Jenni L. Walsh

Jenni L. Walsh spent her early years chasing around cats, dogs, and chickens in Philadelphia's countryside, before dividing time between a soccer field and a classroom at Villanova University. She put her marketing degree to good use as an advertising copywriter, zip-code hopping with her husband to DC, NYC, NJ, and not surprisingly, back to Philly. There, Walsh's passion for words continued, adding author to her resume.

Becoming Bonnie, her debut novel, tells the untold story of how church-going Bonnelyn Parker becomes half of the infamous Bonnie and Clyde duo during the 1920s. The sequel Being Bonnie will be released in the summer of 2018.

From Walsh's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You've noted that you originally wrote about Bonnie and Clyde's crime spree, before turning to telling Bonnie's story. Why did you decide to focus on Bonnie?

A: Yes, when I first began writing, I had every intention of telling their crime spree story. While there are various nonfiction accounts of Bonnie and Clyde’s life on the lam, I saw an opening for a fictional retelling.

I dove in, but Bonnie and Clyde’s background came as a surprise to me. There isn’t much known about Bonnie’s adolescent years, but from what I gathered, she started life as a very wholesome individual. Bonnie sang at church, received straight As, won spelling bees, and participated in beauty pageants.

I had this moment where I thought… but she ended up as a fugitive? How? So...[read on]

Visit Jenni L. Walsh's website.

Writers Read: Jenni L. Walsh.

The Page 69 Test: Becoming Bonnie.

My Book, The Movie: Becoming Bonnie.

--Marshal Zeringue

Megan Frampton

Megan Frampton's newest novel is Lady Be Bad.

From her Happy Ever After / USA Today interview with Joyce Lamb:

Joyce: Welcome to HEA, Megan! Please tell us a bit about your new release, Lady Be Bad.

Megan: Lady Be Bad is the first in a new series called The Duke’s Daughters — basically, it’s riffing off the Bennet sisters, only in my situation, the runaway daughter remains a runaway, and the other sisters have to clean up the mess.

Joyce: What inspires your book ideas?

Megan: The characters themselves. I usually start off with a strong feeling for who these two are, and how they first meet one another.

Joyce: Do you have any particular rituals that help you get into the writing frame of mind?

Megan: A liter bottle of seltzer at my side. Other than that, no.

Joyce: Do you have a pet that hangs out with you while you’re working?

Megan: Kiki, my...[read on]

Visit Megan Frampton's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Karin Tanabe

Karin Tanabe's new novel is The Diplomat's Daughter. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Your new novel features three main characters, two of whom are men. What was it like to write from a male perspective this time?

A: I knew I wanted Emi to be the object of two men’s affections when I started to write, but I wasn’t sold on also writing the male perspective, especially twice!

But in the end, I decided I wanted to take the book around the world, and the only good way to do that was to also show Christian and Leo’s stories up close and personal. Christian and Leo both experience the violence of war very differently than Emi, and I liked being able to reveal what each gender went through.

In the end, I really enjoyed writing from the male perspective, and would definitely be open to doing it again!

Q: The novel includes scenes set during the World War II era in Europe, Asia, and the United States, which must have involved a great deal of research. Can you say something about how you researched the novel, and did you learn anything that particularly surprised you?

A: The research was certainly...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Ed Lin

Ed Lin's latest book is Incensed. From his Q&A with TAP-NY:

Can you tell us about your latest novel, Incensed?

Incensed is the sequel to the first book, Ghost Month. It’s very timely in that it discusses LGBTQ issues in Taiwan while in the convention of a mystery set during the Mid Autumn Festival, when family is traditionally together–the Taiwan take on it is eating barbecue together and going into the country to see the full moon, which symbolizes the family together.

What was the inspiration behind the series?

I’m trying to explore Taiwanese history and culture. Each book is centered on a different holiday in Taiwan. The country has so much to offer the world. Other island nations, such as Ireland and Jamaica, have made their story well-known globally but Taiwan hasn’t bridged that gap yet.I remember reading an interview with the director Wei Te-sheng and he said that Taiwan has never been the...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Ed Lin's website.

The Page 69 Test: Snakes Can't Run.

The Page 69 Test: One Red Bastard.

My Book, The Movie: Ghost Month.

Writers Read: Ed Lin (October 2016).

--Marshal Zeringue

Jennifer Kitses

Jennifer Kitses's new novel is Small Hours. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Small Hours, and for your characters Helen and Tom?

A: For me it was all pretty tied together—I had the situation, I had Tom’s storyline I wanted to deal with. I wanted to capture the feeling of how much can happen in a single day.

I have twin daughters—they were in preschool, I was freelancing and trying to take care of them. Going back and forth between Tom and Helen—that was the kind of life I was living. My husband and I were having intense days that weaved together. [It’s the idea of] having separate days in separate worlds.

Q: So you knew from the beginning that you would go back and forth between them?

A: I had the two storylines, and I wanted to go back and forth.

Q: How did the idea that the action would take place in one day affect the writing process?

A: There were constraints because of that. I was checking train times to my imaginary town. Devon isn’t real but I didn’t want to create a train that wasn’t there. Even the sunrise time [which plays a role in the story].

The other part is that I allowed myself the ability to...[read on]

Visit Jennifer Kitses's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Reeves

Richard Reeves's new book is Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do about It. From his MarketWatch interview with John Coumarianos:

MarketWatch: As an immigrant to the United States, how long did it take you to realize how stratified the classes were here?

Reeves: It was a combination of looking at transitional matrices [tables showing mobility] during the day — the U.S. is pretty sticky at the top — and listening to people talk and operate on the weekends and evening. In the U.K. we do class in plain sight. Here’s it’s more quiet. There’s a kind of collective national self-denial about it.

Q: You write: ‘Far from abandoning marriage, college-educated Americans are busily rehabilitating the institution for the modern age, turning it into a child-rearing machine for a knowledge economy.’ All of that sounds like a pretty unerotic business.

A: America is where the most powerful women in the history of the world are more likely to get and stay married. It might have been hard to imagine that the most educated and economically powerful women would get married at high rates. But there is an acknowledgment that this is the best way, especially for the kids. If it’s not “‘til death do us part,” it’s at least “til the last high-schooler departs.” So there is some empty-nest divorce, but not much. People are getting married later so they have their more romantic experiences...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Gian Sardar

Gian Sardar's new novel is You Were Here. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You've said that you've "always been fascinated with invisible layers." How did that fascination lead to the creation of You Were Here?

A: I love the idea that we’re inside a living, breathing history. That everywhere and everything we touch is full of a life we just can’t see, and that sometimes we might sense those past stories in ways that don’t seem logical; a strange moment of pause on a street corner where someone took their last breath, an unexpected feeling of happiness in a place where someone said “I do,” or a feeling of loss in a place where someone said a final goodbye.

I’ve always been fascinated by those invisible worlds that came before us, as well as with the stories of the past that create our present, yet another layer.

Everything that came before us forms the platform on which we stand and I love to imagine how far back that might stretch - whether it’s your life, your parents’ lives, or even a life you could have lived before.

In so many ways our histories began long, long ago, and it’s that idea and that fascination that led me to write a book in which one layer is exposed.

In You Were Here, you see the past, and with that you understand the history of objects and places, as well as glimpse the components that...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Jesse Eisinger

Jesse Eisinger is a senior reporter and editor at ProPublica, and the author of The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives. From his Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross:

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Pulitzer-Prize-winning business reporter Jesse Eisinger, who's a senior reporter and editor with ProPublica and author of the new book "The Chickens Club: Why The Justice Department Fails To Prosecute Executives." And the book tries to answer the question, why were no executives punished with the exception of one after the financial meltdown of 2008?

So when you ask the question, why weren't more individuals prosecuted, you know, after the financial meltdown, I expected the answer to be, well, there was this word that came down, like, protect the banks or, you know - that's not what you found. It's not...

EISINGER: No.

GROSS: Yeah, you found that - I mean the big picture I think is that you found that the Department of Justice lost a lot of prosecutorial tools that it used to have.

EISINGER: Yeah. The Department of Justice suffers a series of fiascos, losses. And they lose tools and there are bad rulings from the courts. And that ends up depriving the prosecutors of tools to prosecute these individuals. And they lose that focus and end up settling on corporations. So yes, it wasn't Tim Geithner, the treasury secretary, calling up Eric Holder and saying, lay off the banks. It was a kind of slow evolution.

GROSS: What's an example of a tool that you think could have been used to good effect after the financial meltdown that the Justice Department no longer was able to use?

EISINGER: Well, prosecutors used to be able to say to companies, if you want to claim that you're cooperating with our investigations, then you have to...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Anne Sibley O'Brien

Anne Sibley O'Brien's new novel for kids is In the Shadow of the Sun.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: As you noted, you grew up in South Korea. How did that affect the writing of this novel?

A: I can't imagine how I could have managed without that experience. One of the issues of writing across cultures is understanding your own lens as an insider or outsider.

Growing up in Korea I was both, a foreign, high-status American child, while living in the Korean community, absorbing Korean life and language through my young eyes and ears, skin and bones.

It's given me the gift of lifelong relationships with close friends and extended and immediate family who are Korean — including our daughter — and so many connections within the Korean American community. All of this...[read on]

Visit Anne Sibley O'Brien's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven Pinker

Stephen Pinker's books include The Better Angels of Our Nature and The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. From his Q&A at Undark Magazine:

UD — On Twitter [in 2016], you wrote that “all words have [more than] one meaning” and also that “mature adults resist taking pointless offense.” We wonder about the word “all” here. How do you square that, for example, with unambiguous, sexually or racially derogative words?

SP — Actually, it’s not easy to find words that are unambiguously derogatory; it always depends on the context. The most offensive word in contemporary English is “nigger”(from negro, Spanish for “black”), but it was far less incendiary in the antebellum South. … And today the term is famously used in a teasing or affectionate manner among African Americans, as if to say “We’re so intimate that we can call each other offensive names without taking offense.” “Queer,” “dyke,” and “bitch” have also been appropriated by their original targets, and there is a magazine for hip young Jews called Heeb.

Of course the speaker and tone are everything. In the movie “Rush Hour,” Jackie Chan plays a Hong Kong detective who innocently follows the lead of his African-American partner and greets the black patrons of a Los Angeles bar with “Wassup, my nigger!” A small riot breaks out.

Even putting aside these consciously defiant acts of reclaiming, most taboo words have, or had, non-taboo senses. Many racist and misogynistic terms started out as metonyms, in which people were demeaningly referred to by...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue