Paul Beatty

In 2016, Paul Beatty became the first American to win the Booker prize with his fourth novel, The Sellout. From his Q&A with Kate Kellaway at the Guardian:

When you started The Sellout, to what extent did you know where you were going with it?

I started with the idea of rendering segregation in a contemporary context. I was asking myself: how do you segregate something without having any power? I was intrigued to try to figure it out. I have a pretty good sense of direction, although I don’t know how I’m going to get there. But the real seed for the book was the character of Hominy [former child actor and latter-day, self-appointed slave]. I tend to like underappreciated characters: you think you see one thing, you might be seeing something else.

I was affected by what you said when you received the Booker prize – you were visibly moved yourself – about writing having given you a life…

I am fortunate in having found something I enjoy, even though I hate doing it too. Writing is a struggle, full of weird contradictions.

As a satirist, do you think there is anything that ought to be satire-proof?

No… but...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Janet Benton

Janet Benton's new novel is Lilli de Jong.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You note that you came up with the idea for the book when you were caring for your baby. What specifically inspired the creation of Lilli?

A: That’s where the mystery comes in, where her specific voice came from. I was learning about wet nurses in history and nursing my daughter, and I started hearing a young wet nurse railing about the unfairness of her circumstances. The young man paid no price for their night of indiscretion, and look at her. It was an act of empathy, I suppose. A character began to take shape.

Q: What kind of research did you do to recreate Philadelphia in the 1880s, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

A: I was surprised at how much people hated and still hate unwed mothers. They had sex without being married, whether it was consensual or not, yet these people didn’t and don’t hate the woman’s partner or rapist. The woman alone bears the shame and the hatred.

In my research, I learned that these young women were shunned, hounded on the streets, victimized over and over. They would hide their pregnancy with tightly laced corsets, but that eventually would become too painful, and imagine what that would have done to the baby.

And most hospitals were...[read on]

Visit Janet Benton's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Victoria Redel

Victoria Redel's new novel is Before Everything.

From her Guernica interview with Annie DeWitt:

Guernica: This book dismisses the cliché of women as necessary enemies fighting for the male gaze. In fact, their friendships, rather than their marriages, or even their children, seem to fuel them. I wondered if you might talk about how you claimed that power?

Victoria Redel: It wasn’t a power that needed to be claimed. It’s truly how I feel. I don’t buy any image of women as enemies or inevitably bitchy. Are women angry or ambitious? Yes, sometimes—and why shouldn’t they be? Maybe men believe our primary focus is the male gaze, but what woman in the midst of her life would agree? It is part of an oversimplified portrayal of women that has nothing to do with women’s actual lives. The women in Before Everything have been one another’s close confidantes over many years. They bear one another’s contradictions, they speak up to one another, and they show up for each other. I don’t think this is exceptional, and not only among intimate friends. Hasn’t every woman had the experience of walking into a public bathroom—let’s say at highway rest stop—and some woman washing her hands next to you says the most personal revealing statement? Maybe she looks up and catches your eye in the mirror, says, “Whoa, when did I start looking like my mother?” Or she might say, “I might have to kill my husband and my kids before this road trip is over.” And you nod and laugh, “I know. I know.” You say, “I’ve already killed mine three times this summer.” And then...[read on]

Visit Victoria Redel's website.

The Page 69 Test: Before Everything.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Pfordresher

John Pfordresher's new book is The Secret History of Jane Eyre: How Charlotte Brontë Wrote Her Masterpiece. From his Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How would you describe the relationship between Charlotte Bronte and her fictional creation, Jane Eyre?

A: Despite Brontë’s vigorous denials, there is a remarkably close relationship between herself and her heroine. This was necessitated by her simultaneous wish to make the novel as realistic as possible, and her acknowledgement that her own life experience had been strictly limited.

In pursuing the aim, as she wrote, of taking “Nature and Truth as my sole guides,” she had necessarily to draw upon her own past life. She didn’t know much else.

My book thus has been able to make a series of connections between what can be known about Charlotte Brontë, both the things she observed and did, and also the intensely vivid fantasy life which she had cultivated since early adolescence, and the resulting novel.

Jane Eyre, all of the evidence suggests, is a product of Brontë’s ability to transform her past self into...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward Luce

Edward Luce is the author of The Retreat of Western Liberalism. From his Q&A with Isaac Chotiner at Slate:

One of the most depressing things about your book is that when people like Trump come to power they make every social and economic problem that they were elected to solve much worse. Is there anything that gets you hopeful, or is this just a horrific picture with no upside?

So let me say one unhopeful thing before I say one hopeful thing. The unhopeful thing is that we are living through what my colleague Martin Wolf labels very correctly as pluto-populism. We’ve got a plutocratic sort of class and Trump is executing well. Perhaps he’s not competent enough to execute it, but at any rate he’s hoping to push through, I guess, the most plutocratic fiscal plans we’ve ever seen in terms of the shift of public resources and the tax windfalls for the wealthiest people. That is very, very Latin American. It tends to happen in the most unequal societies with no middle, a big bottom, and a powerful top. And so that’s my fear.

My hope is that we actually do learn as societies from our mistakes. I’m going to give you a really odd example here, which is Iran. There’s just zero chance, as I understand from people who do know Iran well, that a clown like Ahmadinejad could be elected in the foreseeable future back to the presidency. They’ve been through this pantomime and they’ve stuck with Rouhani because they understand—it being in very recent memory—what the theatrical and highly damaging diversions do to their pocketbooks and to their stability as a society. So that’s my hope: that we...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Dana Alison Levy

Dana Alison Levy's new novel for kids is This Would Make a Good Story Someday.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for your new book, and for your main character, Sara?

A: There was no one “ah-hah!” moment with this book, but rather a quieter series of “what if” moments.

What if I write a story about Ladybug’s family (she’s a secondary character from The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher, for those who don’t know!). What if it’s told from her 12-year-old sister’s point-of-view? What if they are taking a family trip?

So Sara already existed, because I mention her (in I think only one line, almost at the end of Misadventures). But everything else just followed.

Q: Did you need to do much research on the cities Sara and her family visit in the course of the story?

A: I really did! I wish I had thought to take a cross-country train trip with my family and written it all off as a work expense, but...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Steph Post

Steph Post’s new novel is Lightwood.

From her Q&A with Kevin Catalano at The Coil:

The last time we talked about A Tree Born Crooked, you told me about the need for more badass women in writing. You certainly delivered that here. I noticed that almost without exception, the women in your book force the men’s hands in one way or another: Sister Tulah intimidates the baddest of dudes by her sheer presence and will (and never with a gun); Shelia uses information to manipulate men and, in a way, orchestrate the final climax; and Ramey’s strength, courage, and independence are necessary for Judah to succeed, and survive. (I especially love when Judah tells her, “You’ve always been mine.” and she responds, “No. I’ve been my own.”) How deliberate were these choices?

This is one of the moments when I get so excited for people to read the sequel, because as the story develops, these three women really come into their own in powerful, unexpected ways. I don’t have an agenda in the writing of badass female characters; I just write the sorts of characters that I would want to read about and who I identify with. And those characters are badass women. But I definitely, wholeheartedly, feel like we need more of these types of female characters, especially in this genre. Unfortunately, the grit-lit, country-noir, whatever-you-want-to-call-it genre, is a bit of a boy’s club, and I think that landscape needs to expand. I could go on for hours on this topic, but to go back to your original question, I...[read on]

Visit Steph Post's website.

Writers Read: Steph Post.

My Book, The Movie: Lightwood.

The Page 69 Test: Lightwood.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Morduch & Rachel Schneider

Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider are the authors of The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty. From their Q&A at the Princeton University Press blog:

Why did you write this book?

We have both spent our careers thinking about households and consumer finance, and our field has reams and reams of descriptive data about what people do—savings rates, the number of overdrafts, the size of their tax refunds. We have lots of financial information but very little of the existing data helped us understand why—why people make the financial decisions they make, and why they get tripped up. So we decided to spend time with a group of families, get to know them very well, and track every dollar they earned, spent, borrowed, and shared over the course of one year. By collecting new and different kinds of information, we were able to understand a lot of the why, and gained a new view of what’s going on in America.

What did you learn about the financial lives of low- and moderate-income families in your year-long study?

We saw that the financial lives of a surprising number of families looks very different from the standard story that most people expect. The first and most prominent thing we saw is how unsteady, how volatile households’ income and expenses were for many. The average family in our study had more than five months a year when income was 25% above or below their average.

That volatility made it hard to budget and save—and it meant that plans were often derailed. How people were doing had less to do with the income they expected to earn in total during the year and more to do with when that income hit paychecks and how predictable that was. Spending emergencies added a layer of complexity. In other words, week-to-week and month-to-month cash flow problems dominated many families’ financial lives. Their main challenges weren’t...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Gina Sorell

Gina Sorell's new novel is Mothers and Other Strangers.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Mothers and Other Strangers, and for your main character, Elsie?

A: I've always ben obsessed with identity and the idea of belonging. And I've always been fascinated by people's recollections of their own lives and how we edit our own personal histories to serve our own purposes. I wanted to write about that and about family and secrets, and the lies we tell when the truth is too much.

Elsie is familiar to me; a complicated woman who has survived a cold and distant parent that hasn't nurtured them. And yet, she is someone whose capacity for love and a desire for a happier life, compels her to try and understand what shaped her mother and created her failings.

She does this in an effort to not only move on and heal, but also out of a genuine desire to have some sort of relationship with her mother. My own mother is amazing, thankfully. But...[read on]

Visit Gina Sorell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Meg Gardiner

Meg Gardiner's new novel is UNSUB.

From her Q&A with Jeff Abbott at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

JEFF ABBOTT: UNSUB asks the dramatic question: “What if a killer like the Zodiac returned?” How did you come up with this premise?

MEG GARDINER: The premise found me. I grew up in California, where the Zodiac wasn’t a theoretical threat. He was a nightmare: a killer who wore an executioner’s hood, attacked young couples, then bragged about it to the police and media. He taunted the public, wrote still-unsolved cryptograms, and threatened to shoot kids on school buses. He sowed terror.

Then he disappeared. He’s never been identified.

I was haunted by that. And I wondered: If the Zodiac left the stage on his terms — somebody so violent, so vicious, so eager to play mind games and hungry for publicity — what’s to stop him from returning?

That was the genesis of UNSUB.

It’s the start of a series featuring investigator Caitlin Hendrix. Did you plan for this to be a series, or did Caitlin seem like she had more story to tell once you started writing?

Both! Caitlin has a will to seek justice — she’s a cop’s daughter and has a bone-deep conviction that wrongs need to be put right. She also loves the thrill of the hunt. There’s a...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Meg Gardiner's website, blog, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

The Page 69 Test: The Dirty Secrets Club.

The Page 69 Test: The Memory Collector.

My Book, The Movie: Meg Gardiner's Evan Delaney series.

The Page 69 Test: The Liar's Lullaby.

My Book, The Movie: Meg Gardiner's Jo Beckett series.

The Page 69 Test: The Nightmare Thief.

The Page 69 Test: Ransom River.

The Page 69 Test: The Shadow Tracer.

Writers Read: Meg Gardiner (June 2014).

The Page 69 Test: Phantom Instinct.

--Marshal Zeringue