Wade Davis

Wade Davis's latest book is Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest.

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

Q: How is INTO THE SILENCE different from other books that have tackled Everest and what new information will readers come away with?

A: I think it is fair to say that most books on the subject focus on the figure of George Mallory, and none of them really place these expeditions in their historical context. Altogether 26 men set off for Everest in 1921-24 and each was without doubt as compelling a personality, with as complex a past, as Mallory. Into the Silence is the first book to celebrate and bring into profile the extraordinary biographies of each of the men.

If Everest began as grand imperial gesture, it really did end up as a mission of regeneration and redemption for a nation and an empire bled white by war. What’s more these expeditions did not take place in isolation, but rather in the context of the era- the Great Game and the final years of the Raj, the complex diplomatic maneuverings between the British, the Russians and the Chinese. Permission to climb the mountain grew out of an arms deal that was itself part of a grand diplomatic scheme brought into being by Charles Bell.

Into the Silence is also the first book to examine these expeditions from the point of view of the Tibetans. To do so I spent weeks in monasteries, trekked throughout the region with Dorjee Lhatoo, and secured the first complete translation of the spiritual autobiography of Dzatrul Rinpoche, the abbot of Rongbuk who greeted the British in 1921-24. Puzzles that have perplexed scholars for decades are solved. Why and how was Finch excluded from the 1921 effort? Who actually discovered the route to the North Col, the doorway to the mountain? Why was Howard-Bury selected to lead 1921, yet excluded from subsequent expeditions? Why Mallory chose to climb with Irvine? How Finch was betrayed in 1922 and yet, had he not chosen to save the life of Geoffrey Bruce, might well have reached the top. Wheeler has been overlooked in every other book, yet he was the key figure in 1921. John Noel went to his grave speaking of his service in the war. His own family does not know he sat out the war shell-shocked. Finch’s own daughter is unaware that her father had...[read on]

See Wade Davis's list of six notable books about World War I.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Carey

Peter Carey's novels include Parrot and Olivier in America.

From his Q & A at the Man Booker Prize website:

MBP: You were researching [Parrot and Olivier in America] in America during the presidential elections. Was Democracy in America often cited during the campaigning? How important is it to contemporary American politics?

PC: I don't recall Tocqueville being quoted during the campaign, although he is always being quoted, so I must be wrong. When I first learned that my American friends had all studied Democracy in America at school, I foolishly believed that this must have involved them reading the entire book. Of course I have met many people who have read every single word, but the majority seem to have read only those pages where Tocqueville speaks in support of the American idea. His doubts and fears have completely passed them by.

MBP: Many of your novels play out across two countries. Is this something to do with being an Australian living in New York?

PC: I think it has a great deal to do with being born in a Commonwealth country in 1943, inheriting the notion that there was a real country somewhere else, not where I was born. That home was a green place we had never visited, where our own success and failure would ultimately be judged. Thinking of two countries is a colonial habit. To understand how Australian politicians live in two countries, look at our enthusiasm for British and (later) American military causes.

In any case, I have always inhabited two worlds simultaneously. One in my head and the other...[read on]

Read a 2006 blog post on "Cultural cringe" and Peter Carey's Theft.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Ellroy

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels—The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz—were international best sellers. His novel American Tabloid was Time magazine’s Best Book (fiction) of 1995; his memoir, My Dark Places, was a Time Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book for 1996. His novel The Cold Six Thousand was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book for 2001.

From a conversation between Ellroy and novelist David Peace, in the Guardian back in 2010:

DP Did you write American Tabloid knowing it would be the first book of a trilogy?

JE As I began the finishing of Tabloid, I saw that it was a trilogy, and I saw that the second book would be the big book about the 60s.

DP Had you also envisaged the third book?

JE Not in any kind of detail, no. Because the politics and the social upheaval of America during the 60s are so obvious – you got the anti-war protests, the civil rights movement, the racism of the South, Howard Hughes buying up Las Vegas – I had a lot of it right at the gate. But when you go into 1972, as this book [Blood's a Rover] does, it's less charted territory.

DP At what point did you decide on the various timeframes for each novel?

JE I had decided to end the first two books with the assassinations (of JFK in 1963, and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968), and then the death of Hoover in '72 unfolded as the logical conclusion to the trilogy.

DP These are huge stories, huge histories. What are your research methods?

JE They are...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Kameron Hurley

Kameron Hurley's books include God’s War and Infidel.

From her Q & A at The Ranting Dragon:

So for those unfamiliar with the novel, what is God’s War about?

God’s War is a screaming, bloody adventure story set on a ravaged, contaminated world where a centuries-old holy war rages. It follows an inglorious former government assassin named Nyx and her ragtag band of felons, mercenaries, and magicians in their hunt to take down an alien gene pirate who may hold the key to ending the war.

How did the idea of Nyx come up for you? Did anyone inspire you for that character?

Nyx is a natural evolution of some complex bloody heroines I developed in early short stories. They were from post-apocalyptic/desert/resource-poor worlds, and I knew that I wanted to have the same kind of hard-bitten, experienced, take-no-prisoners personality type for Nyx.

When I started patching together what I thought was going to be my “bounty hunter novel” those characters were certainly at the top of my mind. Thing is, the more depth you give your world, the more unique the character becomes to that world. I don’t know that Nyx could exist without Umayma. That’s something I think is key to building memorable characters. They have to be people who simply couldn’t exist if you picked them up and put them somewhere else.

Was there a character that you related to more than any others? Was there a story that you enjoyed telling more than any other?

Nyx is by far easiest to write, so...[read on]

My Book, The Movie: God’s War and Infidel.

Writers Read: Kameron Hurley.

--Marshal Zeringue

William Gibson

From William Gibson's 2011 interview by David Wallace-Wells for The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

How do you begin a novel?

GIBSON

I have to write an opening sentence. I think with one exception I’ve never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.

INTERVIEWER

You won’t have planned beyond that one sentence?

GIBSON

No. I don’t begin a novel with a shopping list—the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It’s like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn’t a violin. That’s what I do when I’m writing a novel, except somehow I’m simultaneously generating the wood as I’m carving it.

E. M. Forster’s idea has always stuck with me—that a writer who’s fully in control of the characters hasn’t even started to do the work. I’ve never had any direct fictional input, that I know of, from dreams, but when I’m working optimally I’m in the equivalent of an ongoing lucid dream. That gives me my story, but it also leaves me devoid of much theoretical or philosophical rationale for why the story winds up as it does on the page. The sort of narratives I don’t trust, as a reader, smell of homework.

INTERVIEWER

Do you take notes?

GIBSON

I take the position that if I can...[read on]

Learn what Gibson is scared of.

Gibson's Neuromancer made PopCrunch's list of the sixteen best dystopian books of all time and Annalee Newitz lists of ten great American dystopias and "Thirteen Books That Will Change The Way You Look At Robots.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Sims

Michael Sims is the editor of The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories.

From his Q & A with the Jacket Copy blog:

Jacket Copy: The book’s subtitle refers to this as “a connoisseur’s collection.” How is this book different from other collections of Victorian-era stories of detection?

Michael Sims: For decades I dreamed about editing the ideal anthology: a carefully chosen mix of representative stories that includes forgotten works by big-name authors and lost gems by forgotten authors, an introduction that places the genre and authors in literary and historical context, an introduction to each story that goes beyond a brief note cobbled from Wikipedia entries and includes some of the literary anecdotes my disheveled magpie brain has hoarded over the years, everything in chronological order to show the genre's growth, and a hefty number of handsome pages but not too heavy to read in bed.

So I designed my Connoisseur's Collection series for Walker and Bloomsbury (the first volume was "Dracula's Guest," about vampires, and the third volume will be "The Phantom Coach," about ghosts) to expressly avoid the slips in these categories that I have found disappointing in some other anthologies.

JC: Crimes are puzzles, and the popularity of crime stories and thrillers has to do with the fact that just about everyone loves a good puzzle. Are there certain principles or elements that the mysteries in your book have in common?

MS: I hope readers won't be able to find much in common between these stories except...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin's many books include the Earthsea series.

From her Q & A with readers at the Guardian in 2004:

Q: One of the most memorable images of the Earthsea books is that of the "wall of stones" and the grey world of the dead beyond. The idea of a shadowy world of despair seems to crop up a lot in SF - in the last century I'm reminded of Philip K Dick's "tomb world", or the grey town in CS Lewis's The Great Divorce, or most recently the world of the dead in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. I guess there are more ancient parallels in the Old Testament references to "Sheol" or the Greek conception of the Fields of Asphodel. Why do you think so many writers have talked about death in these terms and is there a reason why it is such a recurring theme in the Earthsea books?

