Writers Read

Arika Okrent

2009-07-13T05:55:00.000-05:00

Arika Okrent is the author of In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers and the Mad Dreamers who tried to Build a Perfect Language.

Last week I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I just finished Iris Murdoch's The Book and the Brotherhood. I never would have chosen this novel on my own: the tagline is "A story about love and friendship and Marxism." It is indeed about love and friendship, though not in the trite way the tagline would suggest, and it is not really about Marxism at all. It is about a group of friends who, when they were young and politically-charged Oxford students, agreed to pool resources to support the most brilliant of their group so he could fully dedicate himself to writing an important book about important ideas. Decades go by, their beliefs change, their brilliant friend causes misery in their lives in various ways, but they continue to support him out of a sense of duty to a promise made. My old English professor, a specialist in 20th-century British women novelists, recommended it to me, and I'm glad he did. The plot is engaging and full of drama, and the way it easily and deeply exposes inner lives and shifts in perspective is utterly absorbing. But I've never read a book that left me so unsure of what I was supposed to think about characters and events, and it unsettled me (in a good way). I felt the need to go find and read some criticism on it in order to help me understand my reactions. So, Professor Soule, if your plan was to get me back to the college-days excitement of interacting with literature, it worked.

I also wouldn't have thought to pick up Science from Your Airplane Window by Elizabeth Wood if it hadn't been suggested to me. I wrote about how Mark Shoulson, my guide to the world of Klingon, pulled it out of his bag when we settled in for our flight to a Klingon conference in Phoenix. That detail was meant to add to a portrait of his nerdy pursuits, but I later bought the book, thinking it would be a fun, educational diversion for my son the next time we took a flight. (Here's to the passing along of nerdy pursuits!) I haven't yet remembered to pack it for a flight, but I have been picking it up occasionally to learn a fascinating tidbit about the shapes of lakes, the polarization of light, or the plow lines in farms. It is written in a very simple, direct style that gives you exactly what the title promises. The simplicity is almost poetic; it captures the essence of good non-fiction. It says, "Here, sit by me. Let's look out of this tiny window together. I will show you things you never noticed and change your perspective on the things you have noticed. Even though this window is tiny, through it you can see the whole world."

The language book I have going now is John Baugh's Beyond Ebonics. A fascinating look at a grossly misunderstood linguistic controversy.

And I read The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander a while ago, but I can't pass up an opportunity to recommend it. Though I'm reluctant to play the "he reminds me of" game, I was reading a lot of Primo Levi – one of my favorites – right before I started this book, and the transition to Englander's voice was almost imperceptible. Englander writes with a similar wary wisdom and gentle, humorous absurdity about absolute horrors. Ministry deals with Argentina's "dirty war" but it is really about all wars, all injustice, and the sometimes dangerous compromises people make in order to lead a normal life in abnormal circumstances.

Learn more about Arika Okrent and her work at her official website and at the In the Land of Invented Languages website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Tel

2009-07-11T19:21:00.001-05:00

Jonathan Tel is the author of the story collection Arafat’s Elephant (Counterpoint, 2002) and the novel Freud’s Alphabet (Counterpoint, 2003). His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and Zoetrope. He has worked as a quantum physicist and an opera librettist.

Tel's latest book is the short story collection, The Beijing of Possibilities.

A few days ago I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I have several books on my desk, reading a chapter of one, a chapter of another, as the fancy takes me. I'm going through some books about China, related to my own writing, as well as those about places and times I know little of.

The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu is oral history: a series of interviews with Chinese at the bottom of the ladder. Most of his subjects are elderly, having lived through the turbulence of the last half century. Fascinating stories from a professional mourner, a safecracker, a mortician, a restroom attendant, and more. The interviews are skilfully edited, so that each has the shape of a short story, with the help of Wen Huang, who was also the translator. I like that the translation has a strong Chinese flavor.

There was a tradition of erotic fiction in the Ming dynasty - an entire body of literature most of us know nothing of. Patrick Hanan has translated much of this; now I'm reading his collection, Falling In Love. Fascinating to learn about a culture so unlike our own, yet not as far as all that from contemporary China.

I was a poet before I was a fiction writer. I admire the rare combination of novels in verse, with rhyme and meter, please. So I'm re-reading Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, set in and around San Francisco in the 1980s. Also Equinox by Matt Rubinstein. Taking place over twenty-four hours in Sydney, the lives of various characters intertwine. The book is unobtainable outside Australia, but it was seralized in the Sydney Morning Herald, and I'm reading it on their website.

Read "Year of the Gorilla" and "Though the Candles Flicker Red," selections from The Beijing of Possibilities, at The China Beat.

Read more about The Beijing of Possibilities at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom Standage

2009-07-10T06:13:00.001-05:00

Tom Standage is the business affairs editor at the Economist and the author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses, The Victorian Internet, The Turk, and The Neptune File. He has written for Wired, the New York Times, and numerous magazines and newspapers.

His new book is An Edible History of Humanity.

A couple of days ago I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I'm reading three books at the moment. On the fiction side, I'm reading Neal Stephenson's Anathem. This is a very large book — so large that it does not fit in my bag — so I have the e-book of it on my iPhone, too. The book depicts an alternative history in which mathematics has become a religion. It takes a while to get going, but it is packed with geeky in-jokes, as Stephenson's books generally are.

On the non-fiction side, I'm reading Empires of the Word by Nicholas Ostler. It's a megahistory that looks at world history through the prism of language, and it's fascinating, particularly in the way it draws analogies across space and time. I enjoy megahistories a great deal, which is why I have written two myself (looking at world history from the perspectives of drink and food).

Finally, I'm reading Chris Anderson's Free, which I am reviewing for The Economist. It does not have an elegant central thesis in the way Anderson's previous book, The Long Tail, did. So I find it less intellectually satisfying. But much of the criticism of the book seems to be coming from people who have not read it, and who think it says that everything ought to be free. Actually, the book does not say that. What it says is rather more complicated: that some products can have zero as one of their many prices, or something. The fact that I can't neatly sum up what it says is telling.

Read an excerpt from An Edible History of Humanity, and learn more about the author and his work at Tom Standage's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan

2009-07-08T14:25:00.001-05:00

Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan, a fiction writer and journalist, lives in New York. She is a 2002 graduate of Harvard College. In 2005, she received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and in 2005-2006, she was the Bennett Fellow and writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy. In 2007, she graduated from the new MA program at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she was a Bollinger Fellow specializing in Arts & Culture journalism. She has written and reported for The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sepia Mutiny, and The American Prospect, among others.

Her first novel, Love Marriage, was published in April 2008. Washington Post Book World named the book one of its Best of 2008. It was also longlisted for the Orange Prize.

Not so long ago I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

It’s never occurred to me before, but I approach reading the same way I do writing in that I like to have several things going at once. If I’m not in the right mood to read something, I put it down and pick up something else. I read non-fiction for both research and pleasure; obviously, I also read fiction, and I have recently returned to poetry.

At the moment I am reading:

Beloved by Toni Morrison—I read this many years ago and picked it up again when I was going through old books. I was thinking about what my former Iowa classmate Nam Le wrote about it on The Millions blog. I’ve been struck anew by how painful and simultaneously lovely this book is. How does one make a reading experience out of pain? How does beauty of style and language balance against raw and powerful content? How do the two work together? These are among the most basic questions we ask about writing—form and content—but it’s useful to think about them again in this framework. And I’m concerned with morality in my fiction, and obviously Beloved tackles that. I’m loving reading it again.

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer—I still read children’s literature, young adult literature, and fantasy. I’ll read really anything that grabs my attention. I saw the Twilight movie recently—with good friends and good wine—and found it delightfully bad. There is a particular part in the movie in which vampire Edward tells innocent human Bella how he reads people’s minds, and he describes to her what every person they see is thinking. He gives them one word each, and it’s very funny. (I won’t spoil the movie for anyone who hasn’t seen it.) But anyway, that line is NOT in the book, which is nevertheless also delightfully bad. Definitely reading the rest of them.

like myth and mother: a political autobiography in poetry and prose by Sivamohan Sumathy—I admire Sumathy a great deal. I was on a panel with her at the Galle Literary Festival, which was held in Sri Lanka in January, and I liked a lot of what she said. Her poems are surprising and forceful, unapologetic and subversive. Of course I am particularly interested in writing about Sri Lanka and by Sri Lankans.

Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror by Mahmood Mamdani—I couldn’t tell you if I am reading this book for research or pleasure—I don’t know yet. But I am reading an increasing number of books about politics and ethics.

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir and The Giant’s House, both by Elizabeth McCracken—(Full disclosure: Elizabeth was my teacher.) The first book here is her latest, a memoir about losing her baby. I am almost done with it. It is fantastically well written and enormously sad. See: Beloved. As to the second, it seems to me that although I have read the whole book, I am never really finished with The Giant’s House. Rather, I am always carrying it around. There is a passage I like to read when I am stuck. It is at the end of part one, when the heroine talks about deciding to love the hero. It’s one of my favorite passages in anything, ever, and it begins: “Sometimes, when your lover does not step from the woods to save you—because how many of us are rescuable, how many would look at some fool in a pair of tights and a pageboy and say, Of course—sometimes you have to marry your tower, your tiny room.”

Maybe that’s what all writers do: Marry our towers, our tiny rooms.

Read an excerpt from Love Marriage, and learn more about the book and author at V.V. Ganeshananthan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Castronovo

2009-07-06T18:37:00.000-05:00

David Castronovo--a New York critic, essayist, and humanities educator whose work largely concerns modern literature, English and American social life, and the history of ideas--is currently C. Richard Pace Professor at Pace University in New York City.

His latest book is Blokes: The Bad Boys of English Literature (Continuum International, 2009).

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I’m on summer literary manoeuvres these days, which is to say preparing for the next book I’m thinking of writing and kicking back a bit. W.H. Auden’s demanding but very rewarding long poem titled “New Year Letter (1940)” in Collected Poems (The Centennial Edition, Modern Library, 2007) has taken up some time. It’s a pungent, moving survey of civilization on the brink of war. Auden’s subjects in this crisp poetic discourse--very classical in style--are art, the just society, social sin and guilt, European suffering, failed ideologies, and the spirit doing battle with mass culture. He twists and turns his reader’s mind as he describes his own doubts and his hunger to believe in individual men and women.

Edward Mendelson’s superb biography Later Auden (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999) is extremely useful for deepening an appreciation of the poem and does what these monster biographies almost never do--provides lucid, searching commentary on the work of literature as well as the writer. Also from the same period is Delmore Schwartz’s In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. I only knew the title story, but now I’ve found the entire New Directions volume a rich exploration of Jewish life in Washington Heights in the 1930s and 1940s, complete with all the mishegas and misgivings. The sly style, the miseries mixed with the absurdities, the streets and interiors, the speech cadences make this book an original source for those who want to know about the social and intellectual yearnings of Jews in America. The title story--terrible and lovely at the same time--is bold in conception: our narrator watches a movie of his parents as they are about to become engaged in a Coney Island restaurant. But the stories about groups--young people who hang out and argue on Saturday night in “The World is a Wedding,” family in “The Child is the Meaning of This Life”--are wrenching social studies of thwarted lives. Clifford Odets covered such things in “Awake and Sing,” but Schwartz left this much richer legacy for Bellow and Roth. His kibitzers and whiners and yearners have real depth.

Now while kicking back I have enjoyed Irish Brooklyn of the 1950s in Colm Toibin’s beautifully controlled and evocative novel Brooklyn: having been a boy in that borough back then, I can say that he captures the restrained mores of the time and the feel of old downtown with its department stores and nearby row houses. Joseph O’Neill’s masterpiece Netherland is a crazy mix of Brooklyn elements from a different period; it’s an exuberant and very sad treatment of West Indians, American dreaming--and a dream of making cricket a major American sport.

I’m also reading the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina. I first read Anna in 1970--and believe me, this translation makes it seem like I’m having a completely new adventure. Lucidity and nuance on every page.

Learn more about David Castronovo and Blokes: The Bad Boys of English Literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy J. Shannon

2009-07-04T08:12:00.000-05:00

Timothy J. Shannon teaches Early American, Native American, and British history at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (2008), Atlantic Lives: A Comparative Approach to Early America (2004), and Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 (2000), which won the Dixon Ryan Fox Prize from the New York State Historical Association and the Distinguished Book Award from the Society of Colonial Wars. He is also co-author with Victoria Bissell Brown of Going to the Source: The Bedford Reader in Early American History (second edition, 2008). His articles have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, the New England Quarterly, and Ethnohistory.

Late last month I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

It is summer, the time of year when I try to squeeze in most of my pleasure reading. My usual tactic is to pick one contemporary work of fiction and one long-neglected (on my part at least) classic and then to see what those titles lead me to next.

I started off with Dear American Airlines, a well-reviewed debut novel by Jonathan Miles last year. The story is told by the protagonist, a recovering alcoholic and divorced father who is trying desperately to make it to his daughter’s wedding, only to find himself thwarted by the capricious nature of modern air travel. His angry letter of complaint, composed during an interminable and unplanned layover, becomes a confessional account of his life, told with hearty doses of black humor. Of course, I may have been cajoled into reading this one simply by the description of the author’s day job on the dust jacket: he is the cocktails editor for the New York Times.

The classic novel I have selected for the summer is John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. I read some of his short stories in college and his criticism pieces in the New Yorker, but I had never read any of his novels. His death last year made me put this on my list. However, I have not cracked it yet, as I have already been distracted by other things.

My family and I are spending June and July in Britain with a study abroad group, and so I wanted to read something that would put me in the proper frame of mind for travel. George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London seemed like a good choice, as we would be spending time in both cities, and I always wanted to read something by him that was not on one of my high school reading lists. The book reminded me of Orwell’s wonderful dexterity with English prose, and it also proved him to be adept at the brief character study. He does a wonderful job of conveying the personalities of the various down-and-outers he meets while living as a homeless person in London, and his descriptions of working in the bowels of a Paris hotel kitchen will make you think twice about what you are getting on your plate the next time you eat in a fancy French restaurant.

From Orwell, I moved on in search of some comic relief and found it in Cold Comfort Farm, a satire of English country life by Stella Gibbons. A friend had recommended this title to my wife and I shortly before our departure for the UK. I found a paperback edition in a used bookstore shortly after our arrival and figured it was a sign from heaven. I have never indulged in the sort of works this book was intended to lampoon, Victorian tales of isolated gentry families slowly descending into madness and rot out there in the moors. But now having read it, and smiled the whole way through, I feel like I have digested Wuthering Heights as well. So I am glad to recommend it as a highly enjoyable two-for-one.

The historian Kevin Kenny wrote of Shannon's Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier:

Shannon’s book takes us from the zenith of Iroquois power in the early eighteenth century to its nadir in the Revolutionary era, concentrating on the intricate art of diplomacy in treaty negotiations over war, peace, and trade between the various colonial governments and the Indians. In this account the Iroquois are major players rather than pawns in history, even if their story ends, inexorably, in tragedy. In keeping with the tone of the series, Shannon writes about even the most complex issues in an impressively deft style.

--Marshal Zeringue

Guobin Yang

2009-07-02T13:07:00.000-05:00

Guobin Yang is an associate professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College, Columbia University. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and is coeditor, with Ching Kwan Lee, of Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China.

His new book is The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online.

Earlier this week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I usually read books somewhat related to what I am writing (but not too closely related). Casual reading is too much of a luxury. This summer, I am working on my book manuscript about the Chinese Cultural Revolution. So I thought I'd catch up with some reading about the global 1960s.

I have just read Kristen Ross's book May '68 and Its Afterlives (2002). The book shows that in the decades after 1968, mainstream social science has constructed a mellow and tame image of the May Movement as a student movement about lifestyles and cultural identity. Ross argues that this image distorted historical reality, contending that the May Movement was a violent, not tame, revolutionary movement about social equality rooted in the fundamental crises of capitalist society and involving broad cross-sections of French society, notably workers, but also farmers, as well as students.

I have always been struck by the numerous parallels in the social activism of the 1960s in Western societies and in China. It is sobering to realize that the mainstream image of the 1960s movements in the West is mellow and quiescent, whereas that of the Red Guard movement and the Cultural Revolution in China is just the opposite -- violent, bloody, and cruel. The unstated commonality between these two images is that neither has anything to do with revolutionary transformation. Ross's book shows how this image is false.

Another book related to violence (and the global 1960s) I have just read is J. Glenn Gray's The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (1959). This is a true classic and sparkles with insights. I came across this title when I was reading Hannah Arendt's little book On Violence (which again has a lot to do with the 1960s). Gray was a philosopher. He received his notice to be inducted into the Army on May 8, 1941 in the same mail that brought him his Ph.D. degree from Columbia University. Written with deep pathos, the book is a philosophical meditation on war, death, love, enemy, and guilt based on his own war experiences and diaries. The entire book is highly relevant to the violent realities of our contemporary world, but the most striking chapter for me is the one on "Images of the Enemy." One basic point Gray makes is that violence is often supported by an abstract image of the enemy, because such an image promotes abstract hatred. The book is full of quotable gems. Here is one: "The abstractness of the term [the enemy] promotes in this emotion-drenched atmosphere of war the growth of abstract hatred. I think it is abstract hatred and not the greater savagery of contemporary man that is responsible for much of the blood lust and cruelty of recent wars." (p. 134)

Where does abstract hatred come from? It "arises from concentrating on one trait of a person or group while disregarding other features, not to speak of the larger context in which all the traits coexist and modify each other."(p. 134). Gray also makes the poignant point that soldiers at the battlefront may have a more concrete, and therefore more human, image of the enemy than civilians back at home. He writes: "A civilian far removed from the battle area is nearly certain to be more bloodthirsty than the front-line soldier whose hatred has to be more responsible, meaning that he has to respond to it, to answer it with action. Many a combat soldier in World War II was appalled to receive letters from his girl friend or wife, safe at home, demanding to know how many of the enemy he had personally accounted for and often requesting the death of several more as a personal favor for her!" (p. 135)

Watch a video of Guobing Yang discussing The Power of the Internet in China, and read more about the book at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicholas Griffin

2009-06-30T16:52:00.000-05:00

Nicholas Griffin's books include the historical novels The Requiem Shark and House of Sight and Shadow and the nonfiction work, Caucasus. His latest novel is Dizzy City.

A few days ago I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I'm heading toward the end of nine months of research for my next book. That means I've read around 120 books, all non-fiction, as well as several hundred articles. The problem with research is not only that so much of it is dry, most of it is happens to be irrelevant to your own end-result, but even the author doesn't know exactly where he or she is heading at this stage. Among the dross, I read many first rate books, two of which, Nelson Mandela's Long Road to Freedom and Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold stand out.

Writers need patience, but patience itself is put in perspective through Mandela's accomplishments, always pushing outwards, reaching outwards, observing, even when all he had was a quarry on Robben Island and years of confinement ahead of him. God and Gold by Walter Russell Mead is one of those 'big' books, filled with history and bright ideas but refreshingly unapologetic to the place the US and UK carved out into the world. It stops short of the current financial crisis, but the thesis is still key ... whoever understands the working and movement of money and trade gets to control the world. With the pound taking a nose-dive last year and the dollar presumably not far behind, it makes you long for the days where innovation was tempered by experience and fear.

In my back-pack for my holiday is the new book by Steig Larsson and David Grann's The Lost City of Z. Can't wait.

Read an excerpt from Dizzy City and learn more about the book and author at Nicholas Griffin's website.

The Page 99 Test: Dizzy City.

--Marshal Zeringue

Esther M. Sternberg

2009-06-28T14:55:00.000-05:00

Esther M. Sternberg's latest book is Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being (Harvard University Press, 2009).

This weekend I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I generally prefer non-fiction to fiction, and tend to read historical biographies, particularly biographies of accomplished women. Most recently I have read the biography Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, by Brenda Maddox; the biography Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis by Kim Todd; and the biography Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin. All three of these books not only provide detailed descriptions of the era when these women lived, but also give fascinating insights into the hurdles that they had to overcome in order to accomplish their goals in periods in history when their fields were very much male-dominated. The books are thoughtful in that they reveal character traits in each of these women that helped them make their great contributions despite these challenges and against all odds. The books nonetheless also explore traits that may have hindered them in fully achieving recognition in their own time. The books about scientists (Merian and Franklin) also reveal the history of their particular fields of science, which I find fascinating, in the context of what we know about these fields today.

The most recent book I am reading in this genre is not about one individual, but is rather an ensemble biography: A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Martin Johnson Heade by Christopher Benfey. Rather than focusing on the challenges faced by the women in this cast, it addresses the challenges of the era surrounding the civil war in the United States, and the role that these intellectuals who all knew each other, played in the abolitionist movement. The symbolism of hummingbirds as a symbol of freedom figures prominently throughout the book, whether depicted in the written or spoken word, or in paintings, by each of these highly creative people. Their foibles and weaknesses of character, and how these did or did not impact their creative products and geniuses are also explored.

When I do read fiction, it is often historical fiction. Most recently I have read Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks, and am part way through Saving the World: A Novel by Julia Alvarez. Both books explore the personal impact on the books’ characters of the great infectious scourges of these eras – in the case of Year of Wonders, the impact of the plague in 17th century England, and in Saving the World, the impact of smallpox globally, from the point of view of a woman of early 19th century Spain, alternating with the story of the fear of AIDS in a woman of our own time.

Finally, one of my favorite fiction writers is Jhumpa Lahiri, whose short stories in Unaccustomed Earth and The Namesake I love to read, both for their lyricism and poetic style, as well as for their subject matter of adjusting to life in a new country and culture. These stories resonate with me in part because I am a first generation Canadian/American, whose parents came from Romania before and after World War II. The experience of having a foot in two cultures has also deeply informed my own writing.

I find all these books interesting not only from a historical, scientific and psychological perspective, but also in terms of their dramatic structure and literary style. Their ability to make the reader keep reading, and to raise suspense through the arc of their stories, helps me in my structuring my own non-fiction books on different aspects of the science of the mind body interaction (The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions Holt, 2001; and Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being Harvard University Press, 2009). In my books, I try to make the reader feel like they are right there with the scientists whose characters and discoveries I describe. I am convinced that science can be presented to readers who do not have a scientific background in a compelling, interesting, accessible, non-condescending and even poetic and lyrical way, all held together by the glue of narrative. Reading these books provides me important insights on how to continue to do so for my own readers.

Esther M. Sternberg, M.D., author of the newly released Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being and The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions, has done extensive research on brain-immune interactions and the effects of the brain's stress response on health. She was on the faculty at Washington University, St. Louis, prior to joining the National Institutes of Health in 1986.

Read an excerpt from Healing Spaces, and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press website.

Dr. Sternberg is internationally recognized for her discoveries in brain-immune interactions and the effects of the brain's stress response on health: the science of the mind-body interaction. A dynamic speaker, recognized by her peers as a spokesperson for the field, she translates complex scientific subjects in a highly accessible manner, with a combination of academic credibility, passion for science and compassion as a physician. Learn more about her research, publications, and professional activities at Esther M. Sternberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kevin Kenny

2009-06-26T04:01:00.000-05:00

Kevin Kenny is Professor of History at Boston College, where he teaches the history of Atlantic migration and popular protest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is author of Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment (Oxford University Press, 2009), The American Irish: A History (Longman, 2000), and Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (Oxford University Press, 1998); and contributing editor of New Directions in Irish-American History (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003) and Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2004). He teaches courses on the history of American immigration, race, and ethnicity.

Earlier this week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I am currently reading Peter Kolchin’s American Slavery, 1619-1877. A classic in its field, American Slavery was first published in 1993. The current Tenth Anniversary edition comes with a new Preface and Afterword by Kolchin. Accessible to specialists and general readers alike, this elegantly written book covers the period from the beginnings of American slavery through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Kolchin offers a remarkably balanced account of a highly contentious topic, viewing the “peculiar institution” from the perspectives of the slaves, the slave owners, non-slaveowning Southerners, and Northern observers across the political spectrum. He shows how American slavery, far from being a static or monolithic evil, changed over time and spread across space, assuming very different forms in different periods and places. And he interweaves the relevant scholarly controversies into his narrative with a nice, light touch. As the author of Unfree Labor (1990), a study of American slavery and Russian serfdom, Kolchin also excels at placing his subject in comparative contexts, especially Brazil and the Caribbean. He describes American Slavery, 1619-1877 as a “short, interpretive survey” and it is without question the best of its kind.

I have just started reading Timothy J. Shannon’s Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (New York: Penguin, 2008), a volume in the new “Penguin Library of American Indian History.” From their base in upper New York, the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy were the dominant Native American power in the northern American colonies during the eighteenth century. Through a combination of expert diplomacy and the threat of military force they claimed sovereignty over most American Indians in the present-day Northeast and Midwest. They also served as intermediaries between Britain and France in their long struggle for imperial mastery over North America. Shannon’s book takes us from the zenith of Iroquois power in the early eighteenth century to its nadir in the Revolutionary era, concentrating on the intricate art of diplomacy in treaty negotiations over war, peace, and trade between the various colonial governments and the Indians. In this account the Iroquois are major players rather than pawns in history, even if their story ends, inexorably, in tragedy. In keeping with the tone of the series, Shannon writes about even the most complex issues in an impressively deft style.

For pleasure, I am reading Andrea Camilleri’s August Heat (La vampa d’agosto, trans. Stephen Sartarelli). The hero, Inspector Salvo Montalbano, fights crime in the small but hopelessly corrupt town of Vigàta, in Sicily. He maintains a passionate but distant love affair with Livia, who spends most of her time in Genoa but occasionally comes to visit. His assistants, Gallo and Catarella, out-do each other in clownishness, but beyond the comedy lie layer after ominous layer of corruption and intrigue. Camilleri misses no opportunity to skewer the local mafiosi, the Berlusconi administration, and northern Italian fascists. Montalbano loves nothing more than to be alone, to swim, and to eat good food. Camilleri’s mouth-watering descriptions of his hero at table, always with simple, fresh ingredients in just the right combination – shrimp or baby octopus tossed in olive oil with chopped parsley – exquisitely reveal Montalbano’s inmost self. Food is his refuge from an otherwise sinister world. When Livia comes to Sicily with two friends and their young son in the midst of the August heat, the holiday soon turns into a disaster. Beneath the apartment he has rented for the family they discover a second underground apartment, and in that that concealed apartment they find the body of …

Read more about Peaceable Kingdom Lost at the Oxford University Press website, and see the related essay in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “The ‘holy experiment’ was too good to last,” and his recent entry on OUPblog, “Immigrants and Native Americans.”

Learn more about Kevin Kenny's scholarship at his Boston College faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alissa Hamilton

2009-06-24T15:41:00.002-05:00

Alissa Hamilton holds a Ph.D. from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a J.D. from the University of Toronto Law School. She has been a Graham Research Fellow in International Human Rights at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. She is currently a 2008-2009 Food and Society Policy Fellow with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP).

Her new book is Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice.

Recently, I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

It's summertime, the season for a great romance, thriller, or mystery, whether read between covers or viewed on the big screen. And yet all I seem to be reading these days is non-fiction, the film equivalent of the documentary, which you might think is more fall/winter appropriate. Think again. Docs can be entertaining: remember March of the Penguins, when the two pudgy penguins too impatient to wait their turn get momentarily stuck, Abbot and Costello style, in the hole in the ice on their way fishing?

Similarly, Non-fiction can be gripping. I'm going to take a chance and pick Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life as proof. I confess I have not read this year-in-the-life, but it's on my shelf, next in line. Kingsolver, who appropriately made her name writing delicious fiction (The Bean Trees was her first novel), begins Animal, Vegetable, Miracle with an elaborate drawing of an every-vegetable-plant followed by the evocation:

Picture a single imaginary plant,

bearing throughout one season all the

different vegetables we harvest...

we'll call it a vegetannual

With a start like this, I'm confident it won't disappoint. Especially since squash, which may be my single most favourite vegetable, crowns the drawing.

If you're more in the mood for a thriller, I recommend A Question of Intent: A Great American Battle With a Deadly Industry, by David Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Kessler was largely responsible for exposing and cracking down on the tobacco industry. Although the book was published in 2001, it is timely given a recent article co-authored by Kelly Brownell, Yale psychologist and author of Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About it, and Kenneth Warner, tobacco researcher and Dean of the University of Michigan's School of Public Health, about the similarities in the marketing tactics used by the food and tobacco industries.

Hot docs for what I hear is going to be a hot summer.

Visit Squeezed's home page at the Yale University Press website, to view reviews, an excerpt, and more.

--Marshal Zeringue

Caitlin O'Connell

2009-06-22T13:19:00.000-05:00

Caitlin O’Connell is the author of The Elephant’s Secret Sense (Simon & Schuster, 2007; paperback by University of Chicago Press, 2008) and the upcoming The Boys Club (Harvard University Press, 2010) about male society from the elephant perspective. She is also co-author of a children’s nonfiction science book called The Elephant Scientist (Houghton Mifflin, 2010). Her essay in the August issue (2009) of The Writer magazine strives to assist the nature writer in “casting words in nature’s best light.”

Last week I asked O’Connell what she was reading. Her reply:

Because I teach a creative writing class for Stanford’s Continuing Studies program, I’m always on the lookout for books to recommend to my students on the craft of writing. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott was recently recommended and it didn’t take long to see why. Part of my phobia of self-help books is the assumption that they deliver dry facts on how I should behave within the discipline of writing and inevitably make me feel like I’ve somehow failed at my craft if I’m not able to do my daily writing exercises, keep a diary and be religious about outlining prior to writing. Anne Lamott blows those fears out of the water with her wonderful and frank personal narrative about a writer’s struggles, failures and successes, while weaving in motives for trying some concrete, very accessible tools to assist writers in moving forward with their goals. I highly recommend this book to writers, would-be writers, as well as readers looking for a fun personal narrative.

In my never ending pursuit of strong character-based fiction, members of my book club recently recommended Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra, which I found to be an unexpected mind-bending delight on many levels. This very slim novella is a fascinating journey that twists and turns through time, emotions and raw consciousness. An enriching experience.

A last recommended recent read is Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, a memoir about growing up in Zimbabwe in a troubled time with a troubled yet colorful family. What struck me most about this story was the unique and often breathtaking depiction of a land that is very familiar to me given my work in the neighboring Namibia on elephants, and yet made all the more rich and resonant with her lyrical prose.

Read an excerpt from The Elephant’s Secret Sense and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Elephant’s Secret Sense.

--Marshal Zeringue

Josh Weil

2009-06-20T14:56:00.000-05:00

Josh Weil received his MFA as a Jersey Fellow at Columbia University. His fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals including Granta, Story Quarterly, and New England Review.

His new book is The New Valley, three linked novellas which, according to Tim O'Brien, "shine with a strange and intense luminosity that is at times heartbreaking, at other times triumphant. There is a magic and gentle beauty in this book that makes me remember why I had always wanted to be a writer."

A few days ago I asked Weil what he was reading. His reply:

I've noticed this can happen with short story collections, even the best ones: you pick it up, read a few stories, love them, and then something else gets in a way and you never finish the collection. Unless it's really, really good -- and then you pick it back up, maybe a year later, and dive back into it and think: how did I ever set this down? That's where I'm at right now with Don Waters' collection, Desert Gothic. It's set in America's dry, hot, sun-backed places: mostly around Reno, Nevada. And it pulls off darkness and light, heat and chill, as naturally and as cleanly and as inseparably as the desert landscape does. These are stories about grief and loss and the places in us that are hollowed out by both, but Waters manages to dig around those places with a gentleness that makes me want to exist there a little longer with each story, even if it's difficult, even if it's sad. He has lots of talents, but the main three that are striking me as I dive back into this are these: 1. He sees details most of us would miss, and when he points them out they're the kind of thing that feel so vital we'd have missed the whole point without them. 2. In much the same way, the rhythm of his language feels both fresh and natural to the stories. 3. Finally, and most importantly, he hits on that surprising yet absolutely right feeling near the end of each story: he finds ways to bring the stories together with events that are utterly pleasing. What I mean by that is that they are the perfect events to end the story without ever feeling like the easy way out. It's good stuff.

In the year between reading the beginning of Desert Gothic and going back to it, I read three books that blew me away: Jim Harrison's Returning to Earth, Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing and Paul Yoon's Once the Shore.

Returning to Earth is about the process of coping with loss -- before it happens (when it is looming) and afterwards -- and it's probably the most moving book I've read in a couple years. The story circles around a man who is dying from Lou Gherig's disease, and is told through multiple perspectives: his and that of of those who love him. But the story isn't really why it's so powerful. It's, in some ways, the fact that it doesn't quite feel like a story. There are elements that feel very narrative, almost like fables, but they only serve to point out the miracle that Harrison pulls off: these characters feel almost more real than real people ever could, and the way they struggle to come to grips with their relationships, the way they unearth understandings about each other and themselves, feels almost unconstructed. There isn't a false or contrived note. Somehow, Harrison makes the book feel as if it just naturally happens, and when that kind of deep veracity is accompanied by the kind of love for characters and empathy for their pains that fills Returning to Earth it's deeply, achingly affecting.

Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing affected me for very different reasons. I'm not going to go into paroxysms of praise about McCarthy's prose, his voice, his worldview, his all around amazingness: we all know that. But I will say that The Crossing made me remember all that in a way nothing of his has in a while. I love his older work - Outer Dark, Child of God, Blood Meridian - and I was mildly blown away (McCarthy is one of the few writers who blows me away even with his work that isn't my favorite) by The Road and No Country for Old Men, but, of all his books that I've read, I liked All The Pretty Horses least. So what a tremendous thrill to read the second book in his border trilogy and find myself absolutely bowled over by the man's work again. There are so many reasons to read The Crossing, but, for me - and my writing - it was important mostly because of the narrative drive, the way that it slams relentlessly forward without ever feeling contrived, without rushing, without following any well-worn trails: it just lights out into the wilderness of story and crashes through the brush and doesn't look back. There's not explaining, here. There are no deep moments of introspection. There's no blind adherence to momentum, either. It has it's moments where it breathes, long, its stride lengthening, its footfall slowing. It has its moments where it veers off in wild directions. But it never sits still. And it feels, for all its blood and bruises and filth and dirt, so clean: it feels like perfectly clean storytelling. Each event is surprising in ways that make me crazy with envy and with pleasure and never want the book to end. It's that good.

Finally, there's Paul Yoon's collection, Once the Shore. I read that one straight though, sipping it each night like a big glass of cool water, till I'd drained the thing and could lie there in the dark feeling utterly sated. Yes, Yoon's voice is beautiful; yes, his stories are moving; but the most important, and striking, thing is that he's doing something different with these stories than the usual stories you come across in journals and collections: he takes you and sits you down and shows you a fully realized world, and keeps you sitting there until a moment has come and gone in that world, and then he lifts you under the arms and takes you to another part of his world and sits you down again and shows you that. And you begin to know the world with every bit of richness and reality and wonder and magic that the real world contains. These aren't stories about characters taking action to move through life -- though that's there, too. At heart, I think these are stories about the way life moves through characters, and they are all the more powerful for that.

Visit Josh Weil's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Simon Van Booy

2009-06-19T06:56:00.001-05:00

Simon Van Booy was born in London and grew up in rural Wales and Oxford. In 2002 he was awarded an MFA and won the H.R. Hays Poetry Prize. His journalism has appeared in magazines and newspapers including the New York Times and the New York Post. His new book is Love Begins in Winter.

Earlier this week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

Lately I have been reading about everything from fashion to Proust, metaphysical investigation to new children's tales. For me, one of the pleasures of reading is pulling from a variety of sources to amalgamate an image of the world and our consciousness of it. Books are ingredients in a recipe that ultimately helps to make up our minds over the course of years of reading. For instance, I have been reading Walt Whitman, whose expansive elegies constitute vast feasts of American life to me. And Guy de Maupaussant, whose delectable stories taste of bitter irony, and are served with such simplicity that I savor them like nice Port. Also, the contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq, whose grasp of the utter futility of life is somehow comforting, and his wit is like a balm to the soul, not to mention the repugnance of some of his ideas. My agent recently gave me a galley of a book due out this fall, called Persian Porn and Iranian Rappers, which I am really enjoying. It's the memoir of a young Englishman who travels around Iran and learns how incredible the country and its people truly are. Beyond that, I plan on reading some serious essays on composting.

Visit Simon Van Booy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Donna Jo Napoli

2009-06-17T21:03:00.001-05:00

Donna Jo Napoli is an author of children's and young adult books, and a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College.

Her recent and soon forthcoming books include Alligator Bayou and The Earth Shook: A Persian Tale.

Recently, I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I just finished reading Maximum City. It's about life in Mumbai, with a main character who's interviewing drug lords and prostitutes. What I love about it is that so much of the history of the place and of the many religions of the place is integrated into the descriptions and even into the conversations, so that I felt I was getting a view not just of the seedy side, but of a tradition that is new to me in ways I couldn't have expected. I'm writing a book set in India in the 1500s -- and modern books, you might think, would not help me in the least. But I think this book does help because of exactly that -- the steeping in a culture that holds onto ancient ways beside the modern. Also, quite incidentally, the book is riddled with misery -- and I love misery.

Visit Donna Jo Napoli's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pat Shipman

2009-06-16T13:57:00.001-05:00

Pat Shipman's books include To the Heart of the Nile, The Man Who Found the Missing Link, and Taking Wing, which won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for science and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and named a New York Times Notable Book for 1998.

Her latest book is Femme Fatale: Love, Lies, and the Unknown Life of Mata Hari.

Last week I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I am re-reading Pat Barker's trilogy about World War I: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and Ghost Road. Not only is the writing beautiful and effective, but Barker's insights into the meaning of war for the soldier, the officer, and the ones left at home is brilliant. Besides, I can think of no two more fascinating people in history than W.H. Rivers, the psychologist and anthropologist, and his patient Siegfried Sassoon, the WWI poet, officer, and war protester. Their interaction in the first book as Rivers treats Sassoon (and others) for "mental illness," which in Sassoon's case is justifiable anguish over the horrors of an ill-defined war, is superb.

For those who do not know their WWI history, Sassoon was an serving officer in France and a decorated war hero when he came to believe the war was wrong, its aims badly defined, and he felt it would simply go on and on eating up young lives mercilessly. He wrote a bold letter to the London Times protesting the war and, to prevent his being court-martialed, was diagnosed as "shellshocked" and was sent to Craiglockhart in Scotland where shellshocked soldiers were treated. But of course, many of those involved in the war was shellshocked to some degree, even Rivers (because of his empathy for his patients) who served in Scotland as a psychologist.

Browse inside Femme Fatale, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: Femme Fatale.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joel A. Sutherland

2009-06-14T19:17:00.000-05:00

Joel A. Sutherland is a mild-mannered reference librarian by day and a speculative fiction writer and editor by night. He is currently keeping himself busy by completing his Masters of Library and Information Science from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and by raising his Goldendoodle puppy, Murphy, with wife Colleen.

His novel Frozen Blood was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel.

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I’ve just finished reading three of the five First Novel nominees for the 2009 Bram Stoker Award. I was thrilled beyond words when I discovered my own novel, Frozen Blood, had been nominated, and I immediately ordered the other four books. It’s an exciting time in the horror fiction field, with plenty of new and innovative voices breaking into the scene, and the other nominated novels are as riveting as they are different.

First, I read Michael McCarty and Mark McLaughlin’s Monster Behind the Wheel, a freewheeling road trip to Hell and back. It’s about a young man, Jeremy Carmichael, and his seemingly possessed car that is slowly taking over his life. Jeremy has been plagued by accidents and ill fortune his entire life, and things quickly get a whole lot worse. I’m always a little skeptical about collaborative novels, as they can often be clunky and uneven if the authors’ styles don’t mix well, but I was pleasantly surprised by this one. The tone never wavers from its darkly comic pitch, and aside from a few too many dreamlike sequences that slowed the story down, I found it to be a quick, entertaining read.

Next, I read Lisa Mannetti’s The Gentling Box, a much quieter, slower-moving novel than the first, which was a welcome change of pace. It takes place in 19th Century Central Europe, and follows a gypsy trader trying to protect his friends and family from a sorcereress’ vengeful curses. It’s incredibly researched, descriptive and vivid. My only complaint was that I sometimes found the characters’ decisions to be slightly unbelievable, but otherwise was enthralled by Mannetti’s writing.

Finally, I read Christopher Conlon’s Midnight on Mourn Street, which was perhaps even slower-moving than The Gentling Box, and yet I couldn’t read fast enough to find out how it all ended. There are no possessed cars in this book, no evil curses, no post-apocalyptic landscapes (as in David Oppegaard’s The Suicide Collectors -- more on that in a moment) and no deadly hailstorms (as in Frozen Blood). The horror in this novel comes from within the guilt-ridden characters: a man with a terrible secret and a young woman with a desire for revenge. It’s a compelling novel, and one that will be hard to forget.

Unfortunately, The Suicide Collectors didn’t arrive in time before I head to the awards banquet in California this weekend, but I plan on picking up a copy from David himself at the event and reading it once life settles back to normal.

I’m honoured to have my own name included on a list alongside these four other first time novelists, and I’ll be looking forward to their next novels.

Read an excerpt from Frozen Blood, and learn more about the author and his work at Joel A. Sutherland's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shanthi Sekaran

2009-06-12T17:17:00.000-05:00

Shanthi Sekaran was born and raised in California, and now splits her time between Berkeley and London. A graduate of UC Berkeley and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, she was first published in Best New American Voices 2004 (Harcourt). Her first novel, The Prayer Room (MacAdam Cage), was released in February 2009.

Earlier this week I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

Since I began writing my own fiction, I’ve become a terrible reader. I am impatient, intolerant and slow. I often read phrases four times over, with varying degrees of attention, and I constantly question the author’s choices. Probably to my own detriment, I have no qualms about throwing a book behind the sofa and forgetting about it if it doesn’t enthrall me in the first chapter. My favorite books are the ones that grab me by the throat and make me breathless with the need to write, that make my heart race like I’ve had too much coffee. When a book does get me, I devote myself to it. I fall in love with it. I learn what I can from it. And then I file it, alphabetically, in my very narrow bookcase.

Nobody Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July

Nobody belongs here more than you: it was just what I needed to hear that day when I picked this book up in a Berkeley bookstore. It’s hard to explain the appeal of these short-shorts. They are, in some vague way, welcoming. They make me think of a beautiful woman sitting on a red-white picnic blanket, pouring me a glass of lemonade; and yet the stories themselves are about the lost, the abandoned, the befuddled. I never used to understand people who thought Morrissey was uplifting; now I do.

White Tiger, Aravind Adiga

I always try to read the Booker Prize winner, just to see what’s considered “good”. This book is beyond good, venturing into the realm of greatness. It’s deceptively funny and easy to read; it isn’t weighed down with the density and near-impossibility of many modern classics.

I’d have to rank White Tiger’s ending with my other favorite, from Joyce’s ‘The Dead.’ It manages to encapsulate the novel’s nuttiness and drives home a final cheeky punch. It’s a little daunting to think how much a final sentence can actually accomplish. Adiga’s final lines lift the book from good to great, and make me laugh out loud.

God’s Own Country, Ross Raisin (US title: Out Backward)

I’m educating myself with this book. It’s the story of a young Yorkshire loner who falls for the new girl in the village, the well-bred daughter of a family of “towns”.

In my own writing, there’s nothing that intimidates me more than having to write a boy-meets-girl scenario. It could so easily turn into something boring, cliché, straight out of a Dawson’s Creek episode. And yet, real-life love is never boring or cliché, at least not to the people experiencing it. And so, I’m faced with the challenge of transferring that excitement to the page, where my only tools are words.

Ross Raisin tells the story of a friendship/romance from a very limited 1st person perspective. He’s been brave enough to use a Yorkshire dialect (not as incomprehensible as Emily Bronte’s Joseph, but definitely not the Queen’s English). I’m just in the middle of this book, so I can’t say much more than that.

The Book of Other People, edited by Zadie Smith

After a six year dry spell, I’ve recently begun writing short stories again. For years, I was unable to bring a story to any sort of reasonable conclusion; the scope of short fiction, and how a writer was supposed to gauge it, were a mystery to me. I think that if you’re going to write short fiction, you need to read a lot of it. You need to get a sense of the ebb and rise of a story, how to gracefully build a plot, size it, and bring it to a natural, satisfying close.

The Book of Other People is a collection compiled to benefit the charity 826 NYC, and includes the work of Zadie Smith, Vendela Vida and Jonathan Safran Foer, three of my favorites. The writers in this collection were assigned the task of primarily writing character, whether these characters inhabited a full story, a monologue, or a graphic piece. This freedom of form has made this a more interesting read than your standard fiction collection. I never quite know what lies in store, and I generally finish reading each piece wanting more.

Three Junes, Julia Glass

This novel tells the story of two generations of a Scottish family. It’s a steady, strong read, and it reeled me in gently, so I didn’t even realize how committed I was to reading it until it was nearly over. Julia Glass strikes me as a patient writer, one who has done her research, her thinking, and has taken the time to build a novel, layer by layer, into something beautiful, quiet and whole.

At the top of the pile:

Love Begins in Winter, Simon Van Booy: I enjoyed Van Booy’s first book, The Secret Lives of People in Love, an unapologetically lush, emotionally riveting collection of stories.

Brooklyn, Colm Toibin: I’ll be living in Brooklyn for the month of September, so this will be one of my geeky preparations.

Sag Harbor, Colson Whitehead: It just sounds like it’ll be good, doesn’t it?

Read an excerpt from The Prayer Room, and learn more about the author and her work at Shanthi Sekaran's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Midge Raymond

2009-06-11T08:52:00.000-05:00

Midge Raymond's short-story collection, Forgetting English (Eastern Washington University Press, 2009), received the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. Her work has appeared in American Literary Review, Ontario Review, Indiana Review, North American Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Passages North, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. She is on the editorial board of the literary journal Green Hills Literary Lantern.

Recently, I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I usually find myself reading several books at once…among the recents:

Novel

The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter

This book has been on my to-read shelf for a long time, and I began reading it with a new fascination after hearing Charles Baxter speak at this year’s Get Lit! literary festival in Spokane, Washington. Baxter talked about what inspired this novel: a friend of his who had, inexplicably, begun to impersonate him, telling everyone he was Charles Baxter and even going around doing readings. Baxter said that the friend eventually confessed to him, then asked, “Do you think I should go into therapy?” Even knowing the novel’s inspiration, the book is full of surprises and, of course, Baxter’s always poetic, engaging prose.

Short Stories

Last Night by James Salter

An absolutely beautiful collection of stories, which I admire for many reasons but probably most of all for Salter’s gift for detail, his ability to portray the essence of a character in a few well-chosen words. For example, from “Comet”: “He was mannerly and elegant, his head held back a bit as he talked, as though you were a menu.” The title story is one of the most unforgettable stories I’ve read.

Nonfiction

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer and Jim Mason

This is an incredibly well researched, thoughtful, and intelligent look at the food industry. The authors look at three American families and their diets (one consuming a “standard American diet,” one all organic, and one vegan) and trace all these foods back to their sources, raising interesting (and not so clear-cut) philosophical, ethical, and environmental questions along the way. Not a cheery read, by any means, but an important one.

Poetry

Habeas Corpus by Jill McDonough

I met Jill McDonough years ago, when I was writing an article about Boston University’s prison education program, through which McDonough teaches poetry to incarcerated college students. Her book comprises fifty sonnets about legal executions in American history — from the country’s first documented execution in 1608 to the more recent and familiar executions of Timothy McVeigh and Aileen Wuornos. It’s dark and tragic and very powerful.

Read an excerpt from Forgetting English, and learn more about the author and her work at Midge Raymond's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sophie Gee

2009-06-09T07:56:00.000-05:00

Sophie Gee is the author of the acclaimed novel The Scandal of the Season, and an assistant professor in the Department of English at Princeton.

She teaches undergraduate and graduate classes on eighteenth-century literature from Milton to Jane Austen, as well as on the history of satire. She lectures on subjects ranging from The Canterbury Tales to South Park and Catch-22.

Recently, I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I’ve got a few books on the go right now. First of all, I’m re-reading The Time Traveler’s Wife because the new novel I’m writing is a love story about a woman who discovers that she can walk into the past. One of the things I like about Niffenegger’s book is her perception that the fantasy of returning to the past is about recovering experiences that we already know, that are already familiar. There’s something comforting about the time-travel fantasy; it’s about finding yourself, again and again. The emotions of memory are sadnesses and happinesses that we already know; the book is really about how this exists alongside the experience of the unknown.

I’m also reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Susanna Clarke does an especially good job of describing the transition from a real world to the world of English faerie. The fantasy world feels familiar at the same time that it’s strange and eerie, which raises the possibility that it’s a world the characters have created in their own minds.

I’m also reading The Brother Gardeners by Andrea Wulf, which is a wonderfully written and rather romantic story about collaboration between a small group of plant enthusiasts and naturalists that led to the establishment of England as the world’s greatest nation of gardeners. Some of the most amazing parts of the story relate how a London cloth merchant managed to set up a seed-import business with an unsophisticated American farmer. It’s about the trans-Atlantic world in the eighteenth century and gardens, two of my most passionate interests.

Finally, I’m re-reading The Magicians, a novel by my partner Lev Grossman, which is being published in August by Viking. I know I’m a partial reader, but it’s really an awesome book, It’s about a very clever, but confused and unhappy boy named Quentin, who, seemingly miraculously, discovers a college for young Magicians in upstate New York. Quentin enters a world that seems just like the one he knows, but which is transformed by being filled with magic. Once at Brakebills, Quentin is singled out as special and gifted in exactly the way he’d always dreamed of. But life is dark and complex and challenging, and his experiences in the real world aren’t nearly enough when he enters a world of real magic. The Magicians is Harry Potter for grown-ups —it’s a fantasy page-turner with lots of college humor and sex and drugs and drink.

Read an excerpt from The Scandal of the Season and learn more about the novel at Sophie Gee's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Scandal of the Season.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gerald Grant

2009-06-07T14:39:00.000-05:00

Gerald Grant is the Hannah Hammond Professor of Education and Sociology, Emeritus at Syracuse University. His latest book is Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh.

Recently, I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

Tobias Wolff's collection Our Story Begins, just out in paper, is the book I can't put down. Wolff deserves all the praise that has been heaped upon him. He really is the American Chekhov, only funnier. Take "Her Dog," for instance, in which a widower reluctantly walks his late wife Grace's dog who constantly berates him:

"And when they kicked me off the beach, remember that? No way you were going to get stuck back here. No, Grace had to walk me in the swamp while you walked along the ocean. I hope you enjoyed it...

"You ignored her. She would call your name and you would go on reading your paper, or watching TV, and pretend you hadn't heard. Did she ever have to call my name twice? No! Once and I'd be there, looking up at her, ready for anything. Did I ever want another mistress?

"... [No! But] you did. You looked at them in the park, on the beach, in other cars as we drove around."

Let me also mention a book I bought while in Tarpon Springs FL a few weeks ago: Myrtle Scharrer Betz's Yesteryear I Lived in Paradise. It's her story of growing up on Caladesi Island in the early 1900s and why it was paradisiacal, though there were hardships, too, for a girl who rowed two miles to school each day in Dunedin. Betz and her father were virtually the only inhabitants of the island and lived off the land and the sea. She is a wonderful storyteller. A great book to read to your children and grandchildren.

Read an excerpt from Hope and Despair in the American City, and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ron Riekki

2009-06-05T15:51:00.000-05:00

Ron Riekki is the author of the novel U.P..

At the end of last month I asked him what he was reading. His response:

Instead of taking Ritalin, I learned to cope with being ADD as a kid. I accepted my odd habit of starting one book, putting it down, and starting another. Maybe that’s why U.P. was written with multiple narrators. Before I’d get bored with one voice, I’d switch to another to maintain the energy I wanted in the narrative. Right now I have two bathroom books, a car book, and six bedside books. And yes, I’m honestly reading them simultaneously.

Bathroom books: Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy—good read. Good bathroom book. Always read about prison in the bathroom.

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—I pick this up when I want to think differently. I remember a panel with Allen Ginsberg at the Naropa Institute where he advised us to read books backwards. Reading Finnegans Wake forward is the same as reading most books backwards. I don’t understand a word. And I like that. When I’m in the mood. Which tends to be in the bathroom.

Car book: John Irving’s The World According to Garp—I don’t like most of it, but I very rarely quit a book once I've started it. A writing prof told me that reading books you don’t like is just as good to do as reading books you do like. That stuck with me, so I always finish the books I start. In the last three years I’ve only skipped pages on one book, Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game. Hated that novel. But I didn’t abandon it.

Bedside books: Larousse Dictionnaire—I love listening to French radio on the Internet (690 am Montréal) and enjoy thumbing through Larousse to pick up new words. Etymology fascinates me, the way that words tell stories through their historical connections, like realizing how terroir and terror are next of kin.

The Michael Eric Dyson Reader—He signed my book, “To Ron, a great, soulful intellectual! Peace & love 2/19/09” and gave me a hug. I’d love to make that deep of a connection with my readers. He’s a truly great and soulful intellectual.

Henry Miller’s Sexus—I’m a big Miller fan. He can rant and ramble and I don’t mind. Kathy Acker’s like that with me. There’s something so authentic and interesting about the voice that I’m in for the ride no matter what. I’ll sometimes randomly open up to a sentence here or there on a page I've already read and enjoy his word choices.

David J. Garrow’s Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—I’m rereading this. I try to read all the Martin Luther King bios that come out, but this one is the most thorough. Impressive. Nothing makes me question the existence of God like being around Christians. They consistently tend to disappoint me. If any Christian wants to wow me, say or do something kind to me and I’ll be astounded. When I think of the Christians I’ve known, so many of them have hurt me. Martin Luther King, on the other hand, makes me believe in Christianity. How powerful is that?

Andrew Calcutt and Richard Shephard’s Cult Fiction: a reader’s guide—My favorite book of all time. I keep it by my bed and read a paragraph every day. I love to read about writers. My goal is to read every book listed in the recommendation section. I’m ten years into that commitment and am about halfway and the books I’ve read have greatly influenced the voice I have as a writer.

Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet—I love positive books, amazingly positive books. I don’t write like that, but I’d love to. Inspirational. Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like if I’d only read positive books my whole life—none of the complexity of Stewart Home, Sarah Kane, Irvine Welsh. Just encouraging texts. I wish I was that kind of person, solely kind, only could think kind thoughts. But I’m just a human. And that’s the characters I write—flawed.

(I also have a Zen book that I keep by my bedside. It's lost in the move right now, but I'll find it again. I really like that book. I also recommend John Bullock's Making Faces and Tara Yellen's After Hours at the Almost Home. Thank you very much to everyone who's read U.P. I've always dreamed of being a writer so I appreciate your reading my book. And look for my next novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Boogey Man on Ghost Road Press in 2010, about a schizophrenic Slayer/John Denver fan.)

Visit Ron Riekki's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ehud Havazelet

2009-06-04T10:25:00.001-05:00

Ehud Havazelet is the author of two critically acclaimed short-story collections, What Is It Then Between Us? and Like Never Before, and the novel Bearing the Body. His stories have appeared in such journals as DoubleTake, New England Review, The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, Iowa Review, Ontario Review, and Crazyhorse, and have been chosen for the Pushcart Prize. He is the winner of both the California Book Award and the Oregon Book Award for fiction.

Havazelet is an Associate Professor at the University of Oregon where he teaches creative writing.

Late last month I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

Aside from the daily Yankees boxscore I’m reading Silent Movies: The Birth of Film and the Triumph of Movie Culture by Peter Kobel, a terrific overview of early film, and maybe the heaviest hardcover I’ve ever held. The artwork is wonderful: there’s a photograph of Louise Brooks that may be the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.

I’m just beginning to re-read Hiding Man, the excellent new biography of Donald Barthelme by my friend, Tracy Daugherty. Barthelme was unique, an avant-gardist with a sorrowing affection for the lives he spliced and flayed and reassembled in collage. That he’s so little read now is an unsurprising disappointment. I hope Tracy’s book reverses that injustice—Barthelme’s a writer we can’t afford to lose.

The Years, by Virginia Woolf, which I’ve never read before. I return to Woolf over and over to help me remember what writing’s about. She makes you slow down, makes you listen and look around and with her inimitable (believe me, I’ve tried) music makes you, finally, see the endless strands of connection and the endless isolation they can’t manage to supersede, makes alive everything you thought you’d seen, understood, and in your smugness set aside. She creates worlds to enter—scenes, weathers, cultural moments--but so much more important, the interior landscapes of characters like nobody has since Shakespeare.

The Years may not be her best book—the challenge she sets herself may be unconquerable--but matching Mrs Dalloway, let alone writing it once, is too much too ask, like beating Fitzgerald over the head with Tender is the Night because it isn’t Gatsby.

Also my eight year old and I are starting the last Harry Potter.

The Page 99 Test: Ehud Havazelet's Bearing the Body.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Moriarty

2009-06-02T19:29:00.000-05:00

Laura Moriarty received her master’s degree from the University of Kansas and was awarded the George Bennett Fellowship for Creative Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy. She is the author of The Center of Everything, The Rest of Her Life, and forthcoming in August 2009, While I'm Falling.

Late last month I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I'm currently reading Living With Saints by Mary O'Connell. It's an amazing collection of short stories, all connected by the clever idea of alluding to the lives of Catholic saints while narrating the struggles and griefs of modern young women. I wouldn't recommend it to conservative Catholics (the first story is about a pregnant teen making her way through protesters to get an abortion), but the larger themes of connection and compassion for the suffering will appeal to fans of Flannery O'Connor. I just love the way Mary O'Connell writes. Her heroines are funny and tough, and the pages turn themselves.

Visit Laura Moriarty's website.

Among the advance praise for While I'm Falling:

“While I’m Falling deftly captures the moment a child realizes that growing up means being responsible for your parents’ mistakes—and preventing yourself from making the same ones. Laura Moriarty keeps getting better and better.”
—Jodi Picoult, author of Handle with Care

See which book most influenced Laura Moriarty's life.

The Page 99 Test: The Rest of Her Life.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rosemary & Larry Mild

2009-06-01T05:36:00.001-05:00

Co-authors Rosemary and Larry Mild write cozy mysteries, adventure/thrillers, short stories, articles, and essays. Their books include Locks & Cream Cheese, Hot Grudge Sunday, Boston Scream Pie, and Miriam's Gift: A Mother's Blessings -- Then and Now.

Recently I asked them what they were reading. Their reply:

Here are a few of our favorites and why.

Rosemary and Larry:
We share one favorite author, Ken Follett, and his two historical novels: Pillars of the Earth and the sequel, World Without End. Pillars plunges us into twelfth-century Kingsbridge, England. Follett gives us accurate medieval history, with the pace and action of a thriller. All his characters are flesh-and-blood. In Pillars we follow a young architect and his inglorious attempts to build a Gothic cathedral; the walls keep falling down—until his invention of flying buttresses. A gritty young woman survives rape, the destruction of her business, and betrayal. Follett weaves a tapestry of daily English society: the Church and its politics; the sheep farmers and the wool industry; the powerful, corrupt knights. World Without End continues the saga two hundred years later in the same town. We live with two boys and two girls, through floods, famine, the plague, and ruthless leaders determined to destroy them and their dreams.What is so satisfying about both books is that Follett allows human goodness to triumph without sappiness, with absolutely authentic emotions and logical successes.

Larry:
I've always enjoyed adventure novels that give me a taste of foreign lands and cultures, including: Robert Ruark in Africa (Something of Value, Horn of the Hunter; and James Clavell's historically precise Asian novels, particularly Shogun, which takes place in feudal Japan.

Rosemary:
I love the novels of Tom Wolfe—deeply satiric, cutting to the heart of human foibles, but driven by suspenseful plots. Fully drawn portraits: the Master of the Universe bond trader who takes a wrong turn in Harlem (Bonfire of the Vanities); the puffed up southern real estate tycoon (A Man in Full) brought to his knees by his bankers. In I Am Charlotte Simmons, the most recent, a naive freshman from a backwater town learns the sordid side of university/fraternity life, compromising her academic brilliance. Wolfe's books paint larger-than-life pictures of particular segments of society.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel. The story begins in India; the body of it takes place on the ocean. The plot is so preposterous, yet hypnotizing, that I'm sitting in the boat with the animals—sun-scorched, starving, and a true believer despite myself.

Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections follows an older Midwestern couple, the husband in the early stages of Alzheimer's, and his wife's despair and anger. Each of their three grown children on the East Coast is trapped in his or her career problems and neuroses. How they cope and come together, reaching resolution and correcting their dysfunctions is a universal story today, yet surprisingly gripping here.

I just finished two books by Alice Hoffman: The Ice Queen and The Third Angel. Her style is deceptively simple. When she writes from the viewpoint of young women in their teens or twenties she touches nerves of recognition. (As much as I admire her writing, her preoccupation with death puts me off a bit.) The Third Angel has a unique, weird structure: it can be read both forward and backward.

A Dog About Town by J.F. Englert is a delightful mystery for any dog lover. This chocolate Lab thinks, philosophizes, and reads (i.e., The Divine Comedy; he likes the translation). He can't talk, of course, but he pushes alphabet cereal around with his nose to leave his owner clues to solving crimes.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. The author didn't start out affluent. Far from it. But now she lives on Park Avenue in New York and she's in a taxi on her way to a party, when she spots her mother rummaging in a Dumpster. A crisp, jolting memoir.

Learn more about the authors and their work at Rosemary & Larry Mild's website.

--Marshal Zeringue