Parag Khanna

Paul Comstock, editor of the California Literary Review, interviewed Parag Khanna, author of The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order.

A couple of questions from the interview:

What is “The Second World” from the title of your book?

The “second world” is a swath of the world’s most strategic countries around the world that are located between or on the peripheries of the three dominant empires: America, the European Union, and China. These countries include: Ukraine, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Malaysia, Indonesia, and others. Second world countries are the emerging markets, but we have to understand them more than just economically: they now hold the majority of the world’s reserves and a growing share of the total global economy, but they are also endowed with natural resources and are pursuing political agendas on their own. In every second world country I have heard people talk about how they will no longer be listening to the US but doing things “our own way.”

Europe is often portrayed in the U.S. as having an unsustainable socialist economy that will soon collapse under its own weight. You see it in a very different light.

Every day on the news we hear about how our own medicare and social security systems are under great stress and may collapse, so I’m dubious about such characterizations of Europe. At least their system works now and has for decades. Europeans are for more efficient in public management with far lower inequality – America has a great deal to learn from them.

Read the full interview.

Visit Parag Khanna's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Wilson

The Rap Sheet's Ali Karim recently caught up with British writer Laura Wilson and asked her a few questions, including:

Ali Karim: Were you a great reader in your youth? And what books struck a chord with you and perhaps even steered you to write?

Laura Wilson: The first book I remember reading for myself was The Tale of the Fierce Bad Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter. When the nice friendly rabbit offers the bad rabbit a carrot, Potter writes, “He doesn’t say thank you. He just takes it.” There was a picture of the bad rabbit looking fierce and snatching the carrot. That made a very big impression on me; I thought it was a terrible thing to do. Perhaps the bad rabbit’s relatively small crime started something … I also loved Fattypuffs and Thinnifers [by Andre Maurois], Black Beauty [by Anna Sewell], and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women--but only the first book, because I lost interest when they grew up and got married and all the rest of it. I don’t remember any conscious decision about wanting to write, just as I don’t remember learning to read. I think the desire was just there in the background, waiting for me to stop dithering and act on it, which I finally did in my late 20s.

AK: What drew you to crime fiction, especially historical work?

LW: Although I chose to read English at university, I’ve always enjoyed reading non-fiction history books, though I’ve never been that keen on historical novels by contemporary writers set pre-1900; there are a few exceptions to this, such as Andrew Taylor’s brilliant novel The American Boy [U.S. title An Unpardonable Crime], but not many. The recent past fascinates me because there’s the feeling that one can almost--but not quite--touch it with one’s fingertips. I think it’s a way of understanding the present--How did we get here?--and it certainly puts things into perspective, but I don’t feel sentimental or nostalgic about it. As for being drawn to crime … that’s probably a question for a psychiatrist, but most of the best stories and plays, from the ancient Greeks onwards, contain some sort of crime--few writers can resist that sort of dramatic potential. The crime novel is an excellent vehicle for exploring social problems and social change, and I also think that the “morality tale” aspect of crime fiction is appealing--not just to me, but to the majority of writers and readers.

Read the full interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Goffard

Christopher Goffard, whose Snitch Jacket is nominated for a 2008 Edgar for Best First Novel by an American Author, is no stranger to the CftAR blogs:

• The Page 99 Test: Snitch Jacket
• Author Interviews: Christopher Goffard

Now John Kenyon of Things I'd Rather Be Doing has interviewed Goffard.

Here is part of the introduction, followed by the opening question:

Read this book and prepare to be impressed....

Oh, and the story? Well, I don't want to suggest that it is superficial, because it is a clever yarn, but it really is best seen as a vehicle for Goffard's characters. At the heart of the book are Benny Bunt, a smallish ex-meth addict snitch who uses his underwhelming nature to help him blend in and learn about the nefarious doings of his acquaintances at the Greasy Tuesday, a bar frequented by some of life's lower beings. He becomes fast friends with Gus "Mad Dog" Miller, a Vietnam vet with multiple tattoos and even more stories of his exploits. These two colorful characters put me in mind of Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck from "Midnight Cowboy," though it's an imperfect analogy at best. There are crimes, a mystery of sorts and plenty of action, but don't come to this expecting a typical whodunit. The book is a rich character study that will leave you laughing, marveling and waiting impatiently for Goffard's next feat of prose.

TIRBD: Benny and Gus are very visceral characters. Did they emerge fully formed for you, or were they the accretion of traits, tics and details as you wrote?

CG: They morphed many times over the course of multiple drafts, and I was deep into one of the many rewrites before I even began to understand the nature of their relationship. The germ for Gus -- the would-be hit man who lives in the closet of a bar -- was a career criminal I met in jail in Santa Ana in the late 1990s, as a cop reporter. His glasses were missing a nose-guard on one side, which made them sag, and I gave the detail to my character. Years later, I met a charismatic homeless man under a bridge in Tampa who was holding forth to a bunch of other homeless guys, and I made a sketch of him -- right down to the way his sweat discolored his baseball cap -- and studied it as I wrote. And for the St. Petersburg Times I did some investigative stories on a VA shrink who, it turned out, was inventing these grisly stories about his experiences in Vietnam, and I gave my character that habit, too. So Gus Miller grew out of all these sources and probably a hundred more than I can't remember. Same for Benny Bunt: a piece here, a piece there, until finally he coalesced into a full and contradiction-riddled person. The crucial thing was getting his name right. It had to be something small and kind of sleazy.

Read the full interview.

The Page 99 Test: Snitch Jacket

Author Interviews: Christopher Goffard

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen Elliott

Playboy.com’s Stacy Klein interviewed Stephen Elliott, editor of Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica.

Here's Klein's introduction and the first two exchanges from the interview:

After campaigning for John Kerry in 2004. novelist Stephen Elliott wrote a memoir called Looking Forward To It: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About It and Love the American Electoral Process. In honor of this political season, he has collected an anthology of erotica stories, Sex For America, that all carry a political message or slant to their climaxes. The book features popular fiction writers, journalists, and sex workers taking an engaging look at the intersection of sex and politics, and in the process showing how fantasies can borrow from both Machiavelli and De Sade. We caught up with Elliott to ask him a bit more about the book, and how exactly the Bush Administration bears resemblance to a dominatrix.

PLAYBOY: What can "politically inspired erotica" tell us that political reporting can't?

ELLIOTT: Fiction can always go places where non-fiction can't. You can explore things in stories, take events to their logical conclusions, and evaluate the conclusions. Politics is sexy. Every election cycle there's all these marriages broken up on the campaign trail. Because people in politics are very passionate about their beliefs. I've heard it referred to as "mactivism". Volunteering for a campaign has to be the easiest way to meet a lover.

PLAYBOY: What do you see as the most important political issue this election?

ELLIOTT: Well, in California, the most important political issue is rent control, which some extremely evil people snuck onto the June 3 ballot as a proposition disguised as eminent domain reform. But in the presidential election the most important issue has to be the war in Iraq. We've already put half a trillion dollars into that war, every dollar wasted. For that money we could free healthcare and free college tuition. It's the biggest mistake of my generation. I'm pretty sure we've never wasted as much on anything else. It would be very hard, maybe impossible, to vote for someone who participated in that mistake by authorizing the war.

Read the full Q & A.

The Page 69 Test: Stephen Elliott's My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephanie Grant

Stephanie Grant is an award-winning writer whose first novel, The Passion of Alice, was longlisted for Britain's Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. She has taught creative writing at Ohio State University and Mount Holyoke College and is currently visiting writer at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University.

From a Q & A about her new novel, Map of Ireland:

Lots of big issues are on the table in Map of Ireland, including race, sexuality, class, religion, and activism. How did you manage to weave so many important questions into the novel?

Much of the "weaving" you describe comes from the situation the characters find themselves in. At first, I thought I had to do more to make the political stakes explicit. But as I worked, it became clear that given the historical backdrop in which Ann's story takes place, I didn't have to force the issues - they were front and center all along. One of the reasons I was attracted to the period of desegregation in Boston was the year it took place - 1974. I knew from my own experience and reading, that both the feminist movement and Black Nationalism were very vibrant political forces at the time. I was particularly taken by the irony of desegregation and Black Nationalism occurring in the same space. Another way to phrase this would be to ask how radical or progressive Black folks in Boston balanced the need for public school desegregation with the libratory separatist impulses of Nationalism? These types of contradictions feel very much a part of contemporary American life -how do we stay flexible in our thinking, yet committed to our political values?

Read the entire Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elisa Albert

In summer 2006 Jonathan Segura interviewed Elisa Albert for Publishers Weekly. Albert was then the author of a debut story collection, How This Night Is Different. Her new novel The Book of Dahlia will be released in March 2008.

The opening exchanges of the interview:

You're Jewish. You're a fiction writer. Do you write Jewish fiction?

Well, I'm Jewish. I'm a writer, and the stories in this collection all revolve around Jewish life-cycle events, so even if I wanted to do battle with that Jewish-fiction-writer label — which I don't — my case is weak. But it's somewhat reductive, so lots of subtle but really important distinctions get lost under that umbrella. You could just as well call my stories "child-of-divorce fiction" or "thwarted-desire fiction" or "marijuana-aficionado fiction," too. But you're still not any closer to a real interaction with the lives chronicled therein, you know. Can't catch the wind, man. Incidentally, I prefer the term "shtetl-ized."

Your characters are skeptical and dismissive of the Jewish identities they cling to.

Gravitational pull, brainwashing, the desire to go home again, who knows. I was raised in a very insular and infuriating Jewish community, and one that proved endlessly dissatisfying to me as I grew up, but it's impossible for me to shake its influence. There's the desire to reclaim it somehow, make it my own and reinvent it in a way that's meaningful. There's a good deal of sentimentalism inherent in that urge, and one I think I share with the population of my stories.

Read the full interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sophie Hannah

From a Q & A between Ali Karim and Sophie Hannah at The Rap Sheet:

AK: You are a renowned poet. How did you find yourself working in the crime-fiction field?

SH: I’ve always wanted to write crime fiction. One of the reasons why it took me so long was that I wanted to wait until I felt I could write a really good crime novel. When I was 18, I wrote two really bad crime novels, and it was obvious that I couldn’t do it at that point in my life. But I knew it was something that I always wanted to do, as I am an obsessive crime reader. I read practically nothing but crime fiction. I just love the crime-thriller genre.

AK: So what books have you favored in this genre, and who influenced your evolution from reader to writer?

SH: I think it’s easier to say who you like, rather than who you are influenced by. I am huge fan of Agatha Christie. Apart from Enid Blyton with her “Secret Seven” books, Christie was the first crime writer I read; in fact, I read all her books and I collect her work. Then I went from Christie to Ruth Rendell; I read all of hers and again collected all her books. Those two writers have been my biggest influences.

Read the full interview.

Sophie Hannah is a bestselling poet and novelist who regularly performs her work both in the U.K. and abroad.

The Page 69 Test: Hurting Distance.

The Page 69 Test: Little Face.

My Book, The Movie: Little Face and Hurting Distance.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sean Chercover

Sean Chercover's terrific debut crime novel, Big City, Bad Blood, captivated readers last year.

Julia Buckley asked him a few questions about his craft, including:

I’m curious about the name of your protagonist, Ray Dudgeon. In my world (the world of teaching Shakespeare), a dudgeon refers to a holder for a dagger, as in Macbeth’s famous speech: “I see thee still, and on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood.” Am I raving here, or were you inspired by Shakespeare in choosing the name?

Shakespeare rocks, and the Scottish play is right up there with Hamlet for me. Ray had a number of names along the way, before I settled on Dudgeon. I like surnames that have independent meanings as words. Some of my favorite classic PIs have names that do double duty by describing the character. Spade, Archer, Hammer. And for some reason I wanted a two-syllable word that started with D. I was flipping through the dictionary, and I hit upon dudgeon. As a fan of the bard, I was familiar the meaning that Shakespeare used – the handle of a dagger – which seemed to fit with Ray’s underlying rage and the violent world he inhabits. And the modern usage of the word also fits. Ray was once a reporter, but he quit journalism when he couldn’t come to terms with the ethical compromises that were being forced upon him. You could say, he left “in high dudgeon.” So I was actually inspired by the dictionary, but the Shakespeare connection was a nice bonus.

Read the full interview.

The Page 69 Test: Big City, Bad Blood.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian Fagan

From a Q & A with Brian Fagan, author of the new The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations:

Why is ancient climate change important today?

I’m struck by how lamentably ignorant most people, even scientists and other scholars, are about ancient climate change. A lot of chatterers talk about a new climatic future, but they forget that humanity has been \living with unpredictable climatic shifts for tens of thousands of years. The ways in which ancient societies coped with sudden events like El Niños or lengthy droughts are both diverse and fascinating, and have much to teach us about how people handle climatic change, maintain sustainability, and modify their behavior. We have much to learn from our forebears, even if we do live in a different climatic era.

Are you arguing that climate change was a major player in human history? Surely this has been argued before?

Yes, it has, nearly a century ago, by a school of geographers who insisted that climate change “caused” major developments like agriculture. This kinds of linear climatic argument, that climate change like drought led inevitably to something historical, became known as climatic determinism—dirty words to generations of archaeologists. Now things are very different, for we now have access to extremely fine-grained climatic data like tree-rings, which now extend back 10,000 years in parts of Europe. For the fist time, we can accurately assess the impact of climate on ancient human societies, and understand that it was one of many players that affected history, and at times an important one.

Read the entire Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Cobb

From a Q & A with Thomas Cobb, author of Shavetail:

What inspired you to set your novel in America's old west? The landscape and time period has obviously been heavily researched. How did you go about researching for this book?

Much of my research was simply growing up in the middle of the Sonoran desert in southern Arizona. The landscape of Shavetail is the landscape of my early life. Though I live in New England now, a part of me never left the desert.

I did to a lot of research on the 19th century Army and hope that I got a lot of it right, though I know I made mistakes. At one point I had to stop researching because it was becoming obsessive and interfered with the writing. I made myself recognize that the people who really knew life in the 19th century Army are all dead now.

* * *

Your characters are relatable to today's reader, though they deal with issues that are unique to their place in history. Did you employ any methods to make characters of historical fiction relevant to modern readers? Are any of the characters in Shavetail based on anyone in your own life? Some of the characters in Shavetail seem to be treated with more compassion than others. While writing, did you feel any particular attachment to certain characters?

I don't believe that you need to modernize historical characters because you modernize them automatically. When we look at history, we look at it from our own point of view, with our own knowledge and prejudices. We can't think like the ancient Egyptians or the Greeks or medieval French peasants, because we know only what we know. So, the characters in Shavetail, while I struggled to make them as historically plausible as I could, are really modern characters, because I'm a modern writer. I can mimic some of the voice of a nineteenth century author, but I can't really adopt the view point because my knowledge base is so different from theirs.

All of my characters are a combination of myself and some others. And I will never admit that any particular character has any of the traits of anyone I know, though, of course, they do. And I love my characters -- I love Ned and Brickner, pretty much equally, though they are terribly different. Lt. Austin is the character who probably has the most in common with me. Since in my other life, I am a college professor, I try to hide that academic side as much as I can when I write. Austin is only of the very few characters I've written who allows me to indulge that side of me.

Read the full Q & A.

The Page 69 Test: Shavetail.

--Marshal Zeringue