Mary Roach

Mary Roach's new book is Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.

From her Q & A with Mindy Farabee at The Daily Beast:

In Gulp, you write, “People who know anatomy are often cowed by the feats of the lowly anus.” The book as a whole ends on a note of awe and respect reminiscent of your feelings for space travel at the close of Packing for Mars.

Yeah, very much so. I think this is a losing battle, but I would love people to come around a little bit from the general position of disgust and revulsion they have for their insides, especially the below-the-waist portion of their insides. Every step of the way, I was kind of floored by how effortlessly complex and amazing it all is, and I would like to impart a little bit of that to people. You go through life with these things inside you—these guts, these organs—and you never see them and consequently you never think about them. Until something goes wrong, and then you think about them all the time.

One of the themes running through the book is how that disgust can cause our minds to get our bodies backwards. This has led to some kooky theories and practices, as with Sir Arbuthnot Lane, the Scottish surgeon who went around cutting out people’s colons as a cure for constipation.

Exactly. Our understanding of our bodies is very simplistic and intuitive. It’s not like everybody can take an advanced biology/physiology class—there’s no reason why people should know this stuff—but [then] we’re very susceptible to somebody coming along and saying the colon is a revolting, disgusting thing, and you’d be better off without it. It’s like, wait a minute, who says it’s revolting and disgusting? In what way? It’s life saving. It’s vital to how we thrive, and who we are. The arrogance of...[read on]

Learn about Mary Roach's six favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steph Cha

Steph Cha is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School. She lives in her native city of Los Angeles, California.

Follow Her Home is her first novel.

From the author's Q & A with Michael Haskins for The Big Thrill:

Philip Marlowe is mentioned in the book’s synopsis and a few of its reviews; are you a big reader of Marlowe and other noir books?

I first read THE BIG SLEEP for a class on American Detective Fiction my freshman year of college. I loved its darkness and style, the ambiance-driven exploration of Los Angeles. I read all of Chandler’s novels over the next few years, along with a lot of Hammett and Mosley and Ellroy. Since selling the book, I’ve gotten more into contemporary noir. I love what women like Gillian Flynn and Denise Mina are doing with the genre.

What made you decide on noir or did it just fall into place?

Well, I like what noir can do. Noir – good noir, anyway – will tell you all you need to know about a place and time. It’s a great way to explore social issues, and to show, in general, the kinds of consequences that can spring from any given action. I love the genre, and I wanted to write something dark and atmospheric, with some stylistic flourish. With dead bodies too, of course.

What writers have influenced you?

Chandler is the obvious one, and as mentioned above, Hammett, Mosley, and Ellroy too. I read a lot and would like to think that all of my reading informs my writing, but I guess my writing has little in common with...[read on]

Learn more about Follow Her Home, and visit Steph Cha's website and Twitter perch.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Steph Cha and Duke.

My Book, The Movie: Follow Her Home.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marlene Zuk

Evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk's new book is Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live.

From her Q & A with Alison George for New Scientist, reprinted in Slate:

What is driving the tendency to idealize the way ancient humans lived?

There is this caricature that organisms evolve until they get to a point when they're perfectly adapted to their environment, then heave this big sigh of relief and stop. Anything that happens to them after that is disastrous.

You see this attitude in what can be referred to as "paleo-nostalgia"—the notion that we were all better off before agriculture, or civilization, or the Industrial Revolution. It's not to say life has been unmitigatedly getting better. But it's more helpful and accurate to see that all organisms are constantly evolving. There has been no point in our past when we were perfectly adapted to our environment.

I'm not dismissing the idea that you need to look at our evolutionary heritage to think about what's best for us healthwise. But when you start plucking out pieces in an oddly specific way, you can run into trouble.

Are paleo diets, which usually involve eating lots of meat and avoiding grains or dairy, examples of this type of specific selection?

