Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett's newest novel is The Dutch House. From her Q&A with Hannah Beckerman at the Guardian:

The protagonists in The Dutch House become obsessed with their childhood home after they’re turfed out by their stepmother. Do you think people too often get fixated on the past?

So many people just get stuck in their childhood and shoulder that burden through everything. It becomes their defining feature in life. Danny and Maeve [the novel’s main characters] chew on their loss of the house: they make it a fetish. I see people doing that and I just think, You can’t still be feeling this loss. You’ve made this your hobby.

Property is both a sanctuary and a burden in the novel. Was that something you set out to explore?

I hadn’t consciously set out to explore that and yet the further along I went the more I could see it and the more I could think about the burden of things. I am somebody who feels the burden of things. I think I would have made a swell nun.

The novel is also about memory: whether we can only ever view the past through the prism of the present. Do you think memory is ultimately unreliable?

Yes, I think that memory is almost a living thing for every person. I was in downtown New York on September 11 with a friend and...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

D.A. Bartley

D.A. Bartley's new mystery novel is Death in the Covenant, the second in her series about Detective Abish Taylor.

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

Q: This is your second book about Detective Abish Taylor. How do you think she's changed from one book to the next?

A: Abbie is slowly opening herself up to life. She was still reeling from having lost her husband in Blessed Be the Wicked.

In Death in the Covenant, we get to see her flirt with the idea of romance. She and her dad are making inroads in their relationship, and Abbie’s made peace with living in a place where she’ll never quite fit in.

Q: Did you know when you were working on the first book that you'd be writing another one?

A: Yes and no. I don't think I'm different from most writers in that when I was working on my very first book, it was pretty much all I could see.

Having said that...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie Hirschfeld Davis & Michael Shear

Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael Shear are journalists with The New York Times. Their new book is Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault On Immigration.

From the transcript of their Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross:

Terry Gross: Michael Shear, Julie Hirschfeld Davis, welcome to FRESH AIR. So let's start with something a lot of America is talking about, alligators and snakes in moats around the Mexican-American border. This is one of the ideas that Trump had, to have, like, basically a moat, (laughter), across the border with alligators and snakes and who knows what else in the water. It sounds so preposterous. It sounds medieval. What was the context of this proposal?

JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS: Well, President Trump has been just taken with this idea of a physical barrier of the wall for many years. And he would talk about it and have very vivid descriptions of what he wanted it to look and feel like. He considers himself a builder. That's one of the reasons his advisers initially thought of the wall. It was almost as a mnemonic device to get him to sort of remember to talk about illegal immigration and his plans for cracking down on it. So going in, he was thinking about the physical aspects of this structure. But he came to really be frustrated with the inability to get the wall built quickly, and he would sort of cast about for other ideas of how he could make it more effective or something else he might be able to do.

And so he would raise this idea of a trench, and maybe we could have a water-filled trench. And he raised it so many times that, actually, his aides finally went and got a cost estimate for what a trench would cost. And it was going to be three times more expensive as a wall. But it didn't really deter him because he was so enamored with this idea of having countermeasures. And so when they would have discussions about these things, sometimes he would raise, well, you could have snakes inside it, or you could have crocodiles inside it - or alligators inside it - excuse me.

And even though it seemed preposterous to his advisers the first and second times that he would bring this up, they kind of got to the point where they couldn't really tell whether he was serious or not serious. All they knew, all he seemed to really know, is that he wanted something that would be dangerous, and threatening and a deterrent.

GROSS: Yeah. He wanted something that would be punitive that would, like, maim people or burn people, cut them to pieces. This is what you write in the book. So what are some of the more extreme ideas he had for a punitive barrier?

MICHAEL SHEAR: Right. So he talked about this constantly. He - the wall, in his view, should not just be kind of a structure that would stop people on the other side, but that anybody who tried to climb it would be hurt severely. So he talked about painting it black. He would always say flat black, Kirstjen - talking to Kirstjen Nielsen, his Homeland Security secretary. He'd say, I want it to be black. And that was because he wanted it to...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Jake Burt

Jake Burt's new middle grade novel for kids is The Tornado.

From his Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You note that you experienced something similar to the bullying that your character Bell deals with in The Tornado. Why did you decide to write about it?

A: It was time. I started writing it just as my daughter began middle school. Her transition afforded me an opportunity to really reflect on my own middle school experience, and I was stunned by how much I couldn’t remember. Every time I tried to recall something positive, the experience of being bullied - and, just as importantly, not standing up for others who were similarly treated - rose to the forefront.

I always knew that it impacted me, but I wasn’t quite ready to come to grips with just how profoundly it did. The Tornado was my way of more fully exploring and coming to terms with...[read on]

Visit Jake Burt's website.

The Page 69 Test: Greetings from Witness Protection!.

Writers Read: Jake Burt (November 2017).

--Marshal Zeringue

Clay McLeod Chapman

Clay McLeod Chapman's new novel is The Remaking.

From the transcript of his NPR interview with Scott Simon:

SIMON:... Your novel suggests that witches are tired of having their stories appropriated.

CHAPMAN: Yes.

SIMON: They want to tell their own stories.

CHAPMAN: I think, you know, women in general - like, why relegate it to witches? But I think with this specific story, yes, like, it's - I want to focus on this idea of the autre (ph), the male gaze, you know, suddenly kind of boxing these particular women in.

And, you know, time and time again, we take these stories, and we spin them out until they're no longer owned by the people who are kind of the source, the point of origin. And I think that goes into filmmaking, novel writing. I'm - my hands aren't clean here. There's blood on my hands.

SIMON: I was about to point out, I mean, this is clear source appropriation on your part.

CHAPMAN: Yeah, and I want to kind of own that. One of the biggest questions I asked writing this was...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Eileen Pollack

Eileen Pollack graduated with a BS in physics from Yale and earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa. She is the author of the novels The Bible of Dirty Jokes, A Perfect Life, Breaking and Entering, and Paradise, New York, the short-story collections In the Mouth and The Rabbi in the Attic, and the nonfiction books The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club and Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull.

Pollack's new novel is The Professor of Immortality.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Professor of Immortality, and for your character Professor Maxine Sayers?

A: I had just moved to Ann Arbor to teach in 1994, and the Unabomber manifesto [written by Ted Kaczynski] came out in The Washington Post. Not long after, David Kaczynski and his wife went to the FBI—they recognized some of the language and the ideas. It was hard for David to turn his brother in.

The University of Michigan realized [Ted Kaczynski] got his Ph.D. in math from Michigan. If you’re a graduate student at Michigan, you have to take a course outside your area of study.

As someone teaching writing [as I did], you got to know your students well. I have had many students who were young men, were bright—and were angry. I’d always taken them as my special projects. I have a physics degree from Yale; I have an older brother who could be a handful. I’d always try to connect with them. Often, I broke through and we became close. I thought many of them were in a lot of pain.

I was interested in Kaczynski. The more I read about him, the more I began to feel for him. If I’d read the manifesto and recognized the words of a former student, would I have turned him in? I’m interested in radical action, in what shaped him.

So I had a figure of a professor who starts to suspect a former student she cares about. I was interested in...[read on]

Visit Eileen Pollack's website.

The Page 69 Test: A Perfect Life.

The Page 69 Test: The Professor of Immortality.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman’s newest book, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future, will be out in January.

From his Q&A with Carol Tannenhauser for the West Side Rag:

WSR: Do you think [changes in commercial real estate on the Upper West Side of New York City] could be the result of a permanent shift in the way people shop? Are mom-and-pops a thing of the past?

PK: What I’m worried about more than a change in shopping habits is gentrification. Big cities in general, and New York in particular, have become desirable places for high earners to live. It’s driving up costs and it does reduce the distinctiveness of the place. There’s a kind of cycle of destruction: someplace is interesting and has character and, because of that, people start buying places and moving in and, in so doing, they drive up real estate prices and destroy the character they came in search of.

WSR: They also drive up the height of buildings.

PK: Well, that’s a funny thing, because I actually, in general, think New York does have to build up. There’s only so much land and you want to be able to accommodate people. While there are places where the buildings are really overshadowing, there are lots of parts of Manhattan that are unnecessarily low rise. Up is the only direction to go.

WSR: If only the tall ones provided affordable housing.

PK: You could have tall ones that do, and, look, if people can...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen Chbosky

Stephen Chbosky's new novel is Imaginary Friend.

From his CrimeReads interview with Michael Seidlinger:

Reading Imaginary Friend makes me nostalgic—pop quizzes, sleepovers, ghost stories, the fear of being grounded—as a child our worldview is smaller and capable of harboring a whole different set of terrors. A child’s imagination runs wild. What are some of those priceless nostalgic things that still crawl to you when you allow time to reflect back? What crept into Imaginary Friend (no spoilers! Okay maybe a few)?

Every age has its own set of fears. When I was a child, nothing scared me more than the witch in Hansel & Gretel. So, she became part of the character (mini spoiler) the hissing lady. When I was older, I was afraid of failing tests. So, that became Christopher’s nightmare in school. I grew up in Western, PA, where the woods felt haunted. The deer were everywhere. And the clouds in the sky, which may (or may not) be watching us. This book is filled with everything that ever scared me (and everything that ever gave me hope).

Has there been a book that scared you so effectively it rendered you speechless? What about a movie? Scariest real-life experience?

Stephen King has written so many incredible books, it is impossible to narrow it down to one. I think The Stand is his greatest novel. The Shining is his...[read on]

Seven books that influence Stephen Chbosky's writing.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sharon Marcus

Sharon Marcus is the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is a founding editor of Public Books and the author of the award-winning Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England and Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London.

Marcus's new book is The Drama of Celebrity.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: The actress Sarah Bernhardt is a major focus of The Drama of Celebrity. Why did you choose to highlight her and her career in the book?

A: Before Lady Gaga, before Elizabeth Taylor, before Gloria Swanson, there was Sarah Bernhardt. Born in France in 1844, in the 1870s she became the first global superstar. A classically trained actress who was also a genius at self-promotion, Bernhardt was one of the first famous people to develop a private persona for public consumption.

We know very little about her true private life — the father of her only child, for example, remains a mystery. But by letting painters and photographers into her home, where she also granted interviews to journalists into her home, by having herself portrayed sleeping in a coffin in her bedroom, she gave strangers the impression that they knew her intimately.

The celebrity culture we live with today began in the mid-19th century with the rise of the cheap press and commercial photography, the rapid spread of information via telegraph cables, and the ability of people to move themselves around the world via steamships and railways. Born at the perfect time to take advantage of all of these technologies, Bernhardt became the...[read on]

Learn more about The Drama of Celebrity at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Drama of Celebrity.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lawrence Wright

Lawrence Wright's acclaimed books include the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

From his Austin Monthly interview with David Leffler:

Your Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Looming Tower, meticulously examines the events that lead to 9/11. Where were you that day?

On Tuesday, Sept. 11, I got in my car after meeting a group of friends for breakfast. NPR was on; that’s when I found out the first plane had hit. The second hit shortly after I got home. It was chilling: I’d previously written this movie, The Siege with Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis, that had postulated what would happen if a terrorist strike hit New York City. Like so many others, I was stunned, but I had to do something. I told The New Yorker, “Put me to work.” More than five years—and hundreds of interviews later—The Looming Tower went to print.

Another of your books, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, was converted into an HBO documentary. How did the Church of Scientology react to its creation?

They never actually sued me, but boy, did they threaten me. They relentlessly harassed my sources, who were ex-Scientologists; I’ve never run into people quite as frightened as they were. They stood to lose a lot, from persecution from the church, the loss of contact from their families, lawsuits, and, of course, the church’s own kind of informal prison system. Private investigators—I would say, very incompetent ones—followed me around too, mainly at public events. One even came to one of my gigs and...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue