Ashley E. Jardina

Ashley Jardina is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. Her new book is White Identity Politics.

From her interview with Sean Illing for Vox:

Sean Illing: So when did whites start thinking about their whiteness in a politically meaningful way again? And what precipitated this sudden awareness?

Ashley Jardina: My argument is that it’s the growing diversity of the United States. There’s this series of events that are in many ways a product of that increasing diversity. So I began by looking at the massive waves of immigration that happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and how that changed the demographics of the United States.

At this point today, it’s projected that whites will cease to be a majority by the middle of the century. This fact, which was brought into sharp relief by the election of Barack Obama, ignited a wave racial awareness among white Americans, and I think we’re still reckoning with the political consequences of this.

Sean Illing: What does the data tell us about how whites are defining their own anxieties or concerns?

Ashley Jardina: Deep down it’s about this fear that America isn’t going to look like them anymore, that they’ll lose their majority and with it their cultural and political power. It’s also tied up in the belief that whites are experiencing discrimination now.

The gains that racial and ethnic majorities are making, either socially or politically or economically, are coming at the expense of their group. In many ways, it’s about...[read on]

Visit Ashley Jardina's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paullina Simons

Paullina Simons's latest novel is The Tiger Catcher (The End of Forever Saga).

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Tiger Catcher, and for your characters Julian and Josephine?

A: This story came from the same place that all my others have come. I simply had an idea.

In this case, the idea was about a man who loved a woman so much he bridged time and space to find her. I didn’t realize at first it was going to be this huge. But after about a year of writing and thinking about it, I knew. It just kept growing.

The Tiger Catcher is a love story of Julian and Josephine, set in Los Angeles and London. He is on his second or third career, living in the land of dreams for sale, and searching for someone to change his life. She is a stage actress, shuffling between New York and L.A. working toward her big break. When they fall in love, it’s like a fairytale, because they fall in love in paradise.

Unfortunately, Josephine is not what she pretends to be. This causes a fracture in the foundation on which Julian has built his life and destroys the hopes on which he built his future. The Tiger Catcher is the story of the love, of that fracture and its aftermath, and what both Julian and Josephine must do as...[read on]

Visit Paullina Simons's website.

The Page 69 Test: Lone Star.

Writers Read: Paullina Simons (December 2015).

My Book, The Movie: The Bronze Horseman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alafair Burke

Alafair Burke's latest novel is The Better Sister.

From her interview at Crime Watch:

If your life was a movie, which actor could you see playing you?

Constance Zimmer. Explaining why would require too much talking about myself, but I love her work and the characters she has selected so far.

Of your books, which is your favourite or a little bit special for you, and why?

Ack, that’s like choosing your favorite kid, but harder because unlike many parents, I actually like all my books. (That was a joke, to be clear.) The recent trilogy (The Ex, The Wife, and The Better Sister) is important to me because of what I think the books have to say about the gendered nature of violence and abuse in our society, as well as the roles that women are expected to play in...[read on]

Visit Alafair Burke's website.

The Page 69 Test: Dead Connection.

The Page 69 Test: Angel’s Tip.

The Page 69 Test: 212.

The Page 69 Test: All Day and a Night.

The Page 69 Test: The Ex.

The Page 69 Test: The Wife.

The Page 69 Test: The Better Sister.

--Marshal Zeringue

Belle Boggs

Belle Boggs's latest novel is The Gulf.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Gulf, and for your character Marianne?

A: Marianne is a poet, broke and living in Brooklyn, when she is invited (by her ex) to run a creative writing school for Christian writers--the Genesis Inspirational Writing Ranch. With no other jobs on the horizon, and facing imminent eviction, she makes the leap to do something ethically dubious.

She's pushed along by her own anger at right-wing evangelical Christians, who abound in the place where she grew up, where her father and sister still live.

I began working on the novel in 2011, which is when the novel begins, and was really preoccupied with the Tea Party backlash to Obama's election, which was especially evident in rural Virginia, where I'm from and still visit often. I was also interested in scams and bad businesses and the negative impact of for-profit education, as well as the precarious financial position of artists.

