Patrick McCabe

Patrick McCabe is an Irish writer. Known for his mostly dark and violent novels set in contemporary—often small-town—Ireland, McCabe has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto.

From his Q & A at the Picador blog:

Which other author would you most like to have for dinner and why?

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but I don't suppose there’s much chance of that now.

What’s your favourite fairytale or children’s book?

My favourite fairytale is The Little Match Girl because it's sad. Her getting burnt up and all.

What’s your favourite film?

Night Moves with Gene Hackman.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Heiter

Elizabeth Heiter likes her suspense to feature strong heroines, chilling villains, psychological twists, and a little bit (or a lot!) of romance. Her research has taken her into the minds of serial killers, through murder investigations, and onto the FBI Academy’s shooting range.

Heiter's new novel is Vanished.

From her Q & A at the Harlequin blog:

What kind of research did you do to put you into the mind of FBI profiler Evelyn Baine?

In order to create a realistic FBI profiler, I read up on how to write a criminal personality profile (there are a lot of books out there written by former FBI profilers), studied real-life cases to create my own profiles in order to test my understanding and visited the FBI Academy at Quantico for a firsthand look at the process of becoming an agent. I also talked to a number of current and former FBI agents because I really wanted to get the details right. As I was doing the research, I realized what a difficult job profiling was, and wanted to give Evelyn a deeply personal motivation for why she picked this kind of work: her best friend was abducted when Evelyn was twelve and never found.

Did you find inspiration for the Nursery Rhyme Killer in the news or elsewhere?

The inspiration for the Nursery Rhyme Killer came from...[read on]

Visit Elizabeth Heiter's website and watch the book trailer for Vanished.

My Book, The Movie: Vanished.

The Page 69 Test: Vanished.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patience Bloom

Patience Bloom is a senior editor at Harlequin Books and focuses specifically on Harlequin Romantic Suspense, which gives her full license to indulge in her love of the thriller genre and all things suspense.

Her 2014 book is Romance Is My Day Job: A Memoir of Finding Love at Last.

From Bloom's Q & A with Joanna Scutts at Biographile:

Biographile: Did you ever think about telling your own story as fiction, or did you always want it to be a memoir?

Patience Bloom: Before Romance Is My Day Job even came close to a publisher, it was my NaNoWriMo book for 2010 -- and accidentally nonfiction. I didn’t think I would ever show the story to anyone. Then I decided to fictionalize it, which took about a year. Suddenly, the opportunity to write it as a memoir came about and I wrote an entirely new draft, which is the one out now. So there are three different takes on this story -- two of which will remain buried on a flash drive.

BIOG: Writing your own romantic ending must have felt at times like tempting fate. Was there a particular point in your relationship with your husband when you felt that it would be safe to write about it in this way?

PB: Yes! Throughout the entire experience of writing this book and even some points afterwards, I thought...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Patience Bloom's website.

The Page 99 Test: Romance Is My Day Job.

Writers Read: Patience Bloom.

My Book, The Movie: Romance Is My Day Job.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Niven

All the Bright Places is Jennifer Niven’s first book for young adult readers, but she has written four novels for adults—American Blonde, Becoming Clementine, Velva Jean Learns to Fly, and Velva Jean Learns to Drive—as well as three nonfiction books—The Ice Master, Ada Blackjack, and The Aqua-Net Diaries, a memoir about her high school experiences.

From Niven's Q & A at the Guardian:

This one’s for all the aspiring writers on the Guardian children’s books website: what was the reason you became a writer in the first place?

I became a writer because writing has always been – for all my life – the thing I love to do most. I write because I can’t not write. I write books I want to read. I was lucky enough to grow up with a writer mom, who taught me that I could be or do anything I wanted to be or do. I’m an only child, and when I was a little girl, we used to have “writing time.” From her, I learned to find the story in everything, and I learned never to limit myself or my imagination. I also saw firsthand how difficult and stressful and unpredictable the business was. And I saw the commitment it took. I’m grateful for that because I think so many people go into the business of writing with unrealistic expectations – not realising that it is, in fact, a business, and that you have to be ready and willing to do it in spite of everything else.

As you are a new YA author, if you were on a desert island which three items would you take and why?

I’d like to take my fiancé and three...[read on]

Visit Jennifer Niven's website.

Writers Read: Jennifer Niven.

--Marshal Zeringue

George Pelecanos

George Pelecanos's latest book is The Martini Shot: A Novella and Stories.

From his Q & A with Dave Davies for Fresh Air:

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, our guest is writer George Pelecanos. He has a new collection of short stories and a novella called "The Martini Shot."

You know, in the novella that's in this collection - and I'm going to talk about this a bit more in a while - it's told in the first person from the point of view of a guy who's a writer and a TV producer, which you have done. But he says at a point that he grew up in a multiethnic neighborhood where they - he had an adversarial relationship with the police. You know, not that he was, you know, doing violent stuff, but that you just didn't deal with the police and wouldn't talk to the police. Was that you? I mean, did you have that kind of relationship with cops growing up?

PELECANOS: No, I didn't. I got chased by the police quite a bit, and it was almost like there was a respect there. Chase me - you know what I mean? - and see if you can. And then, you know, sometimes when I would be pulled over or whatever, you know, there were times when the police officer would say to me, you know, where do you live, son? Well, I live, you know, I live a few blocks down here. Instead of arresting me for, you know, he saw the beer cans in the back or he could smell the weed in the car, you know, with my friends, he would say all right get on home and be careful driving there. OK. So what would have happened if he had arrested me and I had gotten put into the system? My life would be completely different today. And it's why I'm so opposed to this sort of, you know, these stops for possession and this broken window policing because once you do that to a kid, once you put them into the system, it's very, very hard to...[read on]

Learn about George Pelecanos's five most important crime novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ann Mah

Ann Mah is the author of Mastering the Art of French Eating: Lessons in Food and Love from a Year in Paris.

From her Q & A with Meg Bortin:

Q. Your new book is subtitled, Lessons in Food and Love from a Year in Paris. Could you please cite an example of one important lesson about food that you learned while writing your book, and one lesson about love that your year abroad taught you?

A. The most important lesson I learned from investigating 10 classic dishes is that patience is the great hallmark of French country cooking. The patience needed to slowly simmer a pot of cassoulet over several days, or to painstakingly strain the sauce of a boeuf bourguignon, or to visit several charcuteries in search of the perfect sausages and cured meats for your choucroute garnie. Patience is the reason Granny’s food always tastes best. And – patience is also...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Phil Klay

Phil Klay is a graduate of Dartmouth College and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. He served in Iraq’s Anbar Province from January 2007 to February 2008 as a Public Affairs Officer. After being discharged he went to Hunter College and received an MFA. His story “Redeployment” was originally published in Granta and is included in Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, the New York Daily News, Tin House, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012.

Redeployment is his first story collection.

From his Buzzfeed Q & A with Jen Percy:

Jennifer Percy: Can you talk about any complications you came across while transforming autobiographical or overheard experiences into fiction? And why did you make the choice to write fiction, especially using multiple narrators?

Phil Klay: It’s the best way I knew how to think about certain issues. I came back with all these questions, questions that could only be answered by exploring the experiences of contractors, soldiers, chaplains, girlfriends, etc. Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure. When I returned to NYC I came from a place where there were horrific things happening — and not to me, I had a mild deployment — but nightmares were common in Iraq at that time. So you come back, and you go from walking through TQ Surgical where you have Marines, civilians, insurgents, all terribly injured, and then two days later you’re walking down Madison Avenue in New York City and there’s zero sense of war. And when you get out of the Marine Corps you’re no longer in a community where conflict is vital. It’s such an abstraction. And yet you know that there’s a continuing world of horror going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Things of incredible importance overseas. And also here on the home front, as vets try to transition back. So the questions started coming up: How do we deal with veterans? What does the war mean to us?

I’m not the same person I was when started. I remember early on a friend of mine pointed out to me that...[read on]

Redeployment is on Jeff Somer's list of seven of the best recent books that give an honest account of war.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alafair Burke

Alafair Burke's latest novel is The Cinderella Murder, co-written with Mary Higgins Clark.

From Burke's Q & A with Rebecca James for The Edge:

What initially drew you to crime and law, as a career, and as subject matter?

Oh my gosh, that is so hard to answer. I always wonder if it had something to do with growing up in a town (Wichita, Kansas) where there was an active serial killer. Police did not catch him until I was already a law professor, 30 years after his first murder. Growing up with that kind of violence in the community, with no clear answers, might have made me interested in being part of law-enforcement.

How has your undergraduate degree influenced the way you approach crime and law?

I was a psychology major in college. What I learned there about memory and cognition always affects the way I see cases. People’s observations are inherently subjective, and their memories inherently...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Alafair Burke's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Megan Abbott

Megan Abbott is the Edgar®-winning author of the novels Queenpin, The Song Is You, Die a Little, Bury Me Deep, and The End of Everything. Her 2012 novel, Dare Me, was chosen by Entertainment Weekly and Amazon as one of the Best Books of 2012 and is soon to be a major motion picture.

Abbott's latest novel is The Fever:

From the author's Q & A with Greg Akers for the Memphis Flyer:

You had a normal upbringing, nothing too crazy?

It was alarmingly uncomplicated. [Laughs.] It was a book-loving household. My dad is a professor at Wayne State and a writer. My mom wrote on the side and now writes short stories. My brother is a compulsive reader. We passed around books constantly. That made its mark on me more than anything specifically in my childhood.

Were you allowed to read anything you wanted?

Yes. We used to go to used bookstores a lot. Because of the dramatic quality of the covers, I was drawn to true crime at an unhealthy age — not that it really had an unhealthy effect, because it didn’t do anything to me. But the books terrified me, and you love to be scared as a kid. I remember reading at an early age Helter Skelter and Hollywood Babylon. I liked looking at the pictures in the middle of the book and reading all those tales of women who marry men who are con artists who then kill them. I read mysteries like Agatha Christie as a kid, but I didn’t discover crime fiction until high school.

Like the actual hard-boiled classics?

I was working my way through the canon, and I knew of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett from the movies, but I...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Megan Abbott's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Fever.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jan Jarboe Russell

Jan Jarboe Russell is the author of The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America's Only Family Internment Camp During World War II.

From her Q & A with Weekend Edition's Rachel Martin:

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: The internment camps where Japanese-Americans were sent during World War II are a well-documented part of American history. One lesser-known camp was called Crystal City in southern Texas. And there, thousands of Japanese immigrants were detained along with many people of German and Italian descent. Hundreds of these Americans were then sent back to their countries of origin in exchange for Americans who were caught behind enemy lines when the war broke out.

Jan Jarboe Russell writes about these secret trade arrangements in a new book called "The Train To Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Program And America's Only Family Interment Camp During World War II." Russell writes about the families who came to Crystal City to be with their loved ones who have been detained.

JAN JARBOE RUSSELL: You had wives and fathers and children living in tiny huts in this 290-acre internment camp. It had schools. It had a swimming pool. Of course, it was an internment camp. It had barbed wire fences. It was under constant armed guard. All of the mail in and out of the camp was censored. But most heartbreaking is that President Roosevelt set up a division within the Department of State called the Special War Problems Division.

MARTIN: And this is where we get to the subtitle of your book "The Secret Prisoner Exchange Program."

RUSSELL: In the run-up to the war, the president realized that Americans would be tracked behind enemy lines in Germany and in Japan, especially. And he charged the Special War Problems Division with creating pools of people that he could trade for important Americans - soldiers, diplomats, businessmen, journalists, missionaries.

MARTIN: As you say, these were all Americans who happened to be living abroad when World War II breaks out. And the Roosevelt administration is trying to figure a way to get them home. And they think they have leverage by repatriating German-Americans, Italian-Americans, Japanese-Americans. Many of these people were born in America.

RUSSELL: Well, that was the tragedy of Crystal City, not the way the internees were treated. In about the 50 children of the camp that I spent time with and interviewed, some of them say that as hard as it was, those were the best years of their life because they were with their parents and their siblings. And so they aren't resentful about...[read on]

Visit Jan Jarboe Russell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue