publications. He has worked in film, fashion, publishing, and pornography.

Gordon's latest book is the story collection White Tiger on Snow Mountain.

From his Paris Review Q & A with Dwyer Murphy:

White Tiger on Snow Mountain is your first story collection. Did you approach the stories differently than you would a novel?

In conceptual terms, I do think there’s a difference, at least for me. A story usually comes into my mind like a three-dimensional object—something I can see and feel and rotate. I’m often completely wrong about what the object is, but it’s still there. Whereas a novel is more like a set of directions for a road trip to California, with a planned stop in, say, Colorado and a visit to the Grand Canyon. The truth is I have no idea what’s going to happen along the way or whether I’ll even get there, but I have this general sense of direction and an end I hope to reach.

Now that the stories are completed and assembled, are you surprised at any of the themes or images that crop up?

I wrote these stories over a period of years, so some of the thematic echoes that people point out seem fairly straightforward for somebody who’s been writing for a long time—you deal with certain recurring ideas and problems. But then there are very specific echoes that I wasn’t aware of, and those are really interesting to me. My protagonists eat a lot of Chinese food and go to a lot of cafés. People tend to have cats in my stories, and the women have long fingers. I have no idea where this stuff comes from. I have no lost love with long fingers. I guess...[read on]

Visit David Gordon's blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Serialist.

Writers Read: David Gordon (July 2013).

The Page 69 Test: Mystery Girl.

The Page 69 Test: White Tiger on Snow Mountain.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lindsay Hunter

Lindsay Hunter is the author of the story collections Don’t Kiss Me and Daddy’s. Originally from Florida, she now lives in Chicago with her husband, son, and two pit bulls.

Hunter's first novel is Ugly Girls.

From her Q & A with Claire Zulkey:

When I read the synopsis of Ugly Girls, it reminds me of that movie Heavenly Creatures. What books, stories or movies influenced your novel?

Oooh, good one! I saw that a long time ago and loved it. You're totally right - the toxic, devolving friendship between Perry and Baby Girl is very similar to that friendship. Man. Kate Winslet was a baby!

I'd say Cruddy was a big influence, and the other day I was watching Drop Dead Gorgeous and it hit me that there is a lot in that movie that seems similar to UG? Like, Kirsten Dunst has green eyes and blonde hair, like Perry, and lives in a trailer park with an alcoholic mother, like Perry. I loved that movie in my early 20s so it makes sense that it would creep in to my writing.

A huge influence was the book Ravens by George Dawes Green. I basically just wanted to write that book all over again but with female protagonists. My book ended up being very different, but Ravens was and is what I aspire to. It's a masterpiece.

What other titles, if any, did you consider for the book?

I almost called it "The Edge of Ugly" and "The Quarry." For a hot minute I was all about...[read on]

The Page 69 Test: Ugly Girls.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pierce Brown

Pierce Brown is the New York Times bestselling author of Red Rising and Golden Son.

From Brown's Q & A with Catherine Elsworth for Goodreads:

GR: In Red Rising society is divided into a hierarchy of color-coded castes, with Reds at the bottom and Golds at the top. How did this system come about?

PB: The origin here is in Plato's Republic, where he says that in a perfect society men should form a natural hierarchy. There are men with souls of gold, men with souls of copper, iron. The ones of iron should till the soil, while the ones of gold should rule the city. But he didn't believe it should pass down through birth; he believed it was a meritocracy. The problem is that he didn't see that people would want to accumulate wealth or power and pass it down to those they love. So I thought that would be interesting: We have a meritocracy, but how could it be poisoned?

GR: When you were writing, were you aware of any contemporary social commentary you could be making?

PB: I'm not trying to tell anyone anything. I was 23 when I wrote this, which is pretty limited life experience, so I have to come at this with a massive degree of humility. It's not necessarily saying what I think but what is real in this imaginary world. To lay claim to some big notions of governmental critique is not something I've ever wanted to do. What's really interesting to me is how people and economies function and how groups make decisions. It's fun to see how things move in familiar patterns. We're pretty predictable in terms of the overall arc of history. And that's what I really wanted to look at with Red Rising: What do we recognize in their world that's parallel to our own, even though their world is vastly different, even though they look at democracy as an abominable thing. The second book will concentrate more on media and on the idea of propaganda, which...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Bradford Morrow

Bradford Morrow's novels include The Diviner’s Tale, Ariel's Crossing and Giovanni's Gift. He is the founding editor of Conjunctions and has contributed to many anthologies and journals. A Bard Center Fellow and professor of literature at Bard College, he divides his time between New York City and upstate New York.

Morrow's latest novel is The Forgers.

From his Q & A with Karen Russell at Omnivoracious:

KAREN RUSSELL: The Forgers is a totally sui generis existential thriller that introduced me to the world of rare book collecting, a world where I know you have serious street cred. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how the idea to write The Forgers came to you?

BRADFORD MORROW: The Forgers opens with a simple, disturbing, and to me compelling sentence, “They never found his hands.” My editor, Otto Penzler, had asked if I would write a story for a series of bibliomysteries he publishes, and once I’d settled on exploring the rarefied, high-stakes world of literary forgeries, I thought to myself, What would a ruthless forger most want to deprive a rival of having? Pens, nibs, inks, antique papers, subterranean connections in the rare book world? No, his hands, of course. So I began with that single image and all the narrative possibilities and challenges it offered. The rare book community, a collective of brilliant eccentrics among whom murderers don’t generally mingle, is one I have been a part of for my whole adult life—first as a dealer, later as a collector—so most of my research was already done by the time I wrote that sentence and those that came after.

My experience of writing The Forgers was one of extraordinary, unstoppable momentum—the story very quickly matured into a novella and the novella soon burst into a novel. And while, yes, it is a literary thriller, it is also a heartrending (at least to me) love story—love between two people, as well as a love of antiquarian books that, for some, crosses ethical borders into...[read on]

The Page 69 Test: The Forgers.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Ellroy

James Ellroy's new novel is Perfidia.

From his Q & A with Lenny Picker for Publishers Weekly:

How long have you been considering writing a second L.A. Quartet?

I have been brain-broiling the Second L.A. Quartet for half a decade. The L.A. Quartet—The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz—covered 1946 to 1958 in Los Angeles. The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy—American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s a Rover—covers 1958 to 1972 on a national scale. The Second L.A. Quartet takes historical and fictional characters from the first two bodies of work and places them in Los Angeles during World War II, as significantly younger people. Thus, my career as a historical novelist is augmented and rendered that much more grand.

Why did you decide to start this series in December 1941?

Everything changed on December 7, 1941. The debate between interventionism and isolationism ended when Japanese bombs hit Pearl Harbor, and the shock waves were immediately felt in Los Angeles, home of the largest foreign-born and native-born Japanese contingent in the United States. Los Angeles in 1941 was a place of...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Charles Blow

New York Times columnist Charles Blow's new memoir is Fire Shut Up in My Bones.

From his Q & A with Jason Parham at Gawker:

The book challenges static representations of what manhood should be or look like or talk like. I'm curious, what does being a man mean to you?

I believe that we have drawn masculinity in this incredibly narrow, rigid, dangerous way. We think of it as a peak, and I think of it as an ocean.

Dangerous in what sense?

Dangerous in the sense of—writing a note to a song so high only a few people are meant to hit it, and nobody is meant to hold it. And so, boys are constantly confronting this notion of failure because they cannot live up to idea of people saying to them, Man up! Be a man! And they don't know what that is because they're just trying to be human. And being human is sometimes fragile. I believe we have to redraw our collective concept of what masculinity is so that it includes the possibility of difference and variation. And once we do that we free these kids up to be kids, and to be human beings. Also, allowing them to be honest about things they are experiencing, things people don't traditionally identify with masculinity. Because there's no way to be a real man without being an honest man. So when we force these boys to lie and suppress, we're robbing them of truth and honesty and all the real things we would like an archetypical real man to be.

How does your understanding of masculinity inform or shape how you raise your children?

I try to give them latitude. Nature does a lot of things. There is testosterone. I have two boys and a girl, and there are differences there. And that's nature doing whatever it's going to do. But...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Whitmer

Benjamin Whitmer was born and raised on back-to-the-land communes and counterculture enclaves ranging from Southern Ohio to Upstate New York. One of his earliest and happiest memories is of standing by the side of a country road with his mother, hitchhiking to parts unknown. Since then, he’s been a factory grunt, a vacuum salesman, a convalescent, a high-school dropout, a graduate student, a semi-truck loader, an activist, a kitchen-table gunsmith, a squatter, a college professor, a dishwasher, a technical writer and a petty thief.

His first novel, Pike, was published in America in 2010 by PM Press, and in France in 2012 by Éditions Gallmeister. Satan is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers, a memoir co-written with Charlie Louvin, was released by Igniter Books in 2012.

Whitmer's second novel is Cry Father.

From the author's Q & A with Court Merrigan at Electric Literature:

CM: In Cry Father, you write, “It’s almost impossible to measure the damage that damaged young men can do to themselves. Spending their nights drinking, doing whatever drugs they can afford, fumbling through the kind of endless and circular conversations only damaged young men can tolerate. Conversations full of self-pity and self-hatred they can only end by the sudden imposition of physical force.” The endlessly repeating nature of that sort of violence – because there are always more young men, everywhere, – is that what you mean by “violence not doing what you want it to?”

BW: Yep, that’s pretty much it. I had a lot of friends who lived that way, and I was one of the most pathetic. It ain’t real attractive, but that’s what a lot of us thought it meant to be a young man. Some of us lived through it, and some of us didn’t. I’m not a real religious guy, but there’s that old line, “there but for the grace of God go I.” Someday I’ll get that tattooed on my forehead to remind me how lucky I am.

CM: Alcohol and drugs figure heavily in Cry Father. But everyone’s using for a reason, and none of it’s fun. As Patterson Wells says of the men on the disaster-area crews: “The men I work with, they don’t grieve. They drink, then they erupt.” Would Cry Father be a totally different book if everyone were teetotalers, or would these damaged people find some other route to eruption? Games of horseshoes? Religious war?

BW: Man, I don’t even know what a teetotaler would look like. I mean, I know...[read on]

Visit Benjamin Whitmer's website.

The Page 69 Test: Cry Father.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eula Biss

Eula Biss's new book is On Immunity: An Inoculation.

From her Q & A with Michelle Dean at Gawker:

So! Ultimately you came out believing that vaccination does not cause autism.

Yeah, that's an area where the science is pretty clear. There's still a pretty vivacious social debate around that but there's no scientific debate on that anymore. The science is kind of closed.

You have, with this book, intervened in that public debate in a pretty anti-pundit way, though.

In this area, I feel really strongly that's what we need. More and more, it seems like both sides are getting really reductive, and ironing out the nuances of the conversation. There seems to be a proliferation of pundits.

Obviously on what I'm just gonna call the Jenny McCarthy side, the reduction is a lack of attention to the science. What about the other side?

On the pro-vaccine side — and not everyone does this but I saw it enough for it to make me really uncomfortable — is a tendency to accuse people who are wary of vaccination of being stupid and not understanding science. For most people who are hesitant about vaccination, a lot more is going on. I talked to lots of people who are vaccine-hesitant, and I actually was one myself until I got further into this project, and most of them actually are in my demographic: so well-educated people with advanced degrees, who are upper middle-class and have read quite a bit on the subject.

So not only is it reductive, I think it's also wrong. I think if we're really concerned about stopping falling vaccination rates, we also need to be concerned about the actual reasons why those rates are falling, and not just...[read on]

Visit Eula Biss' website.

Writers Read: Eula Biss (June 2010).

--Marshal Zeringue

Jamie Malanowski

Jamie Malanowski has written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times. His books include And the War Came, about America’s six-month-long descent into war after Lincoln’s election, and the recently released Commander Will Cushing: Daredevil Hero of the Civil War.

From his Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Why did you decide to write about William Barker Cushing, and how did he come to be, as you say in your book, “all but unknown today”?

A: I have known about Will Cushing literally since I was eight years old. On January 6, 1961, Life magazine published the first of six issues dedicated to the centennial of the Civil War.

The editors commissioned 10 artists to illustrate scenes from the war. In addition to creating the cover, an astonishing painting of the cavalry charge at Brandy Station in 1863, the artist C.E. Monroe painted “The Sinking of the Albemarle,” which showed Cushing--the daring 21-year-old naval lieutenant--in the midst of his great David vs. Goliath victory over the fearsome Confederate ironclad.

The painting stretched across two pages, and I was captivated. I'm delighted that Buck Monroe, the painter's son, allowed me to use the image on the cover of my book.

In the ensuing years, I read Lincoln's Commando, Roske and Van Doren's 1957 biography of Cushing, which showed that there was more to Cushing than one magnificent triumph.

A few years ago, casting about for my next project, I proposed a new biography of Cushing. A half century had passed since Lincoln's Commando; if nothing else, I knew I could tell Will's story in a less stilted, less formal vernacular than Roske and Van Doren used.

I also knew that their book was written at a time when the average reader was less aware of psychological issues than the average viewer of Law & Order is today. I knew I could add that element. Fortunately, Tom Mayer at W.W. Norton agreed.

How is it that Will is all but unknown today? I suppose there are a lot of reasons. America's interest in history is tiny. America's interest in military heroes who held a rank below general or admiral is also tiny.

It didn't help Will's cause that (spoiler alert!) he...[read on]

Visit Jamie Malanowski's blog.

Writers Read: Jamie Malanowski.

My Book, The Movie: Commander Will Cushing.

The Page 99 Test: Commander Will Cushing.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lisa Black

Lisa Black spent the five happiest years of her life in a morgue. As a forensic scientist in the Cleveland coroner’s office she analyzed gunshot residue on hands and clothing, hairs, fibers, paint, glass, DNA, blood and many other forms of trace evidence, as well as crime scenes. Now she’s a certified latent print examiner and CSI for the Cape Coral Police Department in Florida. Her books have been translated into six languages and one reached the New York Times mass market bestseller’s list.

Black's new novel is Close to the Bone.

From the author's Q & A with Sandra Parshall for The Big Thrill:

CLOSE TO THE BONE is a perfect title for a story in which Theresa MacLean’s workplace colleagues are being murdered and she could also be a target. What inspired you to start killing off people who work in the forensics department?

I try to keep the books very true-to-life, and give an accurate portrayal of how things actually work in the field of forensics. Despite that, my forensic scientist always seems to spend more time out of the lab than in it, which is not at all realistic, so I thought if I could set a story right in the lab, that problem would solve itself. Besides, what better way to make my character vitally, and very personally, involved?

Why do you set your novels in Cleveland, where you worked previously, instead of in Florida, where you live and work now? Is there something about Cleveland that makes it a better setting for the kind of stories you want to tell?

I think so, because Cleveland has more variety in terms of age, culture, urban areas, history, and current events. Where I live in Florida we have a high percentage of retirees and tourists and the ground is flat with a lot of open area. It’s just hard to picture danger and menace in a place where happy people are cavorting in the brilliant sunshine all the time.

Theresa is very protective of crime scenes when police officers are on hand and might inadvertently contaminate evidence. Does this reflect your own experience? How do the roles of forensics investigators and police differ at crime scenes?

Everyone’s job at a crime scene is...[read on]

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

My Book, The Movie: Trail of Blood.

The Page 69 Test: Trail of Blood.

My Book, The Movie: Defensive Wounds.

The Page 69 Test: Defensive Wounds.

My Book, The Movie: Blunt Impact.

The Page 69 Test: Blunt Impact.

The Page 69 Test: The Price of Innocence.

The Page 69 Test: Close to the Bone.

Writers Read: Lisa Black.

--Marshal Zeringue