Rebecca Makkai

Rebecca Makkai's newest novel is The Great Believers.

From her Q&A with Rachel León at the Chicago Review of Books:

Rachel León: As someone who lost someone to AIDS, I wondered if you too had a personal experience with losing someone to AIDS in the 80s or 90s?

Rebecca Makkai: I have a few friends who are HIV positive and my parents had some colleagues who died of AIDS, but it wasn’t anyone I knew personally; I just knew it was happening. I was born in 1978 so as a kid, it seemed like the biggest most important thing that had ever happened. I also think as kids we didn’t dismiss it as happening to those people over there. It felt much more immediate and I don’t think we had the prejudice going into our view of things that adults might have had. So there was that, but also by the time we got to high school in the nineties, all of our Sex Ed was about HIV. I think when I talk to people very close to my own age, even when they didn’t lose someone close to them, it makes a lot of sense that this would be something I’d be drawn to. Whereas for people quite a bit older or quite a bit younger they’re left wondering why I’d write about this, which is so odd to me. Why are we not all writing about this? This is a huge thing that’s happened in our lifetime.

Rachel León: I was born in 1979, so that makes sense.

Rebecca Makkai: Yeah, so you get it. The reaction I’m getting from people, especially with people much older who weren’t effected directly by the crisis, if I tell them what I’m publishing, they’re like, ‘Oh I remember that time,’ as if I’ve just reminded them about something they haven’t thought about in decades, which is probably the case. That’s shocking to me. And with people younger than me, they’re actually...[read on]

Learn more about the author and her work at Rebecca Makkai's website, Facebook page and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: The Borrower.

The Page 69 Test: The Hundred-Year House.

My Book, The Movie: The Hundred-Year House.

My Book, The Movie: The Great Believers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Rodrigo Rey Rosa was born in Guatemala in 1958. He immigrated to New York in 1980, and in 1982 he moved to Morocco. American expatriate writer Paul Bowles, with whom Rey Rosa had been corresponding, translated his first three books into English. Rey Rosa has based many of his writings and stories on legends and myths indigenous to Latin America and North Africa. Of his many works, seven have been translated into English: The Beggar’s Knife, Dust on Her Tongue, The Pelcari Project, The Good Cripple, The African Shore, Severina, and now Chaos, A Fable.

From Rey Rosa's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Chaos, A Fable?

A: A vague idea dawned on me—the idea of writing about a group of young people trying to alter the course of present-day events by any means possible—during a conversation I had with a Muslim acquaintance of mine when I was visiting Morocco in 2015. He kept telling me how crazy the world had become.

In any case, I think that an idea for a novel is only a point of departure, an impulse. I did not know, when I started writing, where this impulse would take me. For me one of the pleasures of writing a long piece, as opposed to a short story, where the "idea" becomes apparent almost immediately, is discovering where a particular impulse, or temptation, may lead --something you cannot know until...[read on]

Learn more about Chaos, A Fable.

Writers Read: Rodrigo Rey Rosa.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jared Cohen

Jared Cohen is the founder and CEO of Jigsaw at Alphabet Inc. He also serves as an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, he ran Google Ideas at Google Inc. and served as chief advisor to Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. From 2006 to 2010 he served as a member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff and as a close advisor to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.

Cohen's newest book is Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America. From the transcript of his interview with Fareed Zakaria:

ZAKARIA: You -- you talk about, you know, in some ways the most famous succession certainly of the 19th Century, Lincoln's assassination and Andrew Johnson becomes president, generally regarded as the worst president in American history.

So the puzzle that you try to answer is how could the person who many people regard as the best president in American history have picked a vice president who ended up being the worst president in American history?

COHEN: Well, that's precisely right, Fareed. So, you know, when you look how we basically win presidential succession throughout the course of our history, it's easy to want to say we got lucky and we navigated it and we ended up more or less OK. But that neglects the reality that we were supposed to get Abraham Lincoln's vision for Reconstruction and instead the bullet of John Wilkes Booth's gun gave us Andrew Johnson, a man who was born a racist, died a racist, the last president to own slaves, ends up resurrecting almost all elements of the old Confederacy, which gives us the black codes, which is the precursor to Jim Crow, which gives us segregation.

So when I set out to write this book, what I wanted to do was vindicate the choice of Andrew Johnson in 1864. And back then the president didn't choose the running mate, but Lincoln, knowing that he had a slim shot at winning the election in 1864, had this whole masterful intrigue to get a war Democrat from a border state on the ticket.

And in 1864 Andrew Johnson was the only Southern senator who had stayed loyal to the Union. He was actually revered in the North. And because he wanted to put the Union back together, his rhetoric at the time was more forward-leaning on civil rights and punishment for traitors than even -- than even Abraham Lincoln.

But when he becomes president, which by the way is after an embarrassing drunken display where he takes the oath of office as vice president and ends up slobbering all over the Bible, when he becomes president shortly after the Civil War ends and then tactically he goes back to his old ways and the real Andrew Johnson makes...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Rachel Howard

Rachel Howard is a writer of fiction, personal essays, memoir, and dance criticism. Her debut novel is The Risk of Us.

From Howard's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You note that The Risk of Us originated with your own family's story, but that you decided to write the story as fiction "to make a space for readers to be in this tension and ambiguity of trying to become a family, but I didn't want it to be about me." What did you see as the right blend between your own experiences and your fictional creations as you wrote the novel?

A: Ah, that’s a tough question. The honest answer is that I didn’t decide on a right proportion for the blend. I’ve spent a lot of years wrestling with the question of “What is the difference between memoir and fiction?” because I’ve long loved to read and write fiction, but my first book was a memoir.

I’ve come to believe that, for me, the differences are primarily two: First, the impetus for memoir (at least for me) has to do with self-excavation and self-discovery, maybe even a cathartic writing myself to the end of one life story and the beginning of another.

Second, memoir can do some relying on the power of telling the reader “This really happened.” The inner reality of its pages connects to outer, real-life reality. Whereas to me, in fiction—even if I know the story aligns in some ways with the writer’s life facts—the story has its own internal reality. Either its internal reality is fully and self-sufficiently convincing, or the work is not quite whole.

For that reason, as I wrote The Risk of Us, I treated my own family’s experience in the foster care world as a starting point for the internal reality of the book. Very quickly as I thought about the dynamics I wanted to set up between the characters and the story shape, some things...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Gerhardt

Michael J. Gerhardt is Samuel Ashe Distinguished Professor in Constitutional Law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His books include Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know®.

From Gerhardt's Q&A with Isaac Chotiner for The New Yorker:

What do you think the post-Mueller debate around Trump and impeachment is capturing or failing to capture about the proper way to think about the subject?

I think that much of the public debate doesn’t understand impeachment properly. There are arguments made, positions taken, but they’re not really well tailored for the impeachment process.

One of the essential things about impeachment is that it does not have to be based on an actual criminal violation, and it does not have to track the elements in a federal criminal statute or state criminal statute. It’s perfectly well within the power of Congress, in particular the House, to frame impeachment on the basis of things that are not themselves criminal.

A lot of the discourse has been focussing on whether or not whatever the President did is actual criminal misconduct. Yes, a criminal statute violation, like perjury, for example, could be a basis for impeachment, but you don’t need the technical criminal violation. A President lying to the public—that could be a basis for impeachment. Or a President trying to interfere with an investigation. Those things could be understood as abuse of power, and they don’t have to be criminal.

It still seems like there’s a distinction that could be made. You could say that the way the President has behaved about Russia—everything from calling for Hillary Clinton’s e-mails to be hacked to firing James Comey or telling Don McGahn to fire Mueller—rises to the level of impeachment. Or you could say that Donald Trump, more generally, is acting like an immoral person and is lying to the American people. Forget Russia: he should be impeached because he is not fit to be President. Those seem like two different things to me, even though neither of them is necessarily based around a specific crime.

Well, I think you’re right to raise those two things. I think each of those, separately, could be a credible or permissible basis for impeachment. And it could also be argued that, if there were a technical violation of the criminal statute, such as obstruction, that could also be a basis for impeachment. The classic definition of impeachable offense would be a serious abuse of power or...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Erin Gough

Erin Gough is a Sydney-based writer whose first young adult novel, The Flywheel, won Hardie Grant Egmont’s Ampersand Prize. The Flywheel was published in the US as Get it Together, Delilah! and was shortlisted for the CBCA’s Book of the Year for Older Readers and the Centre for Youth Literature’s Gold Inky. It was also named a White Raven International Youth Library title.

Gough's new novel is Amelia Westlake Was Never Here.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You note that the idea for Amelia Westlake came from your own high school experiences. How did that lead to your writing the novel?

A: That's right. The original idea came from a hoax I did with two of my school friends when we were in our final school year. That hoax was the best thing about high school as far as I’m concerned, and I thought it would be fun to revisit it in fiction.

As I began writing the story - about three years ago now – I realised it was developing into an exploration of power and privilege. As it happened, those concerns were becoming central to the cultural conversation as well, and we’ve since seen them culminate in the “me too” movement.

Q: How did you come up with your characters Will and Harriet, and did you always plan on writing from both points of view?

A: Will and Harriet were both part of my original plan for the novel. I liked the idea of having two people behind the hoax, and the opposites attract trope has always been a favourite of mine - I could see these ideas working well together. I was also excited about...[read on]

Visit Erin Gough's website.

The Page 69 Test: Amelia Westlake Was Never Here.

--Marshal Zeringue

Roxana Robinson

Roxana Robinson's new novel is Dawson's Fall.

From her interview with Scoundrel Time’s Robert Anthony Siegel:

Robert Anthony Siegel: Dawson’s Fall is based on the dramatic lives of your great-grandparents, Francis and Sarah Dawson, white Southerners who lived through the Civil War and Reconstruction. What made this feel like the right moment for their story? Did it have something to do with the ongoing national conversation on race? Or was the timing more personal?

Roxana Robinson: I usually know exactly when and why I start a book, but in this case, I don’t know when I began to turn my attention to this story. I had deliberately ignored the subject for a number of years. I owned some family papers, and Dawson scholars had sent me others. I knew that a large archive existed at Duke and the subject seemed too big and too burdensome to take on – until suddenly it was not. At first, I wanted just to understand my family, but as I learned more about that time and place I came to understand that I was exploring much more than my family history. I was learning about large American issues – slavery and violence – through these characters. The subject became compelling, and seemed important. These issues were also part of my own path as a writer. I had written before on the subject of moral consequences: the consequences of divorce, of our treatment of the environment, of our behavior within the family, of war, and our treatment of soldiers. So that to write about the moral consequences of slavery was part of this exploration of our national conscience. The book took me five years to write, and with each year the subject seemed...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Roxana Robinson’s website.

The Page 69 Test: Cost.

My Book, The Movie: Cost.

The Page 69 Test: Sparta.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kaira Rouda

Kaira Rouda's new novel is The Favorite Daughter.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Favorite Daughter, and for your character Jane?

A: Much like Paul in Best Day Ever, Jane popped into my head one sunny day. And the rest of the book flowed from there. I’m intrigued by what goes on behind closed doors of seemingly perfect lives. And, although her family has been struck by tragedy, Jane still believes it’s almost perfect, and can be again.

Q: You write of narcissists, "Although it may seem terrifying to some that I enjoy getting inside the heads of these types of people in my most recent novels, to me, it's cathartic." Why is that?

A: No idea. I suppose once you know these personalities exist, and you see them in action in the world, causing commotion wherever they go, a good way to try to understand them better is through…[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Kaira Rouda's website.

My Book, The Movie: Here, Home, Hope.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond's latest book is Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis.

From his Q&A with David Wallace-Wells for Intelligencer:

How likely do you think that is? That the whole network of civilization would collapse?

I would estimate the chances are about 49 percent that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050. I’ll be dead by then but my kids will be, what? Sixty-three years old in 2050. So this is a subject of much practical interest to me. At the rate we’re going now, resources that are essential for complex societies are being managed unsustainably. Fisheries around the world, most fisheries are being managed unsustainably, and they’re getting depleted. Farms around the world, most farms are being managed unsustainably. Soil, topsoil around the world. Fresh water around the world is being managed unsustainably. With all these things, at the rate we’re going now, we can carry on with our present unsustainable use for a few decades, and by around 2050 we won’t be able to continue it any longer. Which means that by 2050 either we’ve figured out a sustainable course, or it’ll be too late.

So let’s talk about that sustainable course. What are the lessons in the new book that might help us adjust our course in that way?

As far as national crises are concerned, the first step is acknowledge — the country has to acknowledge that it’s in a crisis. If the country denies that it’s in a crisis, of course if you deny you’re in a crisis, you’re not going to solve the crisis, number one. In the United States today, lots of Americans...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Randy Susan Meyers

Randy Susan Meyers's new novel is Waisted.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: In our previous interview, you said of Waisted, "It was hard to write." Why was that?

A: I played with the first line of this book for over a decade: “Everyone hates a fat woman,” but I wrote and published four books before using it in Waisted. The story screamed in my head, but I kept it locked away because writing it meant facing myself. Writ honest, the novel would have to include tales of self-loathing, hiding food, and scale-terror. All of which I face daily.

Feeling ready to hit the personal nadir that delving into issues of women and weight could/would ignite took years. Hiding from the truth was far more inviting. And yet, “Everyone hates a fat woman” wouldn’t let go. So, I began.

Once embroiled in the story, I wanted to never eat again, and I wanted to eat every minute. I never wanted to look at a scale, and I wanted to weigh myself three times a day. Part of me wanted to continue denying the cruelty we face from ourselves and others, but I also felt the urge to open myself to every loathsome thought I’d ever had about myself and every bit of self-hatred I (and I imagined other women) held.

I reckoned with my mother teaching me to hate anything short of perfection. I remembered and confronted the question she’d ask on almost every phone call: “How’s your weight?”— as though “my weight” was something separate from me. Like a roly-poly puppy I dragged behind me. Or a snarling feral bear.

Inhabiting my characters forced ...[read on]

Visit Randy Susan Meyers' website.

The Page 69 Test: The Murderer's Daughters.

The Page 69 Test: The Widow of Wall Street.

--Marshal Zeringue