Catherine Chung

Catherine Chung was born in Evanston, IL, and grew up in New York, New Jersey, and Michigan. Writing has been her life-long passion, but as an undergraduate she indulged in a brief, one-sided affair with mathematics at the University of Chicago followed by a few years in Santa Monica working at a think tank by the sea.

Eventually she attended Cornell University for her MFA, and since then she and her books have been given shelter and encouragement from The MacDowell Colony, Jentel, Hedgebrook, SFAI, Camargo, The University of Leipzig, VCCA, UCross, Yaddo, Civitella Ranieri, The Jerome Foundation, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation. Her brother, Heesoo Chung, has also given her a bed and fed her lots of ice cream at criticał times.

Chung is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Director’s Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She was a Granta New Voice, and won an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award with her first novel, Forgotten Country, which was a Booklist, Bookpage, and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2012. She has published work in The New York Times, The Rumpus, and Granta, and is a fiction editor at Guernica Magazine. She lives in New York City.

Chung's new novel is The Tenth Muse.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Why did you choose to focus on a mathematician in your new novel, and how did you come up with your character Katherine?

A: I love mathematics, and at its highest levels I feel like it's closer to poetry than anything else, or maybe music or even mysticism in the way it makes me feel. I love that it can contain statements that are incredibly profound and clear and far-reaching in their implications, but also mind-bogglingly complex.

So I wanted to write about someone who does math at that level, and I wanted also to write about a woman who's incredibly talented and brilliant in a field that has always been incredibly lacking in women. The few women who did rise to the top and accomplish great things have amazing life stories of commitment and dedication and passion and grit.

Q: What do you think Katherine's story says about the challenges faced by women mathematicians over the past half-century or more?

A: I think the stories of women in mathematics are really...[read on]

Visit Catherine Chung's website.

Writers Read: Catherine Chung.

My Book, The Movie: The Tenth Muse.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy Jay Smith

When Timothy Jay Smith quit an intriguing international career to become a full-time writer, he had a host of real life characters, places and events to inspire his stories. His first novel, Cooper’s Promise, in some ways is still the most autobiographical of his novels, though he was never an American deserter adrift in Africa. But he was in The Mining Pan bar and he did meet Lulay and he did stowaway on a barge that landed him in an African jail.

His third novel, The Fourth Courier, is set in Poland in 1992. In it Smith looks back at the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, as witnessed through the eyes of an FBI Special Agent on assignment to stop a nuclear smuggling operation out of Russia. Smith’s newest book continues his style of page-turning thrillers steeped with colorful characters.

From Smith's Q&A with Rich Ehisen:

Open Mic: We’ll talk about process in a bit, but right now tell me a bit about “The Fourth Courier.”

Smith: The timing of the book is the spring of 1992, about three to four months right after the fall of the Soviet Union, which was dismantled legally on Christmas Day 1991. That is an important thing to note because that’s when the border between Russia and Poland became very porous and there was a lot of fear that Russia was unable to really handle or secure all the nuclear material that it had. The story is basically that there has been a series of gruesome murders in Warsaw, Poland in the spring of 1992. On the hands of the third victim they discover traces of radiation. Because all three men had been murdered in the same way, the theory becomes that the couriers carry nuclear product out of Russia into Poland to go on to some place in the world. the US sends an FBI agent to work with the Polish police in order to investigate the case and try to figure out what’s really going on.

Open Mic: This had some basis in reality for you, correct?

Smith: Yes. I was on an assignment around that time in Latvia, where I had a meeting with a decommissioned and very unhappy Russian general who at the end of the meeting suggested we go somewhere where no one could hear us. He took me way out into this forest, I had no idea what was going on, and he said he could get me anything I wanted. I looked very puzzled at him and said ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He said, “atomic.” There had been some discussion in our meeting about Russia’s nuclear arsenal in Latvia, and he apparently had some control over it so I think he had totally misunderstood why I was there and thought this was something he might be able to sell and...[read on]

Visit Timothy Jay Smith's website.

Writers Read: Timothy Jay Smith.

My Book, The Movie: The Fourth Courier.

The Page 69 Test: The Fourth Courier.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Zimler

Richard Zimler's novels include The Search for Sana, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, and The Seventh Gate. He has won many prizes for his writing and has lectured on Sephardic Jewish culture all over the world. He now lives in Porto, Portugal, where he teaches journalism and writes.

Zimler's latest novel is The Gospel According to Lazarus.

From his Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Gospel According to Lazarus?

A: The idea came to me in a very disturbing dream I first had in 1989. To explain, I need to go back to a few years before that…

One of my elder brothers, Jerry, grew ill with AIDS around 1986. At the time, I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area and he was working in New York as a clinical psychologist. I helped him through a series of debilitating opportunist infections, including one that caused lesions in his brain and left him with dementia for about a week.

It was tremendously upsetting, of course. In fact, I often felt as if I’d been trapped in a merciless, ongoing nightmare. Caring for him in New York hospitals – feeding him and walking him around in his wheelchair – also gave me frequent panic attacks. I constantly feared that I, too, might die young – if not of AIDS, then of some other disease or misfortune.

Jerry died on May 6, 1989. He was only 35 years old. I was crushed. Losing a brother or sister makes you...[read on]

Visit Richard Zimler's website.

The Page 99: Guardian of the Dawn.

The Page 69 Test: The Gospel According to Lazarus.

My Book, The Movie: The Warsaw Anagrams.

Writers Read: Richard Zimler.

--Marshal Zeringue

Naomi Booth

Naomi Booth is the author of Sealed.

From her interview with Ross Jeffery & Anthony Self at Storgy:

‘Sealed’ is described as a ‘gripping modern fable on motherhood, and a terrifying portrait of ordinary people under threat from their own bodies.’ The novel deals with a particular disease that provides a unique horror element in the narrative that is very eco-based. Global warming has become a prevalent speaking point at the moment, so was this a commentary on our environment at the moment, or was this something you always wanted to address?

NB – At the time I was writing Sealed, I was reading a lot of non-fiction about climate change and the environment. The critic Timothy Morton uses the term “dark ecology” to describe the way that we’re looped into the world and are profoundly connected to all other life-forms. He argues that we’ve already entered the next mass extinction event, that we’re past the point of no return, that we are already, in some senses, the walking dead. I found this a really uncanny and affecting idea. I was also read a wonderful book by Eula Bliss called On Immunity, in which she discusses the experience of pregnancy in relation to environmental contamination. She argues that our bodies, even at birth, are already polluted: she cites research that shows all kinds of chemicals and toxic substances, including paint thinners and DDT and triclosan, present in breast milk. These ideas really got under my skin, and I found myself wanting to...[read on]

Visit Naomi Booth's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dominic Smith

Dominic Smith is the New York Times bestselling author of five novels, including The Last Painting of Sara de Vos.

His new novel is The Electric Hotel.

From Smith's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Electric Hotel?

A: One of the things I'm interested in as a writer is what I think of as the gaps and silences of history. So when the Library of Congress put out a report about five years ago saying that more than 75 percent of all silent films have been lost forever, I was intrigued.

I kept wondering whether there was a lost masterpiece in all this vanished celluloid. And as I started to research the world of early silent film, I discovered that America’s first movie town was Fort Lee, New Jersey, not Hollywood, and that some landmark films were made before World War I.

This was the seed of the book, which tells the story of a lost silent film that ruined the famous French director and actress who made it. It also tells the story of the rise and fall of...[read on]

Visit Dominic Smith's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre.

The Page 69 Test: Bright and Distant Shores.

The Page 69 Test: The Electric Hotel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Meghan Holloway

Meghan Holloway found her first Nancy Drew mystery in a sun-dappled attic at the age of eight and subsequently fell in love with the grip and tautness of a well-told mystery. She flew an airplane before she learned how to drive a car, did her undergrad work in Creative Writing in the sweltering south, and finished a Masters of Library and Information Science in the blustery north. She spent a summer and fall in Maine picking peaches and apples, traveled the world for a few years, and did a stint fighting crime in the records section of a police department.​​

She now lives in the foothills of the Appalachians with her standard poodle and spends her days as a scientist with the requisite glasses but minus the lab coat.

Holloway's new novel is Once More Unto the Breach.

From the author's Q&A with Rich Ehisen:

Open Mic: Let’s talk about language. Your narrative flows so beautifully, but still feels economical, with no wasted words. Writers sometimes fall in love with the beauty of sentences over their value to the story. Do you ever struggle with that? And if so, how do you overcome it?

Holloway: I love lyricism in writing both as a writer and as a reader. I strive for vividness and for a very sensory reading experience when I’m writing, but it is a challenge to not get caught up in the writing itself. I have to also remember that I am a storyteller. I try to keep the idea in the back of my head that regardless of how lovely a sentence flows, how beautiful it is on the page, it still needs to move the plot forward. If it doesn’t, I need to be ruthless in cutting it despite how pretty it is. That’s not easy and it takes a lot of practice, but one thing that helps is that once I finish a draft I usually print it out on paper and go through it and read it aloud. That helps me figure out how well the story flows, and also where I need to cut out the loveliness and...[read on]

Visit Meghan Holloway's website, and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Istagram.

My Book, The Movie: Once More Unto the Breach.

The Page 69 Test: Once More Unto the Breach.

Writers Read: Meghan Holloway.

--Marshal Zeringue

Whitney Scharer

Whitney Scharer is the author of The Age of Light.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You write that your "fascination with [photographer Lee Miller] sprang from images--images of her and images taken by her." What were some of the particular images that you found especially compelling?

A: There are so many images of and by Lee that I find fascinating. One thing I loved was how she often reinterpreted portraits of herself, created by Man Ray and other men, in her own work.

In one of Man Ray’s photos, he has Miller in the nude, her head caged inside a fencing sabre guard. Lee took the sabre guard and used it in her own shoot: in her version, her model is at ease, with the sabre guard wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl. Lee’s image reclaims the sabre guard from the sadomasochistic overtones it had in Man Ray’s work. When I was drafting my novel, I used the sabre guard photographs as a jumping off point for one of the first scenes I wrote.

Another of the first images I used in drafting my book was Dave Scherman’s photo of Lee bathing in Hitler’s bathtub after Hitler had fled Munich at the end of the war. Her expression in the pictures is...[read on]

Visit Whitney Scharer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kamala Harris

Kamala D. Harris is a lifelong public safety and civil rights leader, and is currently serving as a U.S. Senator from California. Her new book is The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.

From her interview with Wei Tchou for The Cut:

You wrestle with the idea of power and how people who are in power help people who are disadvantaged by the system. How do you think about power as somebody who has had a lot of it?

I mean here’s the thing. First of all, my first and my entire career was as a prosecutor. Until I came to the United States Senate. And at a very young age in my life and my career I spoke these words, which I write about in the book, but it was part of my identity which I would declare every time I walked into the courtroom: “Kamala Harris for the people.” And I took it very seriously.

So the concept there, and how I wrote about it in the book, is that “for the people,” not “for the victim” alone, but “for the people” because our system of justice was designed with an understanding that a harm against any one of us is a harm against all of us. And I feel very strongly about that in terms of how we should proceed and then think of and handle any one of us being harmed. We should proceed and think of this as a harm against all of us.

And if you study our system of justice, that’s a value that was a founding principle of our justice system and therefore who we are as a country. And so I’ve used my positions to...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Kincheloe

Jennifer Kincheloe is the author of the novels The Secret Life of Anna Blanc and its sequel The Woman in the Camphor Trunk. The third novel in the series, The Body in Griffith Park, is out this month.

From Kincheloe's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for your character Anna Blanc?

A: She just popped out. She was supposed to be an homage to Alice Stebbins Wells, a middle-aged minister who became the first cop in LA in 1910. But Anna turned out nothing like Alice.

In some ways, I took my own characteristics at 19 and stretched them. For example, I was relatively privileged. Anna was filthy rich. I was brave. Anna's downright heroic. I was a little self-absorbed. Anna begins the series incredibly self-absorbed.

Q: Did you always know you'd be writing more than one book about Anna, and do you think she's changed at all from one book to the next?

A: The Secret Life of Anna Blanc was supposed to be my practice novel. It was my first, and I didn't think anyone would ever read it. But when my writer's group reacted favorably to the book, and it subsequently sold, I decided I'd like to write more in the series.

And yes, Anna is growing up, changing within each book in some...[read on]

Visit Jennifer Kincheloe's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Woman in the Camphor Trunk.

Coffee with a Canine: Jennifer Kincheloe & Monkey.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scott Shapiro

Scott Shapiro is a professor of law and philosophy at Yale and the co-author, with Oona A. Hathaway, of The Internationalists: How A Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World.

From his May 2019 interview with Isaac Chotiner for The New Yorker:

When you say that there is a long history of conservatives being mistrustful of laws of war, do you mean both international ways of regulating what our troops can do in war, like some sort of world court, and also our own laws or the military’s own laws?

Yes. So John Bolton, for example, has waged a war on the International Criminal Court for many years, since the beginning of its existence, and spent an enormous amount of time when he was in the State Department going around the world, trying to get countries to sign what we’ll call the Article 98 agreements, which basically said that these countries would not coöperate with the court in prosecution of American service personnel, and then denied them foreign aid if they didn’t.

But his objection has been very much about the notion that an international tribunal will prosecute American service personnel. Whereas there is another strand that objects even to our own government, our own military, prosecuting our own service personnel, and there are several strains to it, some of them being understandable, some of them being quite reprehensible. When I say understandable, I think that there are arguments. I don’t think they carry the day, but let me just say that there are at least arguments that make sense.

So one of them is war is hell, and shit happens, and it’s very hard to hold soldiers to such high standards. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous expression, that “detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife,” comes to mind—the idea being that, if you’re in that situation, you can’t be expected to follow all the rules perfectly. There’s also the idea that there are too many rules, and that the rules are too constraining and that we’re tying, as they say, our boys’ hands. And it’s especially problematic in cases where there’s an asymmetry, where the U.S. military is fighting a group that doesn’t follow the rules. So it’s not just that we have a lot of rules, we’re fighting other militaries who are ostensibly bound by those rules, too. But, also, what do we do when they’re not following the rules, they hide among civilians.

Those, I think, are arguments that need to be taken seriously, and people have obviously debated them, and it’s not obvious what the solution should be in particular cases. I went and I watched a lot of the Fox News clips about these cases that it seems like Trump was responding to. And they sometimes use these arguments, but they also use the arguments like, “These are our guys and you need to protect them. They’re risking their lives for us and we have to protect them.” And it’s tribalism. Like...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue