Justin Peacock

Justin Peacock received an MFA from Columbia University and a law degree from Yale. Prior to attending law school, he worked as an online producer at the New York Times. His legal experience ranges from death-penalty defense to First Amendment cases.

His novels include A Cure for Night and the recently released Blind Man's Alley.

From his 2009 Q & A with Kashmir Hill at Above the Law:

Kash: You’ve been in Biglaw. You’ve worked in the Brooklyn courts. Were you taking notes along the way knowing you might write about it?

Peacock: It can be a tricky thing how much you draw from your own life and your own direct experiences. I don’t think I could have written a Biglaw law firm book while working and practicing in that area. If I’m writing something too close to my lived experience, it becomes more of a journal exercise than a work for future. I tried to find something where I knew enough about it to not make a complete fool of myself in terms of getting things wrong. But the book isn’t really reflective of my actual legal career.

Kash: Given that, how did you do your research for the book?
Peacock: I had a public defender friend who did a thorough vetting of the book. I got on Lexis and did some actual legal research, and hung out in New York courtrooms. Clerking was a helpful experience in terms of the ambiance of the courtroom. The Brooklyn federal trial courts are a lively and eccentric place.

Kash: Beyond telling a great story, what kind of themes did you hope to tackle in the book?

Peacock: I wanted to tell a more realistic story about criminal law. A lot of legal thrillers are about high-level government conspiracies and some hidden Thomas Jefferson scroll from the 18th century or what have you…

Kash: Any particular authors in mind there?

Peacock: (laughs) Absolutely....[read on]

Visit Justin Peacock's website.

The Page 69 Test: A Cure for Night.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joan Waugh

Joan Waugh is professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles.

From her Q & A about her book, U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth:

Q: Why is reviving the image of Ulysses S. Grant as a great American hero so important?

A: I see my book as not "reviving" but "recovering" or even "rediscovering" his image and reputation. I think it's important because people cannot really appreciate the enormous impact of the Civil War if they forget about or dismiss the meaning behind its symbols and heroes, such as U. S. Grant. He embodied the Union cause for Americans of his day -- why the United States fought to preserve the country -- more than any living person of the time.

Q: Tell us about why you divide the book into two parts, first considering Grant's life and his status as an "American Hero" and then examining him as an "American Myth."

A: That's such a good question, and to tell you the truth, I struggled with the organization of the book in terms of how much to write about his life. In the beginning of my project, I assumed that everyone knew about Grant's role in the Civil War and as president (whether they liked him or not), but after researching the topic for a few years, I realized that many of my potential readers might need to be educated about the scale of his accomplishments and achievements. That is why the first chapters of the book highlight his ascent into heroic status while the remaining chapters chronicle the mythic general.

Q: In his day, Grant was considered a hero comparable to the likes of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. Why was Grant so popular in the nineteenth century? What did he represent to the American people?

A: Most Americans held a high regard for the man who, with Lincoln, preserved and sustained the United States. In my book I make clear that white southerners...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

J. Sydney Jones

J. Sydney Jones' books include The Empty Mirror and Requiem in Vienna (the first two books in the Viennese Mystery series), the nonfiction Hitler in Vienna, 1907-1913, the guides Viennawalks and Vienna Inside-Out, and the Vienna-based suspense novel Time of the Wolf.

From his Q & A with Declan Burke:

What crime novel would you most like to have written?

Can we stretch it to thrillers? HARRY’S GAME, by Gerald Seymour. He can do dialogue and pacing like no other. Or perhaps Le Carré’s A MURDER OF QUALITY. Ditto the dialogue. You can almost taste it.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?

Prince Myshkin. He runs under the radar.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?

Guilty as accused: mysteries and thrillers.

Most satisfying writing moment?

I’ve...[read on]

Visit J. Sydney Jones' website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Empty Mirror.

The Page 69 Test: Requiem in Vienna.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laurie Frankel

Laurie Frankel lives in Seattle and teaches in the English Department at the University of Puget Sound.

From a Q & A at Number One Novels about The Atlas of Love, her first novel:

NON: How did you get the idea for your novel?

LF: It’s sort of an alternate universe. I did go to graduate school for literature; I did have close friends there; one did get pregnant. Then not one single thing that happens in the book happened in real life. But real life planted the seed, the "what if instead" scenario. I also sat down at some point and thought about what I wanted to write about, what ideas and themes and big picture points were important to me, and I realized I wanted to write about alternative families, about the idea that there are lots of wonderful ways to be a family--all complicated, all beautiful.

* * *
NON: I think that names say a lot about a person, especially a fictional person. How did you decide on your protagonist’s full name? Did you have any other names that were in the running?

LF: I was sitting in a very boring meeting one day when I started naming characters in the margin of a handout. I figured I needed working names before I could get started, and I could always change them later. But then you get attached and start thinking of them as those people, and the names stick. The best name in the book really is Atlas, who didn’t get named until he was born, and I wish I could remember how that came to me--everyone’s going to ask--but I have no idea. Maybe I should make something up. Later, I liked the name so much I wanted to name my own son Atlas, but...[read on]

The Page 69 Test: The Atlas of Love.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jean M. Auel

From a Q & A with Jean Auel about her 2004 novel, The Shelters of Stone:

Q: You've been known to travel to specific archeological sites around the world to conduct research for your books. Where did you do research for THE SHELTERS OF STONE and how many of the caves in the book are based on actual sites?

A: About thirty thousand years ago, during the last Ice Age, the northern lands were buried under tons of ice a couple of miles thick, but France and other countries of the same latitude were south of the glaciers, which meant people could live there, and did. I have been researching THE SHELTERS OF STONE since my first trip to France in 1982, which was part of my first research trip, during which I also visited Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, and the Ukraine. I have returned to Europe several times for research.

SHELTERS takes place in and around the community of Les Eyzies and along the Vezere River in the Dordogne region of southwest France. I have visited most of the sites there to get a feel for the setting of the story. Some of the caves and rock shelters are relatively unchanged, but others have collapsed or have been irrevocably damaged. Even though conditions are different now, I wanted to see the painted caves and living sites, and how they related to each other and to such things as rivers and other natural formations. Then I had to work out the background details, such as the climate and the way the landscape looked back then.

It was important to get the physical details right because not only have most archaeological specialists of this period studied the French material, but many ordinary people from all over the world have visited the region. Every place mentioned in the book and noted on the end-papers map is a real location that still exists and can be visited today.

Q: While your novels focus on a civilization of the past, there is a very modern theme that runs throughout in Ayla struggling to achieve equality with her peers. When you first created this dynamic character, how much thought did you put into giving her modern sensibilities?

A: The reason there is a modern sensibility to my characters is...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

James Surowiecki

James Surowiecki is the author of The Wisdom of Crowds.

From his Q & A at the publisher's website:

How did you discover the wisdom of crowds?

The idea really came out of my writing on how markets work. Markets are made up of diverse people with different levels of information and intelligence, and yet when you put all those people together and they start buying and selling, they come up with generally intelligent decisions. Sometimes, though, they come up with remarkably stupid decisions—as they did during the stock-market bubble in the late 1990s. I was interested in what explained the successes and the failures of markets, and as I got further into it I realized that it wasn't just markets that were smart. In fact, crowds of all sorts were often remarkably wise.

Could you define "the crowd?"

A "crowd," in the sense that I use the word in the book, is really any group of people who can act collectively to make decisions and solve problems. So, on the one hand, big organizations—like a company or a government agency—count as crowds. And so do small groups, like a team of scientists working on a problem. But just as interested—maybe even more interested—in groups that aren't really aware themselves as groups, like bettors on a horse race or investors in the stock market. They make up crowds, too, because they're collectively producing a solution to a complicated problem: the bets of people betting on a horse race determine what the odds on the race will be, and the choices of investors determine stock prices.

Under what circumstances is the crowd smarter?

There are four key qualities that make a crowd smart. It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd's answer. It needs a way of summarizing people's opinions into one collective verdict. And...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson's latest Inspector Alan Banks novel is Bad Boy.

From his Q & A with Declan Burke:

What crime novel would you most like to have written?

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?

James Bond.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?

I find no guilt in reading anything at all.

Read the complete interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

J.C. Hallman

J.C. Hallman's In Utopia is a new book about modern-day utopian projects.

From his Q & A about the book with Thomas Rogers:

Where does the term "utopia" come from?

The term itself comes from Thomas More's book "On Utopia," written in 1516, which describes a perfect society of Godless pagans in the New World. The idea was that it would shame Christian England into governing better than it was: "Look, if these pagans can do better than you, shame on you." It gave birth to an entire genre of literature. Now the term is retroactively applied to everything from constitutions to manifestoes, fiction and nonfiction.

Why the fascination with utopianism?

I grew up on a street called Utopia Road in a master planned community in California. In the same way that utopias tend to slip away from their original visions, so did some of the ideas about suburban planning, and by the time my particular community was born it was much more driven by profit. For me, growing up meant coming to realize that, right or not, the history of utopian thought has something to do with my own personal heritage.

In the book you write about a project called Pleistocene Rewilding, which proposed to reintroduce large animals -- including elephants and lions -- into North America in order to reestablish the ecosystem that existed several thousand years ago. Why didn't that take off?

Science shows that large animals are really...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart's latest novel is Super Sad True Love Story.

From his Q & A with Deborah Solomon:

Your new novel, “Super Sad True Love Story,” a superliterate sendup of consumer culture, is set in New York in the near future, when books are extinct, eternal life can be purchased by a rich elite, the subway offers business class and see-through jeans are the latest fashion. How do you feel about the word “dystopia”?

“Dystopia” is my middle name. I was born in the Soviet Union, and then we moved to Reagan’s America. We immigrated in 1979, just in time for the Gipper.

In your novel, Fox News has become Fox Liberty Ultra.

I’ve seen Fox News a couple of times. It’s a nice transition from the Pravda of yesteryear. It’s a party line without a party.

And this newspaper becomes The New York Lifestyle Times. Why would you make an unkind prophecy like that?

It means...[read on]

Avi Steinberg, a former prison librarian, thought Lindsay Lohan should read Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story in jail.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Quinn

Peter Quinn's latest historical novel, The Man Who Never Returned, revisits the case of Joseph Force Crater, the real-life New York State Supreme Court judge who mysteriously disappeared in 1930.

From his Q & A about the book with Steven Kurutz for the Wall Street Journal:

Why did Judge Crater's disappearance resonate with people?

For a lot of older New Yorkers, they associate his disappearance with the Depression. By 1932, there were two million people on the road in the U.S., looking for work. Crater became a symbol of that lost time.

The book does a wonderful job of evoking mid-1950s New York, with references to Wanamaker's department store and the Herald Tribune.

That's the city I grew up in. I'm old enough to have been on the Third Avenue El. That city is gone. Of course, that's part of the magic and pain of living in New York—it's always going away.

So are New Yorkers forced to be less sentimental?

New Yorkers are incredibly sentimental. They're never quite happy in the city that is. They want the city that was. When I was a kid, my parents talked about the city at the end of the war. Now people are saying it was such a great city in the '70s. It was so alive and creative. Yes, but the crime was also so bad that you couldn't ride the subways.

What aspect of modern New York would make a great novel?

The new...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue