Arvin Ahmadi

Arvin Ahmadi's debut novel for young adults is Down And Across. From the transcript of the author's interview with NPR's Scott Simon:

SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Scott Ferdowsi is 16 years old, hasn't figured out what he wants to do with his life. That worries his Iranian-American parents who believe their son lacks drive - grit - and doesn't take advantage of the opportunities they work so hard to give him. Hoping to find his purpose in life, Scott quits his perfectly good summer internship, high-tails it to Washington D.C., the city of ambitious young people working as bartenders and servers on their way to being lobbyists and legislators. "Down And Across" is the debut novel for young adults from Arvin Ahmadi. He joins us from New York.

Thanks so much for being with us.

ARVIN AHMADI: Thank you for having me.

SIMON: Does he lack grit, or has he just not found something to fall in love with a little?

AHMADI: He doesn't know. And that's the thing. And that's kind of how I fell upon grit. It's this inspirational idea that the No.1 indicator of success isn't your IQ or where you come from, it's grit, your ability to persevere.

SIMON: Tenacity might be - yeah.

AHMADI: Sure. Tenacity, persistence. But...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Xhenet Aliu

Xhenet Aliu's new novel is Brass.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Brass, and for your characters Elsie and Luljeta?

A: Growing up in Waterbury, Connecticut, I was surrounded--at home, at work in the industrial park, in my community college classes--by a lot of women who informed the character of Elsie.

These were single moms with a ton of hustle, women who lived hard lives and still managed to have a nasty sense of humor, women who were sharp enough that, if they’d been born just a few minutes down the road in some of the wealthier parts of Connecticut, it would have been assumed that they would go to college and thrive in the obvious ways that our culture values.

I knew Elsie so well that I barely had to write her; it just took me a while to figure out that there was a reason to.

When I first started writing seriously, I was panicked because I thought a person like me, with no pedigree and not a cosmopolitan bone in my body, had no stories to tell.

I didn’t think people wanted to read about things like poor and working-class people, recent immigrants who weren’t success stories, post-industrial factory towns, because I so infrequently encountered them myself as a reader. Eventually I realized...[read on]

Visit Xhenet Aliu's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Lippman

Laura Lippman's new novel is Sunburn.

From her Q&A with Lloyd Sachs at the Chicago Tribune:

Q: One of the most impressive things about "Sunburn" is that for all its cutting touches, all of the characters are afforded a level of understanding you don't often find in this kind of novel.

A: That human scale wasn't there in an early version. A good friend who read it when I was midway through said to me, "That's not you. That's not the kind of book you write." And I knew that wasn't the kind of book that interests me as a reader.

Q: What led to you to take on noir after all these years as a novelist?

A: I had read Anne Tyler's "Ladder of Years," a dark, cathartic fantasy in which a woman escapes her unhappy family life and spends time alone, in her own house, for a long period of time. And I thought that could be a noir story: What if the person passing through town is a woman? I didn't want to write about the present day, but a time when it was easier to disappear. So I set it in 1995, before...[read on]

Visit Laura Lippman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Caroline Fraser

Caroline Fraser's new biography Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, is a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Award. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: What first got you interested in writing a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder?

A: I first thought about it seriously when I was working on the chronology and notes for the Library of America edition of the Little House books, which I edited. As I was writing those materials, I kept coming across such fascinating stuff in the history she lived through, and it made me want to learn more.

There were all these tantalizing clues in the letters she wrote to her daughter, Rose, about the Dust Bowl and the Depression, about the history of the locust outbreaks and drought on the Great Plains, and even the ways in which her work for the federal government, as secretary/treasurer for the National Farm Loan Association, somehow evolved into her disdain for the New Deal.

The more I learned, the more I felt readers might respond to the historical background of Wilder’s life. There was a moment when I was writing a note about the “Minnesota massacre,” as Wilder calls it in Little House on the Prairie, when I was reading about the history of the U.S. Dakota War of 1862.

And I just thought...[read on]

The Page 99 Test: Rewilding the World.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dennis Palumbo

Dennis Palumbo's new novel is Head Wounds.

From his Q&A with Mike Barson at Crimespree magazine:

MB: Even though you have lived in Los Angeles for decades, you continue to set the Rinaldi series in your hometown of Pittsburgh. What are a couple of the things you particularly love about Pittsburgh?

DP: There are too many to list, but I’d definitely start with the people—friendly, colorful, opinionated, and with familial roots going back generations. Certainly true of my Italian family, tracing back to immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island. Then, as a locale in which to set a mystery series, the city itself is an intriguing amalgam of old and new, transitioning from a blue collar, industrial town into a white collar, state-of-the-art tech hub. As you might imagine, this has resulted in an uneasy clash of cultures that I get to explore in my Rinaldi series.

MB: As a licensed psychotherapist, you have knowledge that is not available to us civilians… Have you ever drawn on that expertise to help shape the villains in this series?

DP: Yes, primarily from my earliest clinical work as a staff member at a psychiatric facility. Plus all the research I’ve done on psychopathology and various personality disorders. In terms of how Daniel Rinaldi helps victims of violent crime, I was privileged to work with one of the nation’s leading trauma experts, Dr. Robert Stolorow. My fictional psychologist incorporates much of...[read on]

Visit Dennis Palumbo's website.

My Book, The Movie: Night Terrors.

The Page 69 Test: Phantom Limb.

My Book, The Movie: Phantom Limb.

Writers Read: Dennis Palumbo (February 2015).

--Marshal Zeringue

Meg Gardiner

Meg Gardiner's new novel is Into the Black Nowhere.

From her Q&A with Texas Monthly:

TM: We’re also at a moment when there’s a great deal of public discussion of the victimization of women. In your books there are a lot of male villains preying on women. Do you feel like you’ve been tapping into an undercurrent that’s suddenly front-page news?

MG: I do. I’m very aware that women are exploited, even in a twenty-first-century Western country. If I can expose some of that and some of the ways that even a seemingly normal person can exploit people, maybe it’s valuable. But I also wanted to feature female investigators who have agency—literally and metaphorically—to tackle the issue.

TM: Right now there’s also a very nationalist and violent right wing on the rise in America. Is that a subject that interests you?

MG: Absolutely. My family is from Oklahoma City. The morning the [Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was blown up by Timothy McVeigh, in 1995], my aunt was driving down the street and was injured in the bombing. My grandmother was volunteering at a hospital just blocks away and was there until one in the morning as they brought people in. It rocked the city, and I don’t think it rocked the country...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Meg Gardiner's website, blog, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

The Page 69 Test: The Dirty Secrets Club.

The Page 69 Test: The Memory Collector.

My Book, The Movie: Meg Gardiner's Evan Delaney series.

The Page 69 Test: The Liar's Lullaby.

My Book, The Movie: Meg Gardiner's Jo Beckett series.

The Page 69 Test: The Nightmare Thief.

The Page 69 Test: Ransom River.

The Page 69 Test: The Shadow Tracer.

The Page 69 Test: Phantom Instinct.

The Page 69 Test: UNSUB.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Tapper

Michael Tapper is the author of Ingmar Bergman’s Face to Face.

From Tapper's interview at the Columbia University Press website:

Q: What are the main discoveries about Bergman in the book?

Besides his image makeover it could be summarized in a few words as: TV, Henrik Ibsen, primal therapy and politics. He did not choose TV just out of financial necessity when the film industry faced a severe crisis, he actually loved the new medium and longed to explore it as an artist. It was technically primitive, which suited the austere style with little scenery he had perfected in the late 1960s.

Much has been written about Bergman’s artistic relationship with August Strindberg, but in the 1960s and 70s Henrik Ibsen became an important source of inspiration. Bergman staged several of Ibsen’s most important and influential plays, and updated both Ibsen’s themes and modernist strategies in his TV productions. The most obvious case is Scenes from a Marriage, in which Ibsen’s A Doll House is explicitly referenced.

For anyone who lived through the 1970s, the cultural impact of Arthur Janov’s primal therapy is unforgettable and Bergman was one of many who were spellbound. He not only read Janov’s then-bestselling books and let the famous psychiatrist’s ideas flow into the work on Face to Face, working title: “The Psychiatrist”, he also contacted Janov and met with him at the Primal Center in Santa Monica. There were even talks about them working on a film project together, but the tax-evasion scandal in April 1976 put a stop to these plans.

Politics was also central to Bergman’s work in this period, although no scholar has really touched on the subject. Frequently, texts on Bergman imply that he was an opponent to the social democratic politics that shaped post-war Sweden. In fact, the opposite is true. He was a fervent supporter of the social democratic party, considered himself to be a socialist and even contemplated going into politics in the early 1970s. This can be supported by several interviews.

More complicated was his relationship with feminism. He considered himself as feminist and was convinced that he had more feminine than masculine sensibilities, but...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Janet Fitch

Janet Fitch is a writer and a teacher of fiction writing.

She is the author of the #1 national bestseller White Oleander, a novel translated into 24 languages, an Oprah Book Club book and the basis of a feature film, and Paint It Black, also widely translated and made into a 2017 film.

Fitch's latest novel is The Revolution of Marina M.

From her Q&A with Jennifer Haupt at the Psychology Today blog:

JH: What was at the inner furnace of this novel?

JF: For me, it was always staying in the inner life of the character, Marina, and not trying to extricate the different political positions and philosophies that were happening at the time, aspects of history that were interesting to me but not intrinsic to the story.

JH: Where did this story begin for you? Did it begin with Marina?

JF: Well, that’s like asking “Where does a river begin?” A river begins from many different rivulets, creeks, and brooks. They come together and build a broader body of water recognizable as a river; that’s your book. One strand of this novel is my background as a history major in college focusing on Russia. I’ve also long been a little bit in love with everything Russian, especially literature. I have often had Russian characters in my writing. It was only a matter of time until there would be a Russian novel.

This novel actually began with a failed novel I wrote before “Paint It Black.” A story came out of that novel, about a Russian émigré working in L.A. in the 1920s. I loved that character and thought maybe I could write a novel about her. But when I tried to write her story in the ‘20s, I realized I didn’t know enough about her. I wanted to know what her life was like during the Russian revolution. What were her memories? Her experiences? Every time...[read on]

Visit Janet Fitch's website.

The Page 99 Test: Janet Fitch's Paint It Black.

The Page 69 Test: The Revolution of Marina M..

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Buchan

Elizabeth Buchan is the author most recently of the novels The New Mrs. Clifton and I Can't Begin to Tell You. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Your two most recent books are set during World War II and its aftermath. Why did you choose that period to write about in these novels?

A: I am always intrigued how, even if the writer has already written about it, a subject sometimes refuses to die and nags away until something is done. But, then. who wouldn’t be fascinated by the women who worked in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War?

My second novel, Light of the Moon, was about a female SOE agent operating undercover in occupied France where she discovers, like Edith Cavell, that patriotism is not enough.

Researching for it proved to be addictive and I made many contacts and some cherished new friends who worked in the undercover agencies.

They told me about the beautiful and fantastically brave Violette Szabo (Carve Her Name with Pride), the equally splendid and intriguing Christine Granville, and the extraordinary Nancy Wake who they revered for their cool bravery and resourcefulness.

All of the agents, both the men and the women, knew that...[read on]

Visit Elizabeth Buchan's website.

The Page 69 Test: Separate Beds.

Writers Read: Elizabeth Buchan (March 2011).

My Book, The Movie: Separate Beds.

--Marshal Zeringue

Melanie Benjamin

Melanie Benjamin is the author of the New York Times and USA Today bestselling historical novels The Swans of Fifth Avenue, about Truman Capote and his society swans, and The Aviator's Wife, a novel about Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Previous historical novels include the national bestseller Alice I Have Been, about Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland, and The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb, the story of 32-inch-tall Lavinia Warren Stratton, a star during the Gilded Age.

Benjamin's new novel is The Girls in the Picture.

From her Q&A with Anna Roins at Authorlink:

AUTHORLINK: Thank you for joining us here at Authorlink to discuss your latest, remarkable release, The Girls in the Picture. It’s about Hollywood pioneers; screenwriter, Frances Marion and movie-star, Mary Pickford and their passion to create movies together despite the challenges imposed on their gender. Was it your intention to explore their relationship from the start, or did it just develop that way once you started writing?

BENJAMIN: Yes, it was always going to be about their relationship. I’ve read bios of both women, and books about the silent era just because I’m fascinated with that time and place and the people who created the film industry. And in reading, I became intrigued about this friendship and all it meant to both the women, and the industry as a whole. Of course when writing a novel, you need that arc; you can’t just write of a time or place without a great story to tie it all together. So this book about this particular time and place was always going to have this friendship as that narrative driver.

AUTHORLINK: Terrific, thank you. Some women in Hollywood are still struggling to have their creative voices heard today. Do you believe there will ever be an even-divide between male and female scriptwriters, directors, producers and actors?

BENJAMIN: Well, we can...[read on]

Visit Melanie Benjamin's website.

The Page 69 Test: Alice I Have Been.

The Page 69 Test: The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb.

My Book, The Movie: The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb.

The Page 69 Test: The Aviator's Wife.

The Page 69 Test: The Swans of Fifth Avenue.

The Page 69 Test: The Girls in the Picture.

Writers Read: Melanie Benjamin.

--Marshal Zeringue