Mark Seal

A journalist for thirty-five years, Mark Seal is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of Wildflower: An Extraordinary Life and Mysterious Death in Africa, about the murdered wildlife filmmaker and naturalist Joan Root. Seal was a 2010 National Magazine Award finalist for his Vanity Fair profile of Clark Rockefeller.

His new book, The Man in the Rockefeller Suit: The Astonishing Rise and Spectacular Fall of a Serial Imposter, is "a stranger-than-fiction twist on the classic American success story of the self-made man-because Clark Rockefeller was totally made up."

From Seal's Q & A with Julia Buckley:

How do you account for the fact that some very smart people were utterly bamboozled by Rockefeller, while others (including one notable woman who compared the story to “The Emperor’s New Clothes”) said they never for a moment believed in him or his ridiculous persona. What might have accounted for the difference?

Of course, many who say that they knew now may not have been as vocal back then. So it’s difficult to say who really knew and who didn’t. He was extremely believable, at least in the beginning, and people are willing to believe things when they are said by some one who is seemingly educated, erudite and, most importantly, has a famous name.

To a certain extent, Rockefeller’s wife seemed to buy into his fiction because he filled a requirement in terms of her own aspirations. Do you think her ambition was the major reason that she never seemed to question all of the inconsistencies in her husband’s life?

She is...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Ali Smith

Ali Smith is the author of the novels Hotel World—short-listed for both the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize—and The Accidental, which won the Whitbread Award and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize.

Her latest novel is There But For The.

From her Q & A with Dan Eltringham at the Financial Times:

What book do you wish you’d written?

The Legend of the Holy Drinker by Joseph Roth.

* * *
What book changed your life?

A Calendar of Love by George Mackay Brown.

* * *
What is the oddest thing you’ve done when researching a book?

I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.

* * *
If you could own any painting, what would it be?

The wall fresco of St Catherine, by Masolino, in the church of San Clemente in Rome.

* * *
What novel would you give a child to introduce them to literature?

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson or Hey Nostradamus by Douglas Coupland.

Read the complete interview.

Learn about the "deceased author [Smith would] most like to watch crossing a room, just to see how she moves."

--Marshal Zeringue

Malinda Lo

Malinda Lo is the author of Ash and the just-released Huntress.

From her Q & A with Donna Freitas at Publishers Weekly:

Both Ash and Huntress feature star-crossed romances between two girls. Can you talk about the role of romance in your storytelling?

My books were always going to be between two girls—I didn’t make a radical choice to do this. I’m not interested in heterosexual romances. I just wrote Ash and then Huntress as a romance, and what’s funny to me about this is that I have never really enjoyed reading romances. Though I really love books that have romance in them as an element and in YA, romance is really king.

I ended up enjoying writing this aspect of the books. The romance in Huntress in particular I love a lot, but it was very hard to do. It starts off by telling you these two girls are going to be in love—sets an expectation for the reader—so you really need to make it feel real, and the two main characters didn’t come to me that easily. I felt like I knew who Taisin was from the beginning but I didn’t really know Kaede at all. I’m not really a character–driven writer. I need to write the whole book before I get to know the characters, their motivations, and how to build them.

That experience taught me a lot about writing romance. I ended up reading a lot of romances that I loved to get a sense of how to do write one—the most unsappy romances I could find. I looked for books with understated romance to try and figure out why they worked for me. I read Persuasion by Jane Austen, for example. When I wanted to figure out sexual...[read on]

Writers Read: Malinda Lo.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lee Martin

Dani Shapiro put some questions to Lee Martin, author of the new novel Break the Skin.

Part of the Q & A:

Break the Skin is set in two small towns, but they are very different kinds of small towns. Your evocation of small town life is so vivid and beautiful. Where does your knowledge come from? How does small town life inspire your writing? And how did these particular small towns in Illinois and Texas come into being in your imagination? Was this a novel that began, for you, more with character, or with place?

I was born in Lawrence County, Illinois, where the largest town had a population of just over five thousand people. I lived on a farm with my mother and father, and I attended a two-room country school until I was in the third grade. Although it’s been a number of years since I lived there, that place is always with me. I’m connected to the rhythm of its seasons, the stark beauty of its landscape, the come-and-go of its people.

I lived in Denton, Texas, for five years when I taught at the University of North Texas, and it was my memory of the area around the university–its bars and tattoo parlors, its head shops and drum circles–that produced Miss Baby and first brought me to the story that would become Break the Skin. Place and character are always inextricable for me. The details of Denton and those of New Hope produced Miss Baby and Laney for me, and I let them tell their stories.

Break the Skin is very much a novel about the deep-rooted hunger to be truly accepted and understood by another person. Laney shows the fierce loyalty and submissive qualities of youth, whereas Miss Baby, who has been through so much hurt, is willing to put it all on the line all over again. How do you dig so deeply into the emotional, internal lives of your characters? I noticed that the novel is dedicated to Miss Baby, and found that really interesting. Can you say a bit about that?

The novel, as you say, is very much about the desire for human connection and validation, which is...[read on]

Visit Lee Martin's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into forty-two languages. His many honors include the Franz Kafka Prize.

From his interview with John Wray at The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

I’ve just read After the Quake, your newest story collection and I found it interesting how freely you mixed stories that were realistic, in the style of your novel Norwegian Wood, let’s say, with others that had more in common with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Do you see a fundamental difference between those two forms?.

HARUKI MURAKAMI

My style, what I think of as my style, is very close to Hard-Boiled Wonderland. I don’t like the realistic style, myself. I prefer a more surrealistic style. But with Norwegian Wood, I made up my mind to write a hundred percent realistic novel. I needed that experience.

INTERVIEWER

Did you think of that book as an exercise in style or did you have a specific story to tell that was best told realistically?

MURAKAMI

I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book. That’s why I wrote that book. It was a best-seller in Japan and I expected that result.

INTERVIEWER

So it was actually a strategic choice.

MURAKAMI

That’s...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Geraldine Brooks

Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, and attended Bethlehem College Ashfield and the University of Sydney. She worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald for three years as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues, and later for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March. Her first novel, Year of Wonders, is an international bestseller, and People of the Book is a New York Times bestseller translated into 20 languages.

Her latest novel is Caleb’s Crossing.

From Brooks's Q & A with Dan Eltringham at the Financial Times:

What book changed your life?

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.

* * *
What book do you wish you’d written?

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Collected Poems.

* * *
Who would you most like to sit next to at a dinner party?

Barack Obama, so I can berate him to do more about climate change. I don’t think he’d like to sit next to me though.

* * *
How would you earn your living if you had to give up writing?

I’d be a dog-walker.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

William Gibson

From a Q & A with William Gibson about his novel Pattern Recognition:

Why did you decide to set this novel in the present, unlike your previous novels?

I've been threatening to do it for a while. The last three books feel to me more like "alternate presents" than imaginary futures. Science fiction is always, really, about the period it's written in, though most people don't seem to understand that. The way that September 11 changed the world is a major theme in this book. How would you describe that change? By writing this book. And I'd leave it at that. I'm more interested in finding questions than answers. Questions are more enduring.

Your main character, Cayce Pollard, is a young woman who specializes in pattern recognition - in recognizing group behavior around certain cultural objects or activities or events or ideas before anyone else does. Isn't this also what a novelist does? How strong is the parallel between you and Cayce?

I don't take the labels off my jeans, or go into anaphylactic shock at the sight of certain designer goods, but I'm aware of branding, and interested in it, in how it's done, and how central it seems to be to what we do as a culture. There's been some sort of investigation of celebrity, in my last couple of books, and that may be the ultimate in branding.

Cayce has an ambivalent relationship with cultural trends. On the one hand, she's exquisitely sensitive to them. On the other, she can be physically repulsed by them - particularly by certain forms of advertising or fashion or corporate marketing. Do you think this is a common experience today?

I would imagine...[read on]

Learn what Gibson is scared of.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joel Brinkley

Joel Brinkley is the author of five books: The Iran-Contra Affair (with Steve Engelberg); The Circus Master's Mission, a novel; Defining Vision: The Battle for the Future of Television; U.S. vs. Microsoft: The Inside Story of the Landmark Case (with Steve Lohr); and Cambodia’s Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land, published by Public Affairs Books in 2011.

From his Q & A with the Christian Science Monitor's Randy Dotinga about Cambodia’s Curse:

Q: What has remained the same in Cambodia as during the Khmer Rouge era?

The relative docility of the Cambodian people. Ninety percent of them went along with the Khmer Rouge, and did not object even as they starved to death. There was a small uprising in one part of the country, but that was quashed.

Now you find a docility toward a government that's predatory and corrupt. They're accepting of whatever happens to them.

Q: How are things different now compared to back then?

The cities look relatively modern. You go to Phnom Penh and they have skyscrapers and more cars, bicycles, and motorbikes. Given that Cambodia has more foreign aid workers and more donors per capita than any nation on earth, the major cities have all sorts of restaurants and coffee bars to sustain them. It's a not a shining metropolis, but it's a lot more modern than the hinterlands.

If you go into the countrywide, people have no electricity, no running water, nothing to cook with except a fire, no bathroom except a pit out back. I suppose it's charming to see people who live as they did 1,000 years ago, but it's quite depressing. They could live better if they knew what they were missing.

Q: You write about the unwillingness of many Cambodians to develop ambitions for themselves and their nation. What's behind that?

Cambodia is quite a bucolic country, and that's one reason that its people are more or less stagnant. They can live off what nature provides them.

The historians who write about the Angkor period [in the centuries around the 1200s] make the point quite clearly that...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Marcelo Figueras

Marcelo Figueras grew up in Argentina and currently lives in Barcelona. His novel Kamchatka (which takes its title from a key territory in the board game Risk) is his first to be translated into English.

From his Q & A with Erin Mendell at the Wall Street Journal:

The Wall Street Journal: What’s the strategic importance of Kamchatka?

Marcelo Figueras: It’s a very little country in Asia, but it’s very useful because from Kamchatka you can leap to Japan, and you can leap also to America. … I had already written the novel when I had watched an episode of that sitcom “Malcolm in the Middle,” and it was really funny because Malcolm’s mother and father were playing Risk, and the mother beat the crap out of the father, and [in consoling himself] he said, “At least I got to keep Kamchatka.…”

So I laughed and said, “ I guess somebody in North America will really know what Kamchatka is about.”

Do you play Risk?

Quite a lot. It was a really popular board game during the ‘70s in Argentina. In Argentina it has another name: Teg.

What are some of the challenges of writing from a child’s perspective?

There are...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Rosamund Lupton

From a Q & A with  Rosamund Lupton about her debut novel Sister, now available in the U.S.:

Q. Where do your characters come from and how do they evolve?

In Sister I began with a central relationship, rather than the characters themselves – clearly in this book the central relationship is between sisters. I then find a small detail, or turn of phrase, that suddenly lights up a character for me. With Beatrice it was her obsessively neat and anxious pictures that she did as a child. Although she is not based on anyone I know, and is completely imagined, I couldn't have written her relationship with Tess without being close to my own younger sister. The emotional truth is one that I know well. The minor characters start as simply puppets of the plot but after a while they snip the strings and acquire a life of their own; just as Beatrice and Tess became more than vehicles to show a relationship. At some point the characters take over and that is when writing becomes a magical thing for me. Before the last draft, I changed the central characters' names and then read it again, as if meeting them for the first time to see if they seemed real.

Q. Did Sister throw up any surprises for you?

Yes, many. In the story itself I was surprised by how the characters developed, often changing a great deal from my original character sketches. For example, Kasia had a very small role initially, but seemed to demand more story time and to contribute in un­foreseen ways. Other surprises were simply logistical. I hadn't appreciated how LONG a novel is, compared to the scripts I'd been used to writing, and how hard that middle section of a thriller can be. At one time I felt like a chess player needing to think twelve moves ahead and wondering if my brain was up to it! The ultimate surprise was how hugely satisfying it is to finish a hundred thousand words and have that bulk of paper sitting on my desk.

Q. A lot of medical research must have gone into writing Sister? How did you go about your research and was it difficult?

I read...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue