Deanna Raybourn

Deanna Raybourn is the author of the Lady Julia Grey series, including Silent in the Grave and Silent in the Sanctuary.

Last year she gave an interview to Barnes & Noble. One question was, "What are your ten favorite books, and what makes them special to you?" Here's part of Raybourn's answer:

To Kill a Mockingbird, Mariana, Forever Amber, Lonesome Dove, The King Must Die, I Capture the Castle -- wildly different books, but all have such perfectly rendered voices. Mockingbird and Lonesome Dove speak to my Southern roots. There are truths there that resonate with anyone raised in the South. Mariana and I Capture the Castle manage to be both funny and heart-wrenching. There is a timelessness about them both. And they would say different things to a twenty-year old reader than a forty-year old reader. I love that. Forever Amber is larger than life. I read it twenty years ago, and I can still see so many of the scenes perfectly in my mind's eye. And The King Must Die is just glorious. Mary Renault did a superb job of grounding mythology in such a way that it becomes entirely believable. Her powers of description were unrivaled. That's really what ties all of these books together: a sense of place and a unique voice. There is an immediacy about great writing that puts you in the heart of the scene, and all of these books do that.

Read the full interview.

Learn more about Silent in the Grave and Silent in the Sanctuary at the publisher's website.

Visit Deanna Raybourn's website, Blog A Go-Go.

My Book, The Movie: Silent in the Grave and Silent in the Sanctuary.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kelly Simmons

Kelly Simmons is a former journalist and advertising creative director specializing in marketing to women. Her debut novel Standing Still is just out from Atria.

From a Q & A about the book:

Q. Standing Still has some dark underpinnings—kidnapping,extortion, domestic abuse, mental illness. Do you have any personal experiences that inspired the plot?

A. My original inspiration was the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping. The horror of it lingered in my subconscious even after Elizabeth was found, and I couldn’t help wondering about all the ways it might have happened differently. So that was all floating around in the obsessed part of my brain. And in the foreground, was my desire to write a story about a fearful woman in a frightening situation, because like my main character, Claire (and an estimated 6 million other adults in the U.S.) I’ve suffered from panic disorder most of my life, as have members of my family. Growing up in the “The House of Fear”gave me lots of fodder to develop Claire’s psyche. (And I think, honestly, part of me wanted to pretend to be brave the way she did.) People with panic disorder have had only Tony Soprano as a media role model---I figured it could change that!

Read the rest of the Q & A.

Visit Kelly Simmon's website and her blog.

The Page 69 Test: Standing Still.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Bryce

Robert Bryce's first book, Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron, received rave reviews and was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2002 by Publishers Weekly. His second book, Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America's Superstate, was published 2004.

Reason Magazine senior editor Brian Doherty, author of This is Burning Man and Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, recently interviewed Bryce. The opening exchanges of the interview:

reason: While “energy independence” has soared to fresh public prominence in this era of soaring gas prices and Mideast wars, it’s not a new idea, is it?

Robert Bryce: The first president to promote the idea was [Richard] Nixon in the wake of the oil embargo in 1973. In his State of the Union address in 1974, Nixon said that he was aiming for energy independence by the end of the decade. He hoped that by 1980 the U.S. would not be importing any oil. And every president since Nixon, in one way or another, has espoused a similar idea. But if you look back at the data, the U.S. was a net crude oil importer [as early as] 1913 and ever since we’ve been a net crude importer with a handful of years [as exceptions]. It’s remarkable how much the rhetoric about “energy independence” has had no connection with reality.

reason: What do its proponents think we can get out of energy independence?

Bryce: The main talking points for those who promote energy independence are, one, that if we were just more tech-savvy we can develop lots of new jobs, and that would be great—we can build windmills, solar panels, whatever nifty new whizbang tech is going to replace oil, and that will stimulate the economy.

Second, they love biofuels. We can just grow the fuels we need to replace imported oil and it will be great for farmers and the rural economy. Third, [energy independence proponents] conflate oil and terrorism. Those arguments really came to the fore since the 9/11 attacks. We buy imported oil, some of our suppliers are Islamic petro-states, some Islamic petro-states send some dollars to support radical Islam, therefore oil equals terrorism and “energy independence” is anti-terror.

The idea is that if we could isolate the oil-exporting countries that in theory support terror we’d cut off its lifeline. The connections of Saudi Arabia to the 9/11 terror attacks are real, I’m not denying that. But you cannot, given the complexity and enormous size and interconnectedness of the global crude oil market, separate one actor from another.

S. Fred Singer [of the Science and Environmental Policy Project] came up with the best analogy. He described the global oil market like a big bathtub. All the oil production is dumped into one bathtub and all consumers have straws sucking oil out. [For all economic purposes] it’s like we’re all sucking from the same common pool. To say you are not gonna buy Saudi oil, or Algerian oil—it’s crazy. For example, the U.S. hasn’t purchased a dime of Iranian oil—except for a small amount in the early ‘90s, but for the most part no Iranian oil since 1979. And that hasn’t stopped Iran from supporting Hezbollah.

Read the full interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ellen Litman

Ellen Litman is the author of The Last Chicken in America -- "Twelve linked, wryly humorous stories about an unforgettable cast of Russian-Jewish immigrants trying to assimilate in a new world."

Arsen Kashkashian interviewed her about the book.

Two questions from the interview:

KBC: The immigrants in The Last Chicken in America seem rather isolated and lonely. Do you think this is a result of their Russian culture? Or is it just the plight of immigrants coming to an American society that has turned inward, obsessed with television and computers? Or are these just the characters that interest you?

EL: I think that what happens – or at least what happened in my case – is, the world shrinks a little. The people in the book immigrate (often from big cities), and their choices, by necessity, are suddenly confined to this relatively small immigrant community. Some fit in, others don’t. Some find it comforting, others suffocating. For me it felt very lonely, and I spent a long time wanting desperately to break into the larger world and not knowing how. So I guess, my characters inherited that sense of isolation.

KBC: Many of the stories involve Masha, a college-age girl, new to the United States? How much does she share with your own background? Was coming from Moscow in the 1990s as difficult as it seems in the stories?

EL: I was a few years older than Masha when we came to the US in 1992. I had finished two years of college by then – in computers, naturally – and later transferred to the University of Pittsburgh, and then spent 6+ years working in IT, before turning to writing. So there are definitely some similarities. But yeah, the first few years were pretty hard, especially for my parents. They’d left so much behind, and now they had to start over somehow, and they were just learning English at the time. Plus they had me and my younger sister to worry about. Plus my grandmother, who was very sick. There was so much uncertainty. We were all struggling in our own ways, and we didn’t always know how to help one another.

Read the full interview.

Visit Ellen Litman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

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