Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel is the bestselling author of numerous novels, including Wolf Hall, which won the 2009 Man Booker Prize, and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.

From her Q & A with Alexandra Alter at the Wall Street Journal:

In developing Thomas Cromwell as a sympathetic and in many ways admirable and influential figure, you’re going against the grain of how he’s historically been portrayed by academics and writers. Traditionally, Cromwell is painted as the villain while the Catholic scholar Thomas More is the hero. What made you want to redeem Cromwell?

He always gets such bad press, it made me think there was a huge untold story here. Cromwell seemed to me like a figure out of time — the ambitious politician on the make, the man who rose from very humble origins to be the king’s right hand man. It seemed like an archetypal story. What I tried to do was scrape away at the accretions of prejudice. It was an act of imagination. A challenge I’m throwing out to my reader all the time is, I’m telling you what the circumstances are as we’re moving through his life, this challenge, this dilemma, and I’m asking the reader, what would you do if you were Thomas Cromwell, and your imperative was survival and to get on and make your mark in life? I think that often the reader will be compelled to say, in all honesty I would have done exactly what he did. Once you start to put yourself in his place, then this idea that he’s a double dyed villain, it starts to evaporate. You start to see that he’s a man struggling alongside other men to serve a capricious, neurotic, whimsical monarch, who made the best of circumstances both for himself and for his country.

The voice you use is very unique. It’s a very close third person that is clearly Cromwell’s perspective, which you emphasize by mostly referring to him as “he” rather than Cromwell. How did you develop that voice and was it something you struggled with?

I didn’t think about it or calculate it at all. When I sat down to write the first paragraph of “Wolf Hall,” I thought I’d write a page or two to see how it sounds, and that was the voice that came out. The first scene was, he’s a boy on the ground and his father’s standing over him and about to bring his foot down. And I thought, well, we’re looking through his eyes. And it can’t be a first person narrative, but it’s not as detached as third person. And I felt that since I’m behind his eyes, I can’t really start calling him Thomas Cromwell, as if I’m across the room and able to point at him. So I evolved this other way of doing it, which has now become...[read on]

Learn about the book Mantel wishes she had written.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward O. Wilson

Edward O. Wilson, one of the world’s preeminent biologists, is the author of more than twenty-five books, including Sociobiology, the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Ants, and the best-selling novel Anthill. His latest book is The Social Conquest of Earth. A professor emeritus at Harvard University, he lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.

From Wilson's Q & A with Liz Else:

You've recently been involved in a high-profile academic row over what drives the evolution of social traits such as altruism. Why should non-specialists care?

That is one of the main points of my new book. Scientific advances are now good enough for us to address coherently questions of where we came from and what we are. But to do so, we need to answer two more fundamental questions. The first is why advanced social life exists in the first place and has occurred so rarely. The second is what are the driving forces that brought it into existence.

Eusociality, where some individuals reduce their own reproductive potential to raise others' offspring, is what underpins the most advanced form of social organization and the dominance of social insects and humans. One of the key ideas to explain this has been kin selection theory or inclusive fitness, which argues that individuals cooperate according to how they are related. I have had doubts about it for quite a while. Standard natural selection is simpler and superior. Humans originated by multilevel selection—individual selection interacting with group selection, or tribe competing against tribe. We need to understand a great deal more about that.

How will a better understanding of multilevel selection help?

We should consider ourselves as a product of these two interacting and often competing levels of evolutionary selection. Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society. If we look at it that way, then we have what appears to be a pretty straightforward answer as to why conflicted emotions are at the very foundation of human existence. I think that also explains why we never seem to be able to...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Tiffany Baker

Tiffany Baker has a graduate degree in creative writing from UC Irvine and a PhD in Victorian literature.

Her latest novel is The Gilly Salt Sisters.

From her Q & A at The Debutante Ball:

Talk about one book that made an impact on you:

I first read Jane Eyre when I was nine years old, and at various points in my life, I’ve gone back to read it again. When I was kid, I was mesmerized by Jane’s tragic childhood. As a teenager, I was smitten with Mr. Rochester, and now, as a novelist, I appreciate the narrative arc and Jane’s voice.

I have a doctorate in Victorian literature, and I’ve come to believe that one is either Team Jane Eyre or Team Wuthering Heights. Generally, most scholars are pro-Wuthering Heights, and although I love both books, I have to say that my heart belongs to Jane Eyre. I think it’s more of a reader’s and a woman’s book. For one thing, there’s no prissy Mr. Lockhart telling the story, just Jane, herself. Also, Heathcliff is sexy, but he’s too much of a brute in the end. Mr. Rochester does have his awful side (the fact of the mad wife in the attic is emphatically Not Good), but he’s not quite as savage as Heathcliff. And the end is happy. I love a happy, if imperfect, ending. Finally, is there any better sentence than...[read on]

Learn more about the author and her work at Tiffany Baker's website.

Baker is also the author of the New York Times bestselling The Little Giant of Aberdeen County.

The Page 69 Test: The Little Giant of Aberdeen County.

Writers Read: Tiffany Baker.

The Page 69 Test:  The Gilly Salt Sisters.

My Book, The Movie: The Gilly Salt Sisters.

--Marshal Zeringue

Megan Mayhew Bergman

Megan Mayhew Bergman grew up in Rocky Mount, North Carolina and attended Wake Forest University. She has graduate degrees from Duke University and Bennington College. Her stories have appeared in the 2010 New Stories from the South anthology, Ploughshares, Oxford American, One Story, Narrative, PEN American, The Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, Greensboro Review, and elsewhere.

Her new story collection is Birds of a Lesser Paradise.

From the author's Q & A with Anna-Claire Stinebring at Full Stop:

You’re originally from North Carolina, though you now live in Vermont. Would you consider yourself a Southern writer?

I spent 30 years in the South, and three in Vermont. I feel like a Southern writer, and yet I already feel ties to New England. What I value most, I’ve realized, is not geography, but proximity to the natural world. I am a girl from the sticks if nothing else. I guess what I can understand, and perhaps feel most at home in, is a small town. (Cue Mellencamp.)

Sometimes I feel like the contemporary Southern writing that gets the most attention capitalizes on being grotesque: decay and trailer parks. Do you find there are tropes that come with writing about a certain place that you have to combat?

I go back and forth on this, and I think the success of writing Southern narratives and Southern characters rests on the skill of the author. I certainly wrote some early stories that stirred up tired ideas, stories I’d like to forget about old people and biscuits and church.

The thing I find most difficult to read in bad “Southern” writing is phonetic dialect; nothing reveals a tin ear like bad Southern. If an author has given us good characters, a palpable setting, and strong word choices, we get it — authors can...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Chad Harbach

Chad Harbach is the author of the novel The Art of Fielding.

From his Q & A with Noah Charney at The Daily Beast:

Do you follow a favorite baseball team, and any specific player?

I’ve been a Brewers fan since birth. My favorite player is the great Vinny Rottino.

What is your earliest baseball memory?

My earliest memory of playing (and maybe my earliest memory, period) is of my dad pitching me Nerf balls in our living room when I was barely old enough to stand. As a fan, I have all-too-vivid memories of the Brewers’ loss in the 1982 World Series, when I was 6 years old.

What do you do when you are stuck or have temporary writer’s block?

Walk. Or drink. But walking is more helpful.

What is something you always carry with you?

My ancient, crappy cell phone that gives a busy signal whenever anyone calls me, but which I for some reason refuse to relinquish. (Either I’m too cheap or don’t like getting phone calls or both.)

If you could bring back to life one deceased person, who would it be and why?

One writer I’ve always been eager to hang out with is...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Alan Gilbert

Alan Gilbert is a John Evans Professor in the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. He is the author of Marx’s Politics: Communists and Citizens, Democratic Individuality, and Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy?

His new book is Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence.

From Gilbert's Q & A at 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: Your new book Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence came out in March. Can you say what the thesis of the book is and if there are political lessons to be learnt from this history?

AG: Sixteen years ago, I started working on blacks escaping and soldiering in exchange for emancipation during the North American Revolution. After many downs - nothing like entering a new field, the writing of history, and in America, its most sacred area, the Revolution, and telling a tale in which blacks from below liberate themselves, but, nonetheless, most escaped to and were taken to freedom by the Crown. As a lifelong anti-racist, this story is threaded from the introduction – a dedication to my grade school classmate and friend Andy Goodman, murdered during Freedom Summer, along with James Cheney and Michael Schwerner – and concludes with the defiant speech of Gabriel, a black artisan who almost led the burning down of the wooden city of Richmond in 1800. Gabriel likened himself and his cause to George Washington (Washington would be a greater leader if one could liken him to Gabriel or Toussint L’Ouverture). The story is of how courageous individuals, with insight into the wrong of slavery, travelled lonely paths to move the mountain. For instance, John Woolman in the 1750s among Quakers began with a refusal to write wills which bequeathed slaves and then walked throughout the South talking with Quakers about the evil of holding men in bondage. John Laurens was the scion of an influential slave-owning family in South Carolina, whose father was a Christian opponent of slavery in the abstract but also, when blacks rose up, stuck at them viciously. John studied Rousseau in Geneva in the early 1770s, and came back the leading elite abolitionist in the Revolution. An aide to Washington, his name is on the Laurens proposal, passed by the Continental Congress in 1779, freeing 3,000-5,000 blacks in South Carolina and Georgia in exchange for fighting. Thomas Peters was a prince in Africa, kidnapped and sold into bondage in South Carolina and branded twice for trying to escape. Peters then succeeded, fought as a sergeant in the Black Pioneers, went to Canada with the defeated British and led a movement among those not given land for redress. He travelled to London, and became the leader of a democratic expedition to and experiment in Sierra Leone. The book explores how through many such stories, then and afterwards, individuals contributed to forging the movement which finally outlawed bondage in the Empire in 1834 and rose to a crescendo in the American Civil War. Often small or not initially determined efforts which achieve, over time, deeper purposefulness can...[read on]

Learn more about Black Patriots and Loyalists at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Black Patriots and Loyalists.

Visit Alan Gilbert's "Democratic Individuality" blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

William Dietrich

William (Bill) Dietrich's historical and action thrillers have been translated into 28 languages. Dietrich is also a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, nonfiction author, and college professor of environmental journalism. He has won the Washington Governor Writer's Award and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award.

His Ethan Gage Adventures feature an imperfect American adventurer who is not only a protege of the late Benjamin Franklin—but also a gambler, sharpshooter, treasure-hunter and romantic, who manages to get into plenty of trouble with women. Ethan's story entwines with Napoleon Bonaparte's, whom he first meets in Napoleon's Pyramids and is later allied to and odds with in The Rosetta Key and The Dakota Cipher. The newly released The Emerald Storm is the fourth novel in the series.

From a Q & A about the new book at the author's website:

Q: Ethan in retirement! I don’t believe it.

A: Our hero is perfectly ready to settle down, except that ambition, vanity, greed and treachery gets in his way.

Q: Fortress de Joux sounds forbidding. Why would Napoleon put a black hero, Touissant L’Ouverture, there?

A: This castle, which can be visited today, was the Napoleonic Alcatraz, one of the worst places to be imprisoned and particularly harsh for a captive from the tropics, given its alpine locale. But Napoleon wanted to return slavery to Haiti, and hoped imprisoning the black leader would accomplish it. Instead, it made the slave revolt worse.

Q: The Caribbean must have been a nice place to do research.

A: Somebody has to do it. It WAS nice, of course, but the islands we think of as paradise today were considered hellish then: hot, diseased, and thronged with insects. I had to imagine the setting from a very different perspective.

Q: Did the Aztecs really have flying machines?

A: No one saw them flying, but golden artifacts have been found that look oddly like airplanes. Perhaps they were representations of...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at William Dietrich's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Emerald Storm.

--Marshal Zeringue

Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins is co-author (with the late Mickey Spillane) of Lady, Go Die!

From his Q & A with J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet:

J. Kingston Pierce: In an opening note in Lady, Go Die!, you explain that you didn’t immediately recognize this novel as Spillane’s second, unfinished book, but thought that it was an early version of his 1966 Hammer work, The Twisted Thing. How long did it take you to discover its true importance, and what finally tipped you off?

Max Allan Collins: When I began reading it, that Lady, Go Die! was a different story became immediately apparent. But understand that I have a file cabinet drawer of unpublished, mostly unfinished Spillane material, and it took me a while to go through everything. The manuscripts of The Goliath Bone, The Big Bang, Complex 90, Kiss Her Goodbye, and King of the Weeds were clearly, obviously substantial Hammer manuscripts. There were a number of other, shorter Hammer manuscripts that I felt would either make short stories or possible novels, once those five were completed.

The other factor was that Lady, Go Die! began with Chapter 2--Chapter 1 had been lost--and was more on the order of 80 pages, rather than the 100 or more of those first, easily identifiable, unfinished Hammer novels. So even when I discovered how significant it was--as the follow-up to I, the Jury--I decided to set it aside. It was shorter, and I’d have to write the first chapter myself, and that all seemed to relegate it to a later slot, after I’d become really comfortable with this posthumous collaboration.

JKP: Can you speculate on why Spillane put this novel aside in the 1940s and never came back to finish it himself?

MAC: I have two theories. I think he may have started a sequel only to have an editor discourage him from submitting it, until sales reports for I, the Jury came in. And of course...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Julianna Baggott

Critically acclaimed, bestselling author Julianna Baggott also writes under the pen names Bridget Asher and N.E. Bode. She has published seventeen books over the last ten years.

After receiving her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Baggott published her first novel, Girl Talk, which was a national bestseller and was quickly followed by Boston Globe bestseller The Miss America Family, and then Boston Herald Book Club selection, The Madam, an historical novel based on the life of her grandmother. She co-wrote Which Brings Me to You with Steve Almond, a Kirkus Best Book of 2006.

Baggott's new novel is Pure, her first horror novel, which divides future humans into two classes: those cataclysmically merged with animals, toys, and other people, and the dome-dwelling, authoritarian “Pures.”

From her Q & A with Roxane Gay at The Rumpus:

Rumpus: Pure, your latest novel, feels very timely and is nothing if not a cautionary tale about the dangers of nuclear weapons. How did the idea for this trilogy come about?

Baggott: My childhood was marked by the great fear of nuclear holocaust. We practiced our Civil Defense Drills, lining up in hallways, curled to the floor, but we knew we’d die or, worse, survive only to suffer radiation and slow death. Pure comes from that deep well of fear—a renewed fear these days. Later in the drafting, I started doing research on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When people say that Pure is too bleak for them, I refuse to apologize. What we’ve done to our fellow man is far more horrific than anything I wrote. That said, Pure isn’t about the apocalypse. It is about what endures—hope, faith, love.

Rumpus: I read that you wrote Pure for your daughter. Do you always write books toward someone in your life? How does that shape your writing?

Baggott: You want the greatest trick for writing a novel? Here it is: imagine urgently whispering your story into one person’s ear—and only one. This one visualization will clarify every word choice you make.

Rumpus: What does it take to write a dark story? Do you ever fear darkness in your work?

Baggott: I don’t know when I’m writing dark. I don’t know when I’m writing funny or even heartbreaking. I’m always just trying to...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Julianna Baggott's website and blog.

Baggott also writes under the pen names Bridget Asher and N.E. Bode.

The Page 69 Test: Bridget Asher's The Pretend Wife.

The Page 69 Test: Pure.

Writer Read: Julianna Baggott.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde (a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize), and the New York Times bestsellers The Falls (winner of the 2005 Prix Femina Etranger) and The Gravedigger’s Daughter. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2003 she received the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature and The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award.

Her recent novels include Little Bird of Heaven, Dear Husband, A Fair Maiden, and Mudwoman.

From her Q & A with Jacqueline Mroz for New Jersey Monthly about New Jersey Noir, which Oates edited:

Is New Jersey a perfect setting for noir?

Perhaps many states of the United States are perfect settings for the noir sensibility—California, New York and Louisiana certainly come to mind—but New Jersey seemed ideal, as my preface suggests.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s story in the collection is set in Princeton. Does he capture the essence of your town? What is the essence of Princeton?

The university is comprised of thousands of individuals, many from foreign countries. Jonathan’s story is primarily about estrangement within the too-near real and could be set virtually everywhere; but since Jonathan knows Princeton from having been a student here for four years, he set it here.

How do you think an outsider’s view of New Jersey differs from that of New Jerseyans?

I have no idea how people in Idaho regard us. Most people’s views of others are cliches and not really worth investigating. That is why art attempts some complexity of portraiture.

You’ve lived in New Jersey for many years. Do you feel like a New Jerseyan?

I feel like...[read on]

Learn about the book that changed Joyce Carol Oates's life.

--Marshal Zeringue