Thomas Perry

One of my favorite thriller writers, Thomas Perry, gave an interview to Robert Birnbaum in 2003. It opens:

Robert Birnbaum: You’ve written how many Jane Whitefield books?

Thomas Perry: Five.

RB: I must confess I lost interest in series, and so I probably have read only three of them. Why did you stop writing the Whitefield series?

TP: Because you were losing interest in the series. (both laugh) Writing the series is fun. It’s a situation that almost feels like having a job. A real, legitimate, honest job, because you know when you are sitting around thinking of some idea or something — what you are going to do with it? And you know when you are finished with this book— then you have a million wonderful things that you are thinking that you know that you can’t possibly fit into this plot, you’re going to have another chance at it. When you are writing stand-alone novels, if you know something great about a character and it just doesn’t fit in because it doesn’t allow the pages to keep turning, you know that you are never in your life going to be able to tell people. It’s over. It’s the wasted by-product of thinking of a book. And so it’s fun to do a series, but it’s [too] comfortable. I don’t think being comfortable is necessarily the thing that’s going to make you a better writer. And I think that’s the most important thing that a writer does — is try to get better. So at a certain point, with a series, your main character is a fully developed, free-standing human being and she’s not going to change a whole lot. At that point what you are writing about is not necessarily the development of her character. It’s about putting her into different situations so that you can show her off. So that’s what you find yourself doing—and I’ve noticed this with other people who have written series, your villains get better and better and better. And more frightening. And your major character is exactly the same. That is probably something you shouldn’t do. What I am doing in the case of Jane Whitfield is giving her a chance to have a little vacation from me and maybe get a little bit older. So that when she comes back she is more — let’s say that there will be developments to report about her and her family and about everything. I was just in Western New York and in the Buffalo area. One of the things that has happened is that the Allegheny Senecas and the Seneca Nation have managed to open a casino in what used to the Niagara Falls Convention Center. That was an issue with Senecas, and it’s a big deal, and it will be interesting to see if there will be changes to report because of that.

Read the entire interview.

Thomas Perry applied the Page 99 Test to his latest novel, Nightlife. The test results will be reported in the coming week.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen Hinshaw

The OUP blog conducted a Q & A with Stephen Hinshaw, author of The Mark of Shame: Stigma of Mental Illness and an Agenda for Change, and a Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley.

One part of the interview:

OUP: In your book you claim that public attitudes towards mental illness are more negative now than they were a century ago, what is this assertion based on? How can you measure public attitudes?

Hinshaw: There are several ways to measure attitudes and beliefs. The most common - questionnaires of "explicit" attitudes - continue to reveal that severe mental illness is feared and stigmatized, even more than during the 1950s, which is a paradox, because there is so much more knowledge and openness today. It may well be that mental illness continues to bring up associations with violence, danger, threat, and incompetence, as well as personal weakness. But such questionnaires are susceptible to 'trying to look good' and may reveal only the tip of the iceberg regarding actual levels of stigma.

Newer research deals with "implicit" attitudes, those expressed quickly and unconsciously. Implicit measures of racial bias show that it exists strongly, even in people who fail to admit prejudice on traditional questionnaires. These kinds of measures are just beginning to be applied to mental disorder.

Still other ways of assessing prejudice, discrimination, and stigma are also quite revealing. In behavioral research, it's actual social interactions that are key -- and these reveal that if a person expects to be interacting with someone with mental illness, distancing and even punitive behavior result. This is especially the case when mental illness is branded as completely genetic. Some thought that putting mental illness into the medical model (replacing earlier beliefs that mental illness resulted from evil spirits ... or, more recently, from bad parenting) would eliminate stigma. Yet simplistic, all-or-none biogenetic attributions may make mental illness seem hopeless, permanent, and even subhuman.

Read the entire Q & A.

Hinshaw put The Mark of Shame to the Page 69 Test.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sara Miles

David Ian Miller interviewed Sara Miles, author of Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion, for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Two of their exchanges:

One of the questions you raised in the book is "Why would any thinking person become a Christian?" First, I'm going to ask you why you even felt the need to pose that question. I don't think someone would ask the same question of a Jew or a Buddhist or a Hindu or a pagan.

There are a lot of secular people who are raised to doubt any knowledge that can't be proved through a scientific paradigm. That's why I asked that question in the book. But one could ask that same question for other religions as well.

Now I'll ask you for the answer to the question, "Why would any thinking person become a Christian now?"

I'm not going to give the answer for why anybody else should be a Christian, but I will say why I became a Christian. I believe the story of Christianity is true. It is true beyond facts and literalism, and it's true beyond logic. As a journalist, it was surprising for me to use a different set of tools -- the eyes of faith -- to understand the world. Belief turned out to be the least important part of faith. For me, the most interesting part of faith has been doubt, not knowing, being willing to look at the universe with a different perspective.

Read the entire interview.

Miles put Take This Bread to the Page 99 Test.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stuart Dybek

Last year Stuart Dybek was interviewed by Zulkey.com. The first two exchanges:

When you do readings, how do you choose what you'll read?

The choice of what I read is sometimes planned out depending on what I know about the audience and sometimes instinctive based on the sense I get once I enter the auditorium and get a sense of who the audience might be. Or sometimes I've written something new that can be read in an half hour or so and want to give it a try.

Have any of the characters in you stories have had impact on your real life relationships? Meaning that, if somebody recognizes themselves in one of your stories, how has that impacted his relationship with you?

Despite the fact that I'm writing fiction and have taken the liberties that fiction allows for, people have at different times recognized themselves in some of the characters. Mostly the reaction has been favorable. I had one old friend who appeared in a story called "The Long Thoughts," who would give the book that story appeared in to people as gifts so that they could read about him. There was an instance however when a dear friend who saw himself in one of my stories -- a version of a story that he told to me -- was offended not by his portrayal but that I would use a story he'd told to me in private. I should add that the story he told to me was fantastical and I changed it further and made still more fantastical. Still, he treated it not as my stealing something but as a broken confidence.

Read the rest of the interview.

Dybek put his novel-in stories I Sailed with Magellan to the Page 99 Test.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allison Burnett

Why did Allison Burnett take a break from his career as a successful screenwriter to write an acclaimed novel? He explained it all to JC Parrish in an interview last year:

I began in Manhattan as a playwright, then I wrote short stories and, eventually, a couple of unpublished novels. On top of writing 35 hours a week, I also worked 35 hours a week as a legal proofreader and as an SAT tutor. By the time I was 30, I had EARNED only a hundred bucks as a writer and I was ready to drop. I began to write screenplays largely as a response to this exhaustion and misery. I suspected that it might be the quickest way to liberate myself from the nightmarish grind that my life had become. I decided to move to Los Angeles. Soon, I was making a decent living as a screenwriter, and not long after, I was making a really good living, and for a while that was more than enough. Then I turned 40. I was being hired by the studios, but I had seen my scripts either made into failed movies (Autumn in New York) or, much more frequently, into no movies at all. They languished on studio shelves. The only film of which I was proud was Red Meat, but that was only because I had directed it myself. Who knew if I’d ever get another chance to direct. Also, a Writers Guild strike was looming, or so many of us thought. It was time take decisive action to reclaim the impulse and aspirations that had made me want to write in the first place. I decided to write a novel.

Read the rest of the interview.

Help Allison cast the lead in his next movie and learn more about his latest novel, The House Beautiful.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gregg Easterbrook

In a brief interview with Lynn Green, Gregg Easterbrook talked about "the revenge of the credit card" and other aspects of "How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse" (the subtitle of his latest book, The Progress Paradox).

The first exchanges from the interview:

A key point in your book is that money definitely cannot buy happiness. So why is it that we Americans are still obsessed with it?

Everyone needs a certain amount of money. Beyond that, we pursue money because we know how to obtain it. We don't necessarily know how to obtain happiness.

Should we really expect to "be happy"? Isn't that a self-indulgent goal?

Aristotle called happiness "the highest good." The Framers of American democracy advocated "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Neither Aristotle nor the Framers were known for self-indulgence. All believed that happiness is a legitimate goal in life; perhaps, one of the reasons we are here.

Read on.

See how the Page 69 Test worked for The Progress Paradox.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ian Rankin

There's a nice little interview with Ian Rankin over at the blog "Murderati." It includes this exchange:

EE: ...okay, how about--what best selling book do you wish you'd written?

IR: There are many books I wish I'd written, everything from Catch-22 to The Black Dahlia, The Big Sleep to Name of the Rose to A Clockwork Orange...

Click here to read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scott E. Page

Scott E. Page's new book is The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies.

From the publisher:

In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. The Difference is about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities.

Part of a Q & A with Page:

What are the wider implications of your book?

America is a place that prizes ability. Diversity is seen as a second- or even third-order effect—multicolored sprinkles atop the cake if you will. My book shows in stark, clear logic that diversity produces benefits far greater than mere symbolism. In fact, collective diversity may contribute more to progress than individual ability. And yet, I think a lot of people don’t really believe deep down that diversity is beneficial, but they feel it’s the politically correct thing to say. This book shows that it’s logically correct as well.

Read the entire Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jon Clinch

Jon Clinch's Finn has just been released by Random House.

There's a Q & A (and other goodies) over at the official Finn site. It opens:

Question: What inspired you to write Finn?

Jon Clinch: Ever since I first read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I’ve been haunted by the image of that dead man in that floating house. It was just too creepy. And upon rereading the book more recently it seemed to me that the scene’s place in the novel (just where Huck and Jim’s story starts taking off) conspires with its anonymity (the corpse isn’t identified as Finn’s until the end of the book) to keep readers from giving it too much attention. No doubt plenty of people slide right past the details: the markings on the walls and the calico dresses, the black cloth masks and the child's speckled straw hat, the baby bottle and the wooden leg. There was an adventure getting started, after all, and this mysterious scene—populated as it was only by an unidentified corpse—was just one more picaresque detail.

I wondered how Finn had come to die surrounded by those mysterious artifacts. The conventional wisdom, that the floating house was a brothel, didn't satisfy. I preferred to believe that Mark Twain had left in that crowded room a set of clues—not just to Finn's death but to his otherwise unknowable life. In Finn, I set out to follow those clues wherever they led. And they set a course down some dark and unexpected waters.

Read more from the Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeffrey Cohen

Julia Buckley interviewed Jeff Cohen, author of As Dog Is My Witness.

Part of the interview:

I'm curious, because I've been introducing my sons to the joys of the Marx Brothers this summer, and you reference them a couple times in the book. Were they a big influence on you as a kid (or an adult)?

I first "met" the Marx Bros. when I was in high school. Late one night, when my father was asleep (he was a store owner, and got up at some ungodly hour), I happened across "Horse Feathers" and was cackling madly five minutes into the movie. My mother walked in, took a look, shook her head and said, "your father likes them, too," and then walked away. My life had changed.

Really I think all modern humor stems from Groucho in some way. But I'm a bit biased.

Yeah, but Harpo is sublime. The Marxes will be featured more prominently in my next book, actually.

Read the entire interview.

Check out the Page 69 Test results for As Dog Is My Witness.

--Marshal Zeringue