These are predicated on the idea that there was a certain way humans ate 100,000 or 15,000 years ago—the era people want to hark back to varies. I think everybody agrees that we evolved eating certain things and we're going to be very unhealthy if we subsist on Diet Coke and Cheetos. But it gets...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

James Salter

James Salter's new book is All That Is, his first novel since the late 1970s. The book details the life, loves, and losses of a naval veteran who served in WWII and who became a book editor after the war, when publishing was a more genteel pursuit.

From his Q & A with Laurie Gold at Publishers Weekly:

What was the impetus for this book?

It was a period I wanted to write about—after the war. Publishing in an era that’s now past, a much more leisurely era. Business was conducted by mail. Everything was letters back and forth, so the entire pace of writing was different. It was in an era, of course, long before cell phones and faxes; the relationship between editors and writers was a little more intimate. Books were sold in bookstores. There were no big retailers. There was no Amazon. The whole scale of life was completely different. You could compare it to town life as against city life. The publishers, as I remember at the very beginning of my career, wrote letters with their fountain pens. A letter is different from a phone call or fax. It’s a different kind of intimacy. That pervaded the entire business of writing and publishing. The humanity of it was much more evident. You had writers sleeping on couches in the publishers’ offices... Faulkner was correcting his proofs on a table in the hallway. It was the family doctor as opposed to the way you encounter medicine today. Intimacy and a certain dignity. I don’t mean that’s absent now. But it’s under pressure. And the scale of publishing is different. The...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Hanna Pylvainen

Cafe Americain staff member K. Tyler Christensen interviewed Hanna Pylvainen about her novel, We Sinners.

Part of the Q & A:

CA: You said that when you were writing the novel that you didn’t think you were writing anything that anyone would ever read. Was that something you told yourself to get the writing done, or did you really believe that?

HP: During my time at Michigan, I didn’t submit a single story anywhere. I had never published anything before, and didn’t particularly see why that would change. I never finished a revision of a story and wondered what magazine or journal might want it –– I was writing the book I had wanted to read. Everything else, as they say, was gravy.

CA: I grew up in a pretty large family, there were 7 of us, and we were often crammed into small places, and living on top of one another. You write about the chaos of growing up in a large family very well, for example, in “Pox” there’s a lot of unrest; you have this large family living in this tiny apartment, and out of their van (an oversized vehicle until you put a set of parents and 9 kids inside). Of all things, the family gets the chickenpox. As the first story in the novel, what is being foreshadowed by a story about an entire family getting the chickenpox?

HP: There are many contagious elements to the family life of the Rovaniemis, but specifically, I would point to the moment at the end of the chapter “Pox” when the daughter, Brita, overhears her parents forgiving each other in the ritual blessing of forgiveness. The real “pox” is the guilt and the forgiveness –– that is the epidemic no character can avoid, or entirely be free of, whether they stay or go.

CA: I love that in each of the stories we get to see...[read on]

Visit Hanna Pylväinen's website and Facebook page.

Writers Read: Hanna Pylväinen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Gilmore

Jennifer Gilmore's new novel is The Mothers:

From her Q & A with Sybil Steinberg for Publishers Weekly:

You and your husband have embarked on a similar quest to Jesse [the narrator of The Mothers, who desperately wants a child] via open adoption. How close are the events you describe to your own life?

It’s obviously true that we’ve made a protracted adoption journey. But a lot of it is fictionalized because I wanted to examine open adoption and how fraught could be, and also to look at issues of race and class and how in our culture they are viewed and affected in the adoption process. I saw a lot of mixed couples, and I wanted to describe which of them were rejected and which were embraced.

Was it hard for you to revisit all the frustrations, indignities and heartbreaks of the open adoption process, or was it cathartic to get it out of your mind and on paper?

I really don’t feel that writing is therapy. However, to be working on the novel as events were happening --as opposed to just suffering through them--was very important to me.

Why did you fictionalize your experience rather than relate it as nonfiction?

I really feel like a novelist and I felt that I could...[read on]

Writers Read: Jennifer Gilmore.

--Marshal Zeringue

Keith O’Brien

Keith O’Brien's new book is Outside Shot: Big Dreams, Hard Times, and One County's Quest for Basketball Greatness. From his Q & A with Jeff Duncan for nola.com:

Where did the inspiration for this story come from for you? How did a reporter from Boston stumble upon a high school basketball team from Scott County, Ky.?

The most interesting stories are within subcultures. And there is no doubt that Kentucky basketball is a fascinating subculture. Unlike most every other state, Kentucky has no classifications for high school basketball - no 5A, 4A and so on - that divide schools into divisions based on their size or talent. In Kentucky, every March, all 270 high school basketball teams enter the postseason. Only 16 make it to Rupp Arena. Crowds of 20,000 fans or more fill the arena to watch kids play basketball. And the boys and men who get there will literally kneel down and kiss the floor. They shed tears; they weep. They believe that just making it to Rupp and playing before these adoring crowds will change their lives -- even though, of course, it usually does not.

How familiar were you with Kentucky's passion for the sport of basketball before spending eight months there? And were you surprised in any way by the zeal once you moved there for the fall and winter?

I grew up in Cincinnati, just across the Ohio River from Kentucky. So I was familiar, at least in passing, with the Bluegrass. I knew, in Kentucky, I'd be able to tell a story that would convey the power and meaning of basketball in rural America. What surprised me, though, was that there was a flip side, a dark side, to this passion. The kids and their families were often under so much pressure to win. The fans could be merciless, attacking teen-agers for their failures and shortcomings. It's one thing to criticize college players - say, Coach John Calipari or his players at the University of Kentucky. It's quite another thing to do the same thing to a 16-year-old kid. There should be...[read on]

View the video trailer for Outside Shot, and visit Keith O'Brien's website and Facebook page.

See O'Brien's six favorite books about people who have beaten the odds.

The Page 99 Test: Outside Shot.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gail Carriger

New York Times bestselling author Gail Carriger writes to cope with being raised in obscurity by an expatriate Brit and an incurable curmudgeon. She escaped small town life and inadvertently acquired several degrees in Higher Learning. Carriger then traveled the historic cities of Europe, subsisting entirely on biscuits secreted in her handbag. She resides in the Colonies, surrounded by fantastic shoes, where she insists on tea imported from London.

Her Parasol Protectorate books are: Soulless, Changeless, Blameless, Heartless, and Timeless. Soulless won the ALA's Alex Award and has been turned into a graphic novel. Carriger's young adult Finishing School series begins with Etiquette & Espionage and follows the exploits of Sophronia who discovers her dreaded lady's seminary is a great deal more than anyone realizes.

From Carriger's 2013 Powell's Q &A:

If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?

Let It Steep: Chronicles of a Wierdo between Tea Breaks

How did the last good book you read end up in your hands, and why did you read it?

These days I'm really into rereading some of my past favorites. It's like visiting old friends. I just went back to Sorcery and Cecelia, a deliciously fun and very polite romp by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer.

Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?

Not unless you count going to Boston Worldcon to meet Tamora Pierce.

Describe the best breakfast of your life.

Oh, this is an easy one. At the Denver Worldcon in 2008 (an all-around awesome trip), the hotel I stayed at (across from the Convention Center) had, in my book, the perfect breakfast. It was a little stew pot of tomatoes with spinach topped with two poached eggs and toast tips. (I ordered it without the ham.) I've been trying to...[read on]

Learn more about author at Gail Carriger's website and blog.

My Book, The Movie: Soulless.

The Page 69 Test: Changeless.

Writers Read: Gail Carriger (November 2010).

Writers Read: Gail Carriger.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ronlyn Domingue

Ronlyn Domingue is the author of the newly released The Mapmaker’s War. Its sequel, The Chronicle of Secret Riven, is forthcoming in 2014. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, The Mercy of Thin Air, was published in ten languages. Her writing has appeared in The Beautiful Anthology (TNB Books), New England Review, The Independent (UK), and Shambhala Sun, as well as on mindful.org and The Nervous Breakdown. Born and raised in the Deep South, she lives there still with her partner, Todd Bourque, and their cats.

From Domingue's Q & A with Caroline Leavitt about The Mapmaker’s War:

The Mapmaker’s War takes place in what feels like an ancient period of history. Aoife is out of step with her time, but ahead of it, too. One reason she becomes a mapmaker is to define her life in some way. She’s aware women are meant to be only wives and mothers, and she doesn’t have much interest in either role, especially when she’s young. How do you perceive her struggle with these expectations?

It’s not that she’s opposed to marriage or motherhood. It’s a matter of choice. She writes, “You had no inclination to become what every woman you knew became. A wife, mother, domestic. You didn’t begrudge them their roles if they were freely chosen. Yet who can choose freely when the options are few?” She wants the opportunity to direct her own life and use the capabilities she has. She struggles against the coercion of custom and tradition, the limitations which usually don’t take into account an individual’s potential beyond gender. But readers will see her evolve with her circumstances. Aoife isn’t quite the same woman as Wyl’s wife and mother to his children as she is as Leit’s spouse and mother of their daughter.

There’s a major theme in the novel about the concept of choice, individual and collective. Why is that so significant?

As Aoife’s story emerged and I reflected on the details of her life, I kept thinking about a book I read, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century by Jonathan Glover. It was a difficult read because it’s about war and genocide, an exploration of man’s inhumanity to man, but Glover includes examples of soldiers and civilians who didn’t give in to violence and cruelty. Most of the book is a complete horror, but when I finished, I had a clear, distinct thought: We choose...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Ronlyn Domingue's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

The Page 69 Test: The Mapmaker's War.

Writers Read: Ronlyn Domingue.

My Book, The Movie: The Mapmaker's War.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mike Rose

Mike Rose is a professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and the author of many books, including Lives on the Boundary, The Mind at Work, and Possible Lives. His latest book is Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education.

From Rose's Q &A with Hector Tobar for the Los Angeles Times:

You're the author of several books about working people and education. Especially about people whose talents are ignored, or who are seen as "problems" by many educators. How did this life-long interest of yours come about?

Well, their story is in many ways my story. My parents were Italian immigrants who were drawn west by the classic 1950s California dream, traveling to Los Angeles to create a better life. They, and all of my family, worked blue-collar and service jobs, and like many working-class kids, I didn’t do so well in school. I drifted along and was tracked into a general-vocational curriculum in high school. Then my senior English teacher turned my life around and steered me toward college – where I struggled before finding my way. So the lives of children migrating here from Mexico or Central America or Asia, or men and women doing physical work, or people in adult school, or the freshman who struggles in college – they all reach something deep in me. But I have to say – because it rarely gets said – that these people’s stories are also intellectually rich: the unacknowledged linguistic gifts of the immigrant kid, the brains it takes to do physical work, the cognitive intricacies of an adult figuring out algebra. All this is as worthy of research as landing a robotic explorer on Mars.

"Back to School" is about "second chancers" and the schools that serve them. Could you tell us a bit more about the wide variety of students you found at the adult schools you've visited and what kind of challenges that presents to the people who run those schools?

In an adult school in L.A., you’ll find everyone from the precocious 18-year old who could not stomach another day of high school to the newly arrived immigrant from Belarus or Taiwan or El Salvador, to a wide range of people in their 30s and 40s who quit high school to join the workforce and raise a family, to older folks who just want the stimulation of a classroom. You’ll find an even wider range of students in our community colleges, talking one minute to a young woman fresh out of high school with her sights set on transfer to UC, and the next minute to a guy who spent years behind bars and is getting his life together in an automotive technology program. I don’t think our policymakers fully understand the challenges of...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue