Richard Lange

Richard Lange is the author of Dead Boys, his debut collection of short stories was published recently by Little, Brown.

T.C. Boyle, George Pelecanos, Alice Sebold, Scott Wolven, Scott Smith, Michael Connelly, Chris Offutt, Anthony Doerr, and Daniel Woodrell number among those with early, enthusiastic endorsements for Dead Boys.

John Kenyon interviewed Lange at Things I’d Rather Be Doing.

One exchange from the Q & A:

You're championed by some heavy hitters in the crime fiction world, though all of these stories were published in pretty traditional short story journals. Is genre a consideration for you? Do you identify with crime writers or mystery writers?

I didn’t think about genre when writing these stories. That the book is considered by some to be a work of crime fiction is fine by me, but I wouldn’t call it that. I do admit, however, to co-opting the language of crime fiction, particularly the hard-boiled stuff, and injecting it into stories that might have been fairly quiet “relationship” pieces without it in order to heighten the tension and describe the violence being done to the characters’ psyches.

I don’t read a ton of crime fiction – a lot of detective books have too many scenes of people talking in offices for my taste, or they’re tough-talking iterations of Chandler or Ross MacDonald. I love Elmore Leonard, though, Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, and Clockers was great.

Read the full interview.

Writers Read: Richard Lange.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edwidge Danticat

Jennifer Gonnerman interviewed Edwidge Danticat, author of Brother, I’m Dying.

Their first exchange:

JG: What was the hardest part of your book to write - and why was it so challenging?

ED: The hardest part was reading the government documents involved in my uncle's death.

Every encounter he had with a government official seemed so unfriendly, so distant, so cold. You have a feeling that no one was responding to him as a person, as a human being. It was also very difficult to write about my father's death. Obviously there was so much emotion involved.

I had been with my father just a few days before he died. This is not in the book but when I left him to return to Miami with my daughter before he died, he said to me, "When you come back, you might be able to see me, but I won't be able to see you."

Soon after that, he stopped eating and drinking and he died seventy-two hours later.

Read the entire Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Pouncey

Peter Pouncey was born in Tsingtao, China, of English parents. At the end of World War II, after several dislocations and separations, the family reassembled in England, and Pouncey was educated there in boarding schools and at Oxford. He is a classicist, former dean of Columbia College, and president emeritus of Amherst College.

From a Q & A about his first novel Rules for Old Men Waiting, at the Random House website:

Rules for Old Men Waiting deals largely with wars of the twentieth century. What is your first memory of war?

I have written in a memoir that I’m working on, called The Broken Times, about coming to myself near the pleasantly peaceful city of Victoria, British Columbia, on the southern point of Vancouver Island. We had washed up there, looking across the water at Mount Baker, at the outbreak of World War II, and were there through the war. It was fine for us children, but a desperately anxious time for our mother: “Bereft of her husband incommunicado with Chiang Kai-shek’s government in the far west of China, of her father and brother in a Japanese interment camp near Shanghai, and of her own mother in the blitz in London, my mother listened in the kitchen to the BBC news, hearing the Axis extending its reach through the world on an ever-widening front. We three children listened with her in silence, sensing her fear, and fearing it.”

How do the wars of the twentieth century relate to our times?

There is no question that the follies of 20th century are the same as our own. The scale of consequences rises: recently we celebrated 150 years since the Charge of the Light Brigade. On that day English cavalry charged the Turkish artillery batteries in the Crimea, and only 195 out of 600 returned. On the first of July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, there were 67,000 British casualties before lunch — waves of perhaps the finest volunteer force ever assembled sent as infantry across level ground into the teeth of modern machine guns, some of whose barrels became red-hot with the ceaseless slaughter they were dishing out. The pattern is in fact invariably the same: the generals and politicians almost never know what they are sending their men into. It was the same with Athens, in the middle of the war that would destroy her: she decides in 415 BCE to send another expedition to conquer Sicily. An army of 40,000 prime troops and a fleet of 200 ships were comprehensively destroyed. Jingoistic slogans seem almost always to win out over considered thought.

Read the entire interview.

The Page 99 Test: Rules for Old Men Waiting.

--Marshal Zeringue

Woody Holton

Jennifer Gonnerman interviewed 2007 National Book Award Nonfiction finalist Woody Holton, author of Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution.

The opening exchange of the interview:

JG: What was the hardest part of your book to write - and why was it so challenging?

WH: Unruly Americans devotes a lot of attention to the people who bought up the government securities that had financed the Revolutionary War. I argue that these bond speculators played a huge, albeit indirect, role in bringing about the adoption of the U.S. Constitution in 1787. Discussing this topic with friends, I quickly discovered that my enthusiasm for it was not infectious. You have to be pretty weird to get excited about government finance.

It occurred to me that I could make the topic a lot more appealing to readers if I could find a compelling story about a single bond speculator; then that one guy could stand in for all the rest. For years I searched in vain for a speculator who left sufficient documentation. Near the end of the writing -- almost too late -- I found my speculator. It is Abigail Adams. Twenty years before becoming First Lady, in June 1777, Adams discovered this incredibly lucrative investment. And she was still buying bonds in the 1790s, when her husband was vice president.

Read the full interview.

The Page 69 Test: Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution.

--Marshal Zeringue

Terryl Givens and Richard Bushman

Steve Evans interviewed Terryl Givens and Richard Bushman for By Common Consent.

Terryl Givens is a Professor of Literature and Religion at the University of Richmond, and author of many books and articles, including The Latter-day Saint Experience in America, The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy, By the Hand of Mormon, and People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture.

Richard Bushman is a Professor of History Emeritus at Columbia University and author of Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities, and more recently, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling.

A brief segment from the interview:

BCC: There have always been sensitive topics in the Church. Historically, BYU and BYU Studies haven’t been particularly friendly to discussions of such things. Do you see your publications as opening the discussion up beyond closed doors? Are BYU and BYU Studies willing to host discussion and publish on topics that they historically haven’t?

TG: I have never set out self-consciously to push the envelope or challenge the orthodox boundaries of Mormon studies or historiography. I don't think I have engaged in particularly controversial questions, but neither have I deliberately avoided them. Its just that I find myself fully occupied trying to address questions that I find personally urgent: was there more to Mormonism's contentious relations with the mainstream than traditional historical accounts tell us? How does one explain the potent capacity of the Book of Mormon to draw millions into its orbit, while simultaneously outraging other millions? Is there really such a thing as Mormon culture? What kind of philosophical and theological depth do we find when we examine Joseph Smith's thought? Generally, I find much more to celebrate than to deplore when I attack these questions.

As for BYU and BYU Studies, I think in an environment where dissident and alternate voices proliferate in very formal settings, there has been a tendency for many participants in the dialogue to define themselves against the "other," and this has resulted in more polarization than I would like to see. Recent efforts of some to organize Mormon Studies around facile categories like "faithful scholars" and "New Mormon Historians" and the like aggravate rather than ameliorate this problem. Mormon intellectual culture is not a two party system.

RB: I don't see many signs of a shift yet.

BCC: The zeitgeist at the LDS Archives seems to be one of opening and liberalization. It would seem that this is also the case at BYU. Why do you think that is?

TG: No one reason. The internet has made our cloistered guardedness of the past impossible; perhaps generational changes, shifting opinions about the value of scholarship to the church, the professionalization of Mormon history writing, the widespread scholarly interest in Mormonism, more moderate coverage by the media and the openness of publishers to let Mormons tell their own story, all have conspired to make the church less suspicious and guarded.

RB: The Archives are now quite open to serious scholars. Even the historians that we label as anti-Mormon work there. There is probably a realization that little is gained by hiding historical materials.

Read the full interview.

The Page 99 Test: Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling.

The Page 99 Test: People of Paradox.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steve Hockensmith

Cameron Hughes (CHUD.com) interviewed Steve Hockensmith, author the "Holmes on the Range" mystery series.

Part of the introduction and their first exchange:

"[Hockensmith's] books are funny, original, and rather than plots driving the characters, the characters drive the plot.They paint a great picture of the old American West and manage not to romanticize it while not making it overly dour either. I want the books to sell to see Hockensmith's take on places like 19th century Hawaii and Cuba and the real thuggish nature of the Pinkerton's. What’s particularly amazing is that in the field of Sherlock analogues, he manages to make his two protagonists completely different and interesting...."

Why westerns?

Why not?

Actually, I can think of a really good reason why not: The Western genre’s a sales killer. So let me take this opportunity to make an announcement to the world.

I don’t write Westerns!

Except, of course, I do.

Sorta kinda.

Sigh.

It always annoys me when some pretentious wanker insists his new novel/movie/TV show/whatever isn’t science fiction even though it’s about mutant clones battling aliens for dominion over the earth. “Yeah, it takes place a thousand years in the future, but it’s really about people” blah blah blah. So I don’t want to be a hypocrite by trying to distance myself from the Western. My heroes are cowboys, for chrissakes! The first book takes place on a cattle ranch in the 1890s. The bad guys in the second book are train robbers. Come on!

But I do truly believe that my books are, first and foremost, mysteries. They just happen to be historical mysteries in which the setting is the 19th century West.

Does that sound lame?

See, this is a little dance I do because I suspect there are a lot of mystery readers who’d never touch a book they thought was a Western. I wish I didn’t have to worry about that, but I do. So I end up feeling ambivalent about my connection to a wonderful American storytelling tradition that I, personally, have great fondness for. Sad, eh?

So let’s start again.

Why Westerns? Because I grew up with them, probably. Both my dad and my granddad were huge Western fans, so when I was a little kid I didn’t just know who John Wayne and Clint Eastwood were -- I knew Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and Lash La Rue and Red Ryder and Gabby Hayes and Smiley Burnette and on and on to infinity. I was always a history buff, too, so the reality behind the fantasy was fascinating to me, as well. And I guess all that just stuck with me through the years. Blame it on nostalgia ... or arrested development.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laurence Bergreen

Laurence Bergreen is the author, most recently, of Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu.

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

Q: It's surprising that for such a well-known person, so little has been written about Marco Polo. Why do you think that is?

A: It is an unlikely situation. And I was as surprised as anyone else to find that this was the case. There are books for young readers, and a vast trove of scholarly articles of varying usefulness, but next to nothing for the general adult reader, despite Marco Polo's fame. Even now, I'm not sure of the reason for this oversight, but I think Polo's unique and unclassifiable personality, reflected in his work, has something to do with it, as does his incredible range. He covers so many countries, continents, cultures, and languages that it is difficult to approach him in his cross-cultural entirety. In addition, Marco Polo did a fine job of speaking for himself. He seemed to need no introduction, but that was five hundred years ago. Now his work needs background and context to explain the circumstances out of which this unique work arose.

Read the full Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chandra Prasad

In Chandra Prasad's novel On Borrowed Wings, a quarryman's daughter enrolls in 1930s Yale having adopted the identity and gender of her recently deceased brother.

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

Women have long posed as men in order to gain access to restricted opportunities. Are there any particular stories, fictional or otherwise, that inspired you in the writing of this book? What has your own experience taught you about such social boundaries as race, class, and gender, and what did you hope to explore in this book with regard to these issues?

Since childhood I've been intrigued by women who utterly defy rules and expectations. The more drastic the story, the more fascinated I am. Anne Bonny and Mary Read are two women who successfully posed as male pirates in the 1700s. Both were known to be fiery, fierce, and quite terrifying. In 1916 Adeline and Augusta Van Buren became the first women to motorcycle their way across America. Several times along their journey, they were arrested for wearing men's clothing, which seems absurd now. Then there was Katie Sandwina, a spectacularly powerful circus strongwoman who was born in the late 1880s. She could carry her husband above her head using only one hand. These are just a handful of examples. There are so many extraordinary women who have tread radically into male territory. They make me realize that once certain boundaries are crossed, they fade, even disappear. Again, I don't really want to impose this notion on the reader. But I do hope that Adele's experience offers food for thought on how far women have come.

Read the entire Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Lee Carrell

Jennifer Lee Carrell has won three awards for distinction in undergraduate teaching at Harvard, where she taught in the History and Literature Program and directed Shakespeare for the Hyperion Theatre Company. She is the author of The Speckled Monster, a work of historical nonfiction about battling smallpox at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Her debut novel is the recently-released Interred With Their Bones.

From the author's 2003 interview with Barnes & Noble:

What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer -- and why?

by J.R.R. Tolkien. The fine detail and vast scope of his world are astounding, but the greatest lesson The Lord of the Rings taught me is the paradoxical necessity of frayed threads, mysterious gaps, and unfinished edges. Like the real world, Middle-earth is deliberately, teasingly, seductively incomplete -- unknowable and therefore seemingly infinitely rich in its history, languages, geography, zoology, culture. The story at hand gives the sense of being no more than a brief exploration through a world whose horizons are endless: "All experience is an arch where through gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move," as Tennyson put it. Shakespeare teaches a similar lesson: Even his minor characters seem to have rich back-stories. The sense of full stories roiling in the shadows makes the plot at center stage shine all the brighter.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

M.G. Vassanji

M. G. Vassanji is the author of the acclaimed novels: The Gunny Sack, which won a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; No New Land; The Book of Secrets, which won the very first Giller Prize; Amriika; The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, which also received the Giller Prize; and The Assassin's Song.

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

Q: Please talk a bit about the horrible violence that shook western India in 2002?

A: The violence took place in the state of Gujarat in early 2002. It followed an incident in which a train compartment carrying Hindu Nationalist activist-pilgrims caught fire and some 60 people were literally burned alive. The activist pilgrims were returning from the site of the 16th-century Babru Mosque, which had been demolished in 1993 by activists claiming it to have been an ancient Hindu site.

Following the burning of the train compartment, attributed to Muslims but never actually proved, a pogrom took place in Gujarat in which Muslim households were targetted and attacked in various places, goaded on by the right-wing Gujarat government, and encouraged by the police. The worst kind of violence imaginable took place, against women especially.

Following this violence (euphemistically called "riots") and basing its decision on the Indian Human Rights Commission, the US State department refused a visitor's visa to the Gujarat Chief Minister, Mody.

Q: How did you decide to write about this period?

A: I used this violence and its terrible destruction as a point from which to bring out the history of a shrine up to its destruction.

Read the entire Q & A and learn more about the novel.

Read Ray Taras' review of The Assassin's Song.

--Marshal Zeringue