I wanted to create a character who would participate in that world, and be ethically implicated by it, but also someone who would...[read on]

Visit Belle Boggs's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nigel Hamilton

Nigel Hamilton's latest book is War and Peace: FDR's Final Odyssey: D-Day to Yalta, 1943–1945. From the transcript of the author's interview with Fareed Zakaria:

ZAKARIA: So 75th anniversary of D-Day. The Normandy landings are, I think, for much of the world, this sort of the moment of World War II. This is the moment when the Allies move onto the Continent of Europe and begin the process of rolling back the Nazi conquest of Europe. And you reveal that Winston Churchill, the great World War II leader was actually opposed to this.

HAMILTON: I'm afraid to say he was. It's really been covered up for the last seven decades, largely because he was such a brilliant writer that he wrote his own version of World War II and he didn't want to go into that. But I've spent 10 years on my trilogy and I wanted to look at it from FDR's point of view.

And FDR immediately after the American defeated Pearl Harbor was determined to impose a strategy, an American strategy on how to defeat first the Germans, then the Japanese. And it in that strategy, it was crucial that ultimately United States Forces would have to meet The Wehrmacht in open battle.

ZAKARIA: The interesting thing you point out is that Winston Churchill, who we're going to rethink of is this great military commander in chief was wrong on almost all his military strategies during the war. And he's wrong for two reasons, one, sometimes he was just plain wrong and other times it was a secret way to actually try to retain the British Empire while defeating the Germans.

HAMILTON: Yes. I mean, one could say that this was a reasonable national strategy if it worked. But the trouble was, for all his genius as a leader, as an orator, as somebody who could marshal the will of a nation as he did in his finest hour in 1940, even though he been to military college which FDR hadn't, he was very unlucky in very impetuous and never really understood...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Ryan

Jennifer Ryan grew up in Britain and moved to Washington, DC fifteen years ago. Previously a non-fiction book editor, she now writes novels set in Second World War Britain and inspired by her grandmother’s stories of the war.

Her second novel, The Spies of Shilling Lane, tells the tale of a woman who heads into the London Blitz to see her daughter, only to find her missing.

From Ryan's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Spies of Shilling Lane, and for your character Mrs. Braithwaite?

A: A few years ago, a quiet 99-year-old woman died in a sleepy London suburb. Below the floorboards in a secret attic annex, they found a semi-automatic Sten gun, ammunition, and other espionage paraphernalia. It was headline news: she was an MI5 operative during and following the Second World War.

As a Second World War aficionado, I was always aware of the roles women played in espionage, especially in mainland Europe as part of the Special Operations Executive.

But it wasn't until Eileen Burgoyne's past was dug out that I realized how women were used by MI5, who were dealing with threats within the country, including enemy spies, people of German decent who harbored Nazi sentiment, and fifth columnists who supported the Nazis, planning to take down the country from the inside.

I immediately started to imagine how...[read on]

Visit Jennifer Ryan's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Spies of Shilling Lane.

Writers Read: Jennifer Ryan.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric Rauchway

Eric Rauchway is a distinguished historian and expert on the Progressive and New Deal eras at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of several acclaimed books on the subject, including The Money Makers, The Great Depression and the New Deal, and Blessed Among Nations, and has contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, Dissent, and The American Prospect.

Rauchway's latest book is Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal.

From the author's HuffPost Q&A with Zach Carter:

This is a book about a presidential election and its transition. Do you see overtones for today?

There are a number of levels in which the parallels you’re suggesting between the early 1930s and today hold true. The least important one right this second is the practical effect of the New Deal, which is the recovery from the Depression. We’re not currently in a recession, let alone a depression. But why it’s vital for proponents of a Green New Deal to use that phrasing is that it rallies Americans to a sense of shared national purpose that recently has been ceded to the political right.

We’ve forgotten how successful Roosevelt and other politicians of the ’30s and ’40s were at creating a progressive sense of common purpose. And that’s certainly important for people on the left today.

And the other is the history of neoliberalism. There’s a long history within the Democratic Party, beginning at least with Jimmy Carter and going all the way through Barack Obama, which concedes to the right the idea that the market is the best way to organize the resources of society, that the best government can do is fiddle with or adjust the social outcomes created by the free market.

The Roosevelt era dawned with an acknowledgment that the market really screwed up. And that what we were calling “the market” was really a system that Republicans had built up to aid rich people and businesses. It wasn’t a market in any conventional sense. For young people who grew up in the Great Recession, there are...[read on]

Learn more about Winter War and follow Eric Rauchway on Twitter.

My Book, The Movie: Winter War.

--Marshal Zeringue

Keely Hutton

Keely Hutton's new novel is Secret Soldiers.

From the author's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Secret Soldiers, and for your character Thomas?

A: The idea for my upcoming middle grade novel, Secret Soldiers, started with some confusion while I was binge-watching the BBC show Peaky Blinders three years ago. The main character, Tommy Shelby, suffers from PTSD due to his time as a soldier in World War I.

My editor and I had agreed that my next book should be in the same vein as my debut novel Soldier Boy, so I’d been researching wars and child soldiers. I hadn’t found anything that really grabbed my attention until I watched Tommy Shelby’s flashbacks, which showed him fighting in tunnels.

A quick Google search revealed that thousands of sappers and miners tunneled beneath the battlefields of the Great War to undermine the enemy’s position and break the brutal stalemate of trench warfare. Fascinated, I researched whether any child soldiers fought in World War I and was shocked to discover that over a quarter of a million underage British boys...[read on]

Visit Keely Hutton's website.

The Page 69 Test: Soldier Boy.

My Book, The Movie: Soldier Boy.

Writers Read: Keely Hutton (July 2017).

--Marshal Zeringue

Rachel Barenbaum

Rachel Barenbaum is a graduate of Grub Street’s Novel Incubator program. In a former life she was a hedge fund manager and a spin instructor, before moving to the New Hampshire woods to write. She has an MBA from the Harvard Business School and an AB in Literature and Philosophy from Harvard College.

Barenbaum's new book, A Bend in the Stars, is her first novel.

From the author's Q&A with NPR's Ari Shapiro:

SHAPIRO: That idea of gravity bending light gives your book its title, "A Bend In The Stars." Did you have it from the beginning?

BARENBAUM: No. Actually in the beginning, I called it "The Measure Of Time," which is the name also of an essay by Henri Poincare, because really at its heart, the problem of relativity or the notion of relativity is really based in this question of, what is time? So time is a construct. We've invented it. What is a second? What is a minute? What is an hour? This notion of time is really what I was focused on.

SHAPIRO: For a first novel, this is such an ambitious project to take on, like, Einstein's theory of relativity and a century ago history of Russia. I mean, like, that's a big bite to take.

BARENBAUM: (Laughter) I guess. You know, I think maybe this is why - one of the reasons why I dug into it so deep and so hard - was because I think people shy away from relativity, from science. I hear a lot of people saying, oh, I don't do numbers. And I always wonder, well...[read on]

Visit Rachel Barenbaum's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Bend in the Stars.

The Page 69 Test: A Bend in the Stars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jean Kwok

Jean Kwok's new novel is Searching for Sylvie Lee.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You write that your missing brother was the inspiration for your new novel. Can you say more about that, and how you came up with the idea for your character Sylvie?

A: When my dear older brother Kwan didn’t come home to Brooklyn for Thanksgiving, we all knew something was very wrong. I was already living in the Netherlands with my Dutch husband at the time. I remember receiving that phone call from my family and feeling like I was suffocating. I kept trying to take a deep breath but couldn’t seem to get any air.

Kwan was the most brilliant, competent, resourceful person I knew. How could he be missing? He was the person who would know what to do, the one we would all call in an emergency. That feeling of terror, of needing to step up and take charge to try to save someone I loved, was the emotional impetus behind Searching for Sylvie Lee.

From there, of course, golden girl Sylvie was born, as was her younger sister Amy. When dazzling Sylvie flies to the Netherlands for a final visit with her dying grandmother and disappears, it is up to timid Amy to pull herself together and try to find her beloved sister.

Once I created the characters, however...[read on]

Visit Jean Kwok's website.

--Marshal Zeringue