UKL: The dark, dry, changeless world after death of Earthsea comes (in so far as I am conscious of its sources) from the Greco-Roman idea of Hades' realm, from certain images in Dante, and from one of Rilke's Elegies. A realm of shadow, dust, where nothing changes and "lovers pass each other in silence" - it seems a fairly common way of thinking about what personal existence after death would be, not a specifically modern one? I do hope you noticed that the wall of stones was broken down in the sixth book of Earthsea, and that all that world of dust and silence was...[read on]

A Wizard of Earthsea is one of Lev Grossman's five top fantasy novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emma Donoghue

Emma Donoghue's latest novel is Room.

From her Q & A at the Man Booker Prize site:

MBP: Room begins with a mother and son captured and living in one room - it's an incredibly chilling and powerful novel. Reviewers have written said that you were influenced by the Elizabeth Fritzl and Jaycee Lee Dugard cases - is this the case and how difficult was it to read this unsettling factual material?

ED: It was the Fritzl case that triggered the idea of the book, as it happens; the Dugard case did not hit the headlines until after the book was written. I was careful to distance the scenario in my book from any of the real-life ones I was reading about, but the research I did was certainly very helpful on, in particular, the issue of how captives cope. The stories I found most distressing were not those of kidnaps, in fact, but those of children raised in appallingly confined, neglected or maltreated situations, usually by their own parents. I deliberately made the circumstances in Room much less horrific than any of the real cases; I did not want to pile up horrors for my readers, but to focus their minds on the more existential issue of confinement.

MBP: In Room, the reader is led to believe that an escape will be the end of their ordeal - yet the ‘outside' world presents new challenges. Did you do any research into how victims coped with life after this kind of imprisonment? Are there themes in victims' responses?

ED: The most interesting material was in studies of solitary confinement, which is widely used in American jails, for instance. The long-term psychic damage of this kind of punitive isolation is clear, so it seemed to me that Ma would have many problems coping with the social world for which she has been longing. And for Jack, of course, much about our world is utterly alien - and not just because...[read on]

Learn about the book at changed Emma Donoghue's life.

--Marshal Zeringue

Qiu Xiaolong

Qiu Xiaolong, author of the Inspector Chen mysteries, came to the United States as a Ford Foundation Fellow in 1988, earning a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Following the bloody 1989 anti-democracy crackdown at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, he resolved to stay on in the US and began writing in English.

From his Q & A with PBS:

How difficult was it to begin writing in English? When you’re writing, are you thinking in English or Chinese?

I started writing in English in 1989, after what had happened in Tiananmen Square that summer. I was banned from publishing in Chinese. And because of it, I had no choice but to struggle with English, though it was really difficult. Nowadays, while working on the novels, I think in English, but it can still be difficult, often with problems unimaginable to a native speaker. For instance, in Red Mandarin Dress, I had a hard time describing some clothing style in detail. My wife talks to me about her shopping only in Chinese. So I had to consult my daughter Julia, who was born here.

Having said that, I want to add that it is not always a disadvantage for a non-native speaker to write in English. For me, the Chinese, still in the subconscious, appears to provide an alternative sensibility to the English writing. For one thing, phrases and expressions overused in one language may become vivid and refreshing in another, not to mention the other experimental other possibilities in syntax and structure.

How do you think the current global economic crisis will affect what you’ve said is a “rampant materialism” that has taken hold in China?

The current global economic crisis has certainly affected China, but regarding the “rampant materialism,” the situation may be complicated. To a considerable extent, it has developed out of the ideological disillusion after the Cultural Revolution. With the demise of Confucianism and Maoism, it’s largely “a spiritual vacuum,” as sometimes described in Chinese media. Walking about in Shanghai, you may see more luxurious brand stores with people busy in conspicuous consumption than anywhere else. Prior to the global economic crisis, ironically, a small number of Chinese intellectuals looked to the capitalist culture for support of their values, and now people are reading a newly-released bestseller entitled China Pissed Off, denouncing and decrying the evils revealed in the crisis of the West. So it’s possible that materialism may grow more rampant, even self-justified, that is, provided the economy does not crash in China in the short term.

How did you decide to take up mystery writing, and who was the inspiration for Inspector Chen?

In...[read on]

The Inspector Chen mysteries appear among Jonathan Fenby's top books on modern China and on Catherine Sampson's top ten list of Asian crime fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jon Steele

Jon Steele's new novel is The Watchers.

From his Q & A with Declan Burke:

What crime novel would you most like to have written?

THE LONG GOODBYE by Raymond Chandler.
* * *

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?

MULLINER’S TALES by P.G Wodehouse. One story before bedtime. Add a cup of hot chocolate and life is about as good as if gets.
* * *

The best Irish crime novel is …?

THE WRONG KIND OF BLOOD by Declan Hughes. (no kidding) Everything about it appeals to...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue