William Gibson

William Gibson is credited with having coined the term “cyberspace” and having envisioned both the Internet and virtual reality before either existed. He is the author of Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Burning Chrome, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History, Distrust That Particular Flavor, The Peripheral, and Agency.

From Gibson's Q&A with Mark Skinner for the Waterstones blog:

The novel’s title gestures towards the way it digs into how much control and individual agency any of us have, either in our own lives or in the world at large. To what extent is the novel’s preoccupation with large, shadowy global networks – not just the traditional world powers – playing games with live and futures influenced by the way the world is manipulated today?

It’s entirely influenced, indeed, is *about* that.

I found the concept of the ‘stubs’ – or alternative past realities – in the book particularly fascinating as a way to explore a sort of time-travel with multiple different possible endings. It made me think about the sense of unreality that seems to go hand-in-hand with living in a post-truth world. To what extent do you think that sense that we’re all living in a reality that doesn’t feel quite real has been heightened in the last decade?

I myself had never experienced any suspicion of that sort until Trump’s election, though the outcome of the Brexit referendum prefigured it, for...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

J. Albert Mann

J. Albert Mann is the author of five novels for children. She has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults. Her work of historical fiction about the early life of Margaret Sanger is What Every Girl Should Know. Born in New Jersey, Mann now lives in Boston with her children, cat, and husband listed in order of affection.

Mann's new young adult historical novel is The Degenerates.

From Mann's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Why did you decide to set your new YA historical novel in the Fernald School in Massachusetts, and how did you create your four main characters?

A: There were many institutions created across the United States to segregate people with disabilities from the general population during the Eugenics Movement.

I chose The Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feebleminded Youth (later renamed The Fernald School) because it’s in my own backyard. (I live in Boston, and the school was founded in South Boston.) I love researching in the place where the history happened. It’s definitely not a must, it’s just a lot...[read on]

Visit J. Albert Mann's website.

The Page 69 Test: What Every Girl Should Know.

Writers Read: J. Albert Mann.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chris Nickson

Chris Nickson is the author of the highly-acclaimed Richard Nottingham series and is also a well-known music journalist. Born and raised in Leeds, he lived in the USA for thirty years and now makes his home in England.

Nickson's eighth Tom Harper mystery, The Molten City, is coming soon to the US.

From Nickson's Q&A with Kate Vane for Crime Fiction Lover:

Tom Harper feels like a very grounded character, and has a strong marriage. It’s quite a refreshing change from the dysfunctional detective. Was that a conscious decision?

When I started writing crime fiction with my Richard Nottingham series set in the 1730s, I made definite decisions. He would be married and have children. The loner detective who drinks too much is a very tired cliché. Most people are married, they have lives outside of work, worries with their partners and kids. That’s how the world is for most people. And by having scenes with the family, it rounds out a character; we see a different side of them. I’ve had one character who was single, Dan Markham in my 1950s books. But those are deliberately noir – and even then he had a regular, and very strong, girlfriend.

At the start of the Tom Harper series, in Gods of Gold, Tom was engaged. His marriage to Annabelle happened at the end of the book. A couple of years later they had a daughter who’s 16 years old in The Molten City and quite headstrong. But Annabelle herself is a strong, working-class woman. I like to have strong women as characters; there are plenty of them in the North, and certainly here in Leeds. And most women I’ve known have been strong. I’d have been hard-pressed to keep Annabelle out really. She insisted on having bigger and bigger roles in the books. She’s the emotional heart of the series. But...[read on]

Visit Chris Nickson's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Constant Lovers.

The Page 69 Test: The Constant Lovers.

The Page 69 Test: The Iron Water.

The Page 69 Test: The Hanging Psalm.

Writers Read: Chris Nickson (January 2019).

--Marshal Zeringue

Sara Holland

Sara Holland is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Everless, Evermore, and most recently Havenfall.

From her Q&A with Mark Skinner at the Waterstones blog:

Are you inspired by things or people in real life?

I don’t typically model characters after real people, except for in superficial traits – I might steal a friend’s favourite idiom for one character, my sister’s fashion aesthetic for another. Mostly though, my characters are a mishmash of certain parts of me and other fictional characters.

However, I am definitely inspired by real-life places. I can’t really envision a fictional room, building or landscape without modelling it on a real place I know well. That’s why I love travelling – it expands my mental library of places and scenery I can use in my stories.

And I think Havenfall is shaped a lot by its setting – the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. In the brainstorming stages of this book, I had landed on the concept of a magical hotel that sat at the intersection between worlds, but I didn’t know where that might be. For a bit, I thought I might set it in the Upper Midwest, where I grew up, or in New York City, where I live now. Both places have plenty of mysterious, magical qualities.

But then I thought about Colorado, which is a place I’ve spent a lot of time in – I grew up driving out there from Minnesota with my family to visit my dad’s parents. I thought about how when you’re driving west across the Midwestern plains, the mountains almost seem to appear out of nowhere – one moment you look ahead and there’s nothing, the next there’s a dark shape in the grey, faint but unmistakeable. I thought about how it felt to be in the back seat, chewing gum to relieve...[read on]

See Sara Holland's list of five books set in a fantastical America.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Loughery

John Loughery is the author, with Blythe Randolph, of the new biography, Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century. From his Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You write of Dorothy Day, "In the end, no category of common experience will neatly and precisely define this woman." Why did the two of you decide to write a biography of Dorothy Day?

A: The book was Blythe Randolph's idea and she enlisted me as coauthor when I completed my previous book. Blythe had long been an admirer of Dorothy for her progressive social work.

I don't think that her Catholicism was of particular concern to Blythe (who is Episcopalian), while the overlap of the progressive politics and the Catholicism was of interest to me as I was raised Catholic (and have, since completing the book, returned to the Church, though that is a long story in itself).

My previous book, Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America, which came out in 2018 from Cornell University Press, was about another Catholic figure, but a person of a radically different temperament.

He was very institution-minded, tough as nails, not a pacifist at all. He fought the nativist bigots in the 1830s and 1840s who were burning Catholic churches; he built Saint Patrick's Cathedral; he supported the Union cause during the Civil War and helped Lincoln personally in many ways.

But I was intrigued to write about a 20th-century Catholic figure who spoke to me in a very different way.

There simply is no other modern-day American, no one I can think of, who is at all like Dorothy Day in combining...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

N. K. Jemisin

N. K. Jemisin's new novel is The City We Became.

From her Q&A with Cate Matthews at TIME magazine:

Systemic oppression is a recurring theme in your work. Is it difficult to revisit those storylines and that pain over and over again?

It’s not difficult—this is my life. This is the world that I know. When I contemplate existential evil, I don’t see some abstract devil, I see people torpedoing themselves just to maintain a status quo and systemic advantages that actually in the long run aren’t helpful for everybody. White people don’t really benefit that much from racism. And the majority of men aren’t benefiting wildly from patriarchy. These are systems that encourage people to act outside their own best interests. We’re perfectly capable as a species of looking at other people who are different from ourselves and understanding that those are other human beings and that they have the same interests and fears and wishes as the rest of us. But these systems discourage that kind of identification.

You once said that artists and creators, especially those who work in speculative fiction, are the engineers of possibility. What possibilities do you hope to engineer with your work?

I would want people to come away from my fiction with a greater understanding of how these existential threats are developing and being artificially encouraged. The consistent theme throughout my work is that these are all societies that could be great, and they aren’t because people gotta be a–holes. That’s...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Maisy Card

Maisy Card's new novel is These Ghosts Are Family.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You write, "Writing this novel has helped me make peace with all the aspects of my family history that are unknown or unresolved." Can you say more about that?

A: There's so much of our history that's been obscured and erased by slavery and colonialism. It was refreshing to find a way to through that, to write this alternative family and reveal a hidden history, even if it's a fictional one.

Q: The novel stretches over several centuries. Did you need to do any research to write it, and if so, did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

A: Yes, I did a ton of research. I thought I knew a lot about slavery but reading first-hand accounts were eye opening. Some of the stuff I learned about the apprenticeship system, which some former slaves argued was even more brutal than slavery, was really fascinating, but...[read on]

Visit Maisy Card's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Zapata

Michael Zapata is a founding editor of the award-winning MAKE Literary Magazine. He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Fiction; the City of Chicago DCASE Individual Artist Program award; and a Pushcart Nomination. As an educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing drop out students. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa and has lived in New Orleans, Italy, and Ecuador. He currently lives in Chicago with his family.

Zapata's new novel is The Lost Book of Adana Moreau.

From his interview with Julie Carrick Dalton at Writer Unboxed:

Julie Carrick Dalton: Mike, welcome to The Writer Unboxed. As you know, I’m a huge fan of your book, in part because you take such big risks with structure. You incorporate many complex elements, yet, somehow weave them together beautifully into an un-put-downable story. What inspired you to take on such an ambitious structure in a first novel?

Michael Zapata: The structure definitely emerged sentence by sentence. That said, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the Latin American literary tradition. The structures found in Latin American literature can be so extraordinary, and I think they allow for some of these divergent elements of stories within stories. There’s a long tradition of that. I put a challenge to myself to combine that with the North American structure that is more plot-heavy, concerned with getting from point A to point B. Overall, I wanted to combine a Latin American structure with a North American structure and see what would happen.

JCD: It occurs to me that a reader could tease The Lost Book of Adana Moreau apart, restructure it, and present it as a book of fables. The story of the Dominicana and the pirate, the story of the pony and the mine, the story of the Lost City, and so many others embedded within your larger narrative. I’m in awe of how you pulled this off. Did you take inspiration from other authors who employ stories within stories?

MZ: I’m a huge fan of monologues, of someone getting on stage and telling their own story. Roberto Bolaño and Borges were strong influences. On the American side, I was ecstatic to read...[read on]

Visit Michael Zapata's website.

Writers Read: Michael Zapata.

The Page 69 Test: The Lost Book of Adana Moreau.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian Platzer

Brian Platzer is the critically acclaimed author of the novels Bed-Stuy Is Burning and The Body Politic (both Atria/Simon & Schuster) as well as the forthcoming parenting book Taking the Stress Out of Homework (Avery/Penguin Random House).

From his Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Body Politic, and for your four main characters?

A: When I write I tend to take exaggerated or distorted versions of myself and people I know well or have met a few times and put them in situations where they are confronted by difficult choices.

This novel was especially inspired by the following: my own chronic neurological disorder, a friend who had recently been cheated on, another friend’s battle with alcoholism, an underground cocktail bar I frequented in college, and the election of America’s worst person as its president.

Q: Author Kristen Roupenian compared the novel to Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children--what do you think of that comparison?

A: I love it! The Emperor’s Children succeeds at so much of what I’ve attempted. It takes a specific moment of history and focuses on how a group of friends and lovers react to it. It is...[read on]

Visit Brian Platzer's website.

Writers Read: Brian Platzer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Akemi Dawn Bowman

Akemi Dawn Bowman's new novel is Harley in the Sky.

From her Q&A at The Nerd Daily:

Hi Akemi, can you tell us a bit about yourself and about Harley in the Sky?

I’m originally from Las Vegas, but I’ve been living in Scotland for nearly a decade. Most of the inspiration for my writing comes from the magic I find in my day-to-day life. Whether it’s a great story, a really cool looking tree, or an entire circus performance, I love feeling like I’ve been plucked out of the real world and thrown into a fantastical one.

The idea for HARLEY IN THE SKY came from wanting to combine my love of magic with the honesty of real life. It’s a story about a teen who dreams of being a trapeze artist, and when her parents insist that she goes to university instead, Harley decides to run away and join a rival circus. It’s about family, growing up, and finding a balance between chasing your dreams and nurturing the relationships that mean the most to you.

Harley has led quite an interesting life, growing up in the circus. What is the earliest memory that she can remember?

I like to think one of Harley’s earliest memories would be of the costumes, and how big the stage felt. As a kid, those were always the things that stayed in my head—the textures, and vibrancy, and how huge the world seemed. And growing up in a circus, Harley would’ve been watching the magic happen in real-time, both backstage and during rehearsals. So I’m sure she...[read on]

Visit Akemi Dawn Bowman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue