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The end of Yann Martel’s extraordinary new novel, Beatrice and Virgil, is shocking and moving and will, as great philosophical novels should, launch a thousand questions. One of those questions will surely be: How does this book—which features a writer named Henry whose particulars seem similar to Martel’s own, a cheerless taxidermist who seeks Henry’s literary advice, and bits and pieces of the taxidermist’s play about a donkey named Beatrice and a monkey named Virgil—have anything to do with the Holocaust? The novel contains none of the iconic events and images we associate with that evil, the word itself is rarely uttered in the book . . . and yet.

In the first novel since his phenomenal bestseller, Martel once again uses an animal story to make profound points about humanity.

“I have always been interested in the Holocaust,” Martel says during a call to his hotel room in Toronto. Martel and his partner, novelist Alice Kuipers, and their seven-month-old son Theo (who coos occasionally in the background) are visiting with family while en route from their home in Saskatoon to a literary festival in Dubai.

In conversation, Martel speaks rapidly, unspooling long, eloquent skeins of thought. He praises “the undervalued, underappreciated, stunning landscapes of the prairies,” and the “very strong sense of community in small, isolated places” like Saskatoon, before returning to the origins of his new novel.

“I lived in France as a child for a few years. My parents were diplomats. And the Second World War, which for North Americans is a foreign tragedy, a foreign adventure, is for Europeans right on their doorstep. The scars of the war are vivid. I remember being taught about the Second World War and about the Holocaust, and it just stuck out, the Holocaust did. Wars are a thrill to a child’s imagination. Going to war makes a kind of sense: You hate someone, you go to war with them. But to my child’s mind—and even to an adult’s mind—there seemed to be no logic to the Holocaust. It stayed in my mind as a little kernel and I just kept coming back to it, reading books on it and seeing the movies. It just stayed with me. And I finally decided to write on it.”

Martel was living in Berlin, beginning to work on the new book, when his third book, Life of Pi, won the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 2002 and “went planetary,” selling seven million copies worldwide. “So I toured for two years,” Martel says, “and I loved it. Before that I was an impoverished writer who had never gone on a tour or anything. I stopped writing and just enjoyed it.”

Returning to the book he’d been working on, Martel struggled. “I was an outsider. I was not a victim. I was not a victimizer. I have no family connection whatsoever, so I wondered, how could I write about it? Also, there’s something very story-killing about the Holocaust, which is why it is so dominated by the nonfictional mode. Finally my entry point was animals. Using animals again allowed me to tiptoe up to a subject without being obvious,” Martel says.

“What I like about writing about animals is that very few writers of adult fiction use animals. Animals have been confined to children’s fiction, which is a mistake because there’s so much more that can be done with animals than just telling children’s stories.”

In fact, this being an odd, vivid, layered, multifaceted gem of a novel, it is possible to read Beatrice and Virgil as a book about environmentalism and animal rights, the interpretative slant that the taxidermist-playwright himself seems to prefer. Or as a story about human responsibility and human culpability. Or as a story about the uses and misuses of storytelling. Or as a story about writer’s block and the creative enterprise. But however one chooses to read it, it is a testament to Martel’s great faith in and commitment to the art of fiction.

“Great art works because it tells an emotional truth,” Martel says. “I suppose great histories could be both factually and emotionally true, but history is very cumbersome. What’s wonderful about art is that it gets at the emotional essence of things and it plays around with the facts. There’s a danger to that; you can manipulate things and you can peddle gross lies. It can be a dangerous tool, but also a very powerful one [which] if well used can deliver more than a history can. A work of art is the beginning of a discussion. It’s part of a dialogue. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to say, ‘Listen, this is what I’m saying; what do you think?’”

Martel’s artful new novel Beatrice and Virgil is sure to make readers think—and to make them demand from other readers: What do you think?

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Read a review of Beatrice and Virgil.

With so many competitors out there, an aspiring novelist needs a strong talent or an original slant to rise above the hoard. Mark Z. Danielewski seems to have both. It’s difficult to imagine a more original and distinctive novel than his House of Leaves. At first glance, it seems to reject most precepts of narrative structure. Remarks by various narrators and commentators appear in different typefaces; there are hundreds of sly footnotes; on some pages the text runs sideways or at an angle; and occasionally there’s only a word or two on a page. One page consists of three measures of music. Toward the back there is a collection of quotations, including a passage from Homer in five different languages. The book ends with an alphabetical index to, apparently, every major word in the entire text.

While these narrative games are all good fun, House of Leaves adds up to more than playfulness. As it should be in such a nightmarish fantasy, what appears to be a barrier is actually a gateway. Like Joyce and Proust, Danielewski isn’t rejecting narration as much as customizing and turbo-charging it. For one thing, he invents several layers of narrators. The author’s name doesn’t even appear on the title page; it’s opposite it, reading "Mark Z. Danielewski’s," with the title page following: "House of Leaves, by Zampano, with Introduction and Notes by Johnny Truant." And the whole thing is a commentary on a homemade film documentary by a man named Navidson. Straightforward this book isn’t, but it is amusing, challenging, and terrifying.

Usually the appearance of a first novel is the public culmination of a long, silent apprenticeship. "I’ve been writing my whole life," Danielewski says, on the phone from his home in California. "My father was an avant-garde filmmaker, very much an intellectual. My mother wasn’t as formally intellectual as he was, but they were always in favor of seeing movies, reading books, and always bringing those subjects into long discourses at the table. My father had been steeped in the 1950s, the literature of the modernists. So certainly the discussions of Freud and Nietzsche and Borges and Sartre were all part of what we discussed and fought about."

Danielewski’s firm grounding in the canon shows in House of Leaves. The central image of the book — a house that is much larger on the inside than on the outside — is very much a Borgesian conceit, and the layering of narrators and cheeky asides bring to mind Nabokov. As the horrors accumulate inside the house, there will be moments when you will think you are reading the unnatural love child of Lewis Carroll and H. P. Lovecraft.

Apparently Danielewski has always confidently ignored readers’ expectations. He wrote his first book at the age of 10. "It was called The Hell-Hole," he remembers. "It was one of those things where we all sat around and made a New Year’s resolution, and I said, ‘I’m gonna write a book.’ I said I was going to write one page a day, and I never altered from that. In the end I had a 360-page book, which I rewrote a little. It was about a young kid who grows up in New York City, becomes a cocaine addict, beats the hell out of a cop, and goes to prison — which was the hell-hole. It was pretty brutal. My father thought it was immoral, and my mother was deeply disturbed. And they basically just didn’t want to talk about it."

He didn’t discuss the manuscript with anyone for at least three years, until he showed it to a high school teacher. Because he used one of the few four-letter words still verboten in prime time, she declared that he had written a dirty book. "I became incredibly wary about showing my work to anyone," Danielewski admits. But he didn’t stop writing. "That was the odd thing, that the force, the will to write, was always far stronger than the criticism that came my way. When I was at Yale, I was rejected at every writing seminar I applied to."

Part of House of Leaves also has its roots in concrete poetry, the tiny subgenre of poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words on the page reflects the topic of the poem. The words to a poem about time, for example, can be arranged in the shape of an hourglass. In House of Leaves, when a character is crawling down a narrow tunnel, the page’s layout shrinks to a claustrophobic band of words. There are many such moments. Danielewski explains: "My view of placing text on the page — aside from being influenced by the likes of E. E. Cummings or maybe some John Cage — was actually cinematic. The point wasn’t just to get really obtuse in the placement of the word. I was very interested in how the reader moves through a book. I’ve never talked to anyone who didn’t feel a sense of elation when they’d read, say, 80 pages in an hour, because something was moving quickly — or expressed some sort of frustration because it took them an hour to read ten pages. So I began to realize that cinema has an enormous foundation of theories on how to control the viewer’s perception of a film." There are passages in which Danielewski’s attitude toward prose seems to echo Hitchcock’s approach to film as collage. His text moves like a camera, slowing down, speeding up, turning corners, zooming, panning, fading.

As he talks about his book, Danielewski doesn’t tell the usual horror stories about the world of publishing. "The book may have started off in solitary confinement," he says, "but I had really a wonderful group of people to help finish it. And we all managed to spit and hiss and finally get together. They called me three days ago with one final question about the blues on the book." Blues are the photographic pages that get shipped to the printer in the final stage of preparing the manuscript for publication. House of Leaves isn’t a typographical maelstrom like Finnegan’s Wake, but its idiosyncratic layout hides countless traps for unwary copy editors and typesetters. "That’s why it was a huge process," Danielewski says. "After the manuscript was purchased, it took two years to really finish the book. I was involved, thanks to Pantheon, in the entire process, all the way from copy editing to layout." He laughs. "The good news is that I got to do it all, and the bad news is that if there’s anything you don’t like, it’s my fault."

Michael Sims is the author of Darwin’s Orchestra and two science books for children.

When I caught up with Larry Brown, he was in the shower. Right away, I knew I wasn’t dealing with an ordinary writer. Most writers, myself included, tend to shower AFTER interviews (to wash away that lingering suspicion that some sort of transaction with the devil has taken place).

But Brown was taking a different approach, one probably dictated by the fact that he had shipped to his publisher, that very morning, the manuscript of a new collection of essays. I called back 20 minutes later, affording him time to complete the early afternoon ritual, making Larry Brown surely the cleanest writer I’ve ever interrogated.

Of course, if you read the press on Brown, you might think he never showered. Vanity Fair magazine once called the Mississippi writer America’s "bad boy novelist." The Washington Post said he had "slapped his own fresh tattoo on the big right arm of Southern Lit." Jumping on the bandwagon, Brown’s publisher says he is famous for his "hard bitten, hard drinking, hard living male characters."

The author of several critically acclaimed novels, including Dirty Work and Joe, and a fine memoir, On Fire, about his 17 years as an Oxford, Mississippi, firefighter, Brown has entered new territory with his latest novel, Fay. The main character is a 17-year-old woman-child who sets out to discover the meaning of life by hitchhiking from Oxford to the Mississippi coast.

"This is a real departure for me, to write a book from a woman’s point of view," said Brown. "There were things I didn’t know, things I had to ask people about women to find out. Their sensitivities are different and their concerns are different."

The book took three years to write, he said, and resulted in a manuscript of 883 pages, every word of which was pounded out on a typewriter. He now does his word processing on a computer, one he purchased just two months ago. He’s not sure how the computer will affect his writing. Typically, he writes every day until he "gets tired," and that could take anywhere from five to ten hours.

Brown decided to become a writer in 1980 at the age of 29. At that point, he had been a small-town firefighter for seven years, long enough to know he didn’t want to do it for the rest of his life. He started writing during his down time at the fire station and wrote portions of On Fire while on the job, though he didn’t finish the book until three years after he left in 1990.

"I decided that a lot of people just learned [writing] on their own, and I went into a room and started writing," he said. "Anybody who wants to apply themselves to it, who wants to work at it, can eventually learn how. That’s what I tell my students. It took me eight years to publish my first book. In that time, I wrote five novels I had to throw away and about 80 or 90 short stories."

But why throw it away? Why not just keep working on it? "Because it wasn’t readable. It was silly. It was stupid. There were so many things wrong with it. You have to do so many of those until you get to the point where you cross the line and you can become a professional writer. It takes a lot of work. You have to keep on going and believe in yourself. And you have to be willing to write stuff and then throw it away."

We may never know how much of Fay he threw away during the three years it took to write it, but the finished product clearly shows his minute attention to detail and his desire to get inside the main character’s head. Probably not since F. Scott Fitzgerald’s incursions into the female sensibilities of the 1920s and 1930s has a writer been so successful in crossing that literary minefield. Considering Brown’s reputation as a macho, man’s writer, it is somewhat surprising that Fay is as complicated and beguiling as any real-life woman who ever walked the planet. His success in capturing a female character is clear evidence that you don’t have to jump off a cliff to imagine what it would be like.

Brown’s portrait of Fay is so complete that I felt I knew who would play her role if the novel were ever made into a movie. Has he ever thought about that?

"Not really," he answered. "I don’t know many actresses that age."

How about Angelina Jolie?

"Oh, yeah," he answered. "She could probably do it." He paused a moment, his mind’s eye superimposing the fictional character over the form of the actress. "Yeah, I can see her as Fay."

Brown is no stranger to filmmaking. In 1995, he played the part of a dope dealer in the movie, 100 Proof. More recently, he went to Thomasville, Georgia, to watch the filming of The Rough South of Larry Brown, a documentary about his own life. He ended up with a cameo role, playing the part of the fire chief, a clear promotion from his former job. You would think that brief incursion into the past would foster memories of the good ole days. "Naw," said Brown, nipping that notion in the bud. "I went to so many fires when it was five degrees or 95 degrees, and I don’t miss the boredom of sitting there, ’cause there’s a lot of that involved."

Brown’s novel, Joe, is under option to actor/filmmaker Billy Bob Thornton, but production has not yet begun on the project. "What they need is a script," said Brown. "I don’t think I will be doing it. I tried it three times, and I haven’t gotten it right yet. I think they should probably find another writer to do the script. Doing scripts is a totally different animal [from writing books]."

No interview with an Oxford, Mississippi, writer would be complete without a question about that other Oxford writer — no, not the Godfather of Southern literature, William Faulkner. I’m talking about John Grisham, recently profiled in Entertainment Weekly on the occasion of his novels’ achieving gross sales of over one billion dollars.

"I used to know him," said Brown. "I used to know him pretty well, before he ever published his first book."

Ah, fame!

James L. Dickerson is the author of Goin’ Back to Memphis, reissued this month in paperback by Cooper Square Press.

Author photo by Joe Osgoode.

Like an archaeologist delving into the earth, unsure of what he'll find, Toronto author Michael Ondaatje immerses himself in the writing process. "I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out," he said. He knows in time, all will become clear.

"It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing."

What he's unearthed in his gripping new book, Anil's Ghost, may surprise readers who know Ondaatje only from his previous work, the Booker Award-winning novel The English Patient. While The English Patient is dreamily set in an abandoned villa at the end of World War II, Anil's Ghost, which took seven years to write, takes place in the violent present. Set in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where Ondaatje was born, it tells the story of Anil, who like the author, is both a native of the country and a stranger to it.

"I'm a Canadian citizen," said Ondaatje by telephone, his voice low and musical. "But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries." Both the author and his protagonist have beautiful memories of growing up there, memories overlaid by horror.

"Sri Lanka now is a more complicated world morally," said Ondaatje, and in his new book he writes, "The streets were still streets, the citizens remained citizens. They shopped, changed jobs, laughed. But the darkest Greek tragedies were innocent compared to what was happening here."

Anil, who has lived abroad for 15 years, returns to her old home as a forensic anthropologist on a human rights mission to find, examine, and identify the bones of the Disappeared. During Sri Lanka's 16-year conflict which began in the mid-1980s, the government struggled to crush uprisings by the Tamil Tigers and separatist guerrillas, and thousands of people simply vanished. Most were assumed to have been killed, their bodies flung into mass graves. However, without remains, without proof, the government-sanctioned massacres could not be proven, and the families of the Disappeared could find no peace.

As he writes in Anil's Ghost, Death, loss, was ”unfinished', so you could not walk through it. "It is," said Ondaatje, "a subject I wanted to write about for some time, but I didn't know how to encompass it." He chose to do it one body at a time. In the midst of her forensic work on a skeleton, "Anil stops to reach forward and lift [the skeleton] into her arms, to remind herself he was just like her. Not just evidence but someone with charms or flaws, part of a family, a member of a village who in the sudden lightning of politics raised his hands in the last minute so they were broken." Ondaatje's depiction of Anil's painstaking work reading the bones of the dead is as haunting as it is true to life. He interviewed and worked with forensic anthropologists to understand and portray the details of their craft. "To me, the book is dedicated to people like that and to doctors, who tend to be unsung heroes in these situations."

Anil and her archaeologist partner Sarath aren't the only of Ondaatje's characters to descend into the earth. In his second novel, In the Skin of A Lion (1987), characters mine and tunnel. In The English Patient (1992), Almasy discovers a cave and Kip, the sapper, lowers himself into the earth to diffuse bombs. "I'm just fascinated by other much more physical careers," said Ondaatje, who notes that writing isn't as far from these other fields as it seems. For the author, the goal is the same to get at the truth.

"A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch. As a writer, one is busy with archaeology, he said. It's what the writer does with any character. On one level you're moving forward, but in the other, you're revealing the past." Ondaatje has a gift for linking the most disparate things. It's why he writes so fully and fluidly about other lives, other professions, about what is, at first glance, outside his realm. The prevailing literary wisdom may be to write what you know, but the author prefers to write what he doesn't know. "That's how you learn," he said. "You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else. It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not. To write about someone like myself would be very limiting. It seemed very natural for me to start with Anil."

Ever interested in craft, Ondaatje has studied his own process over a 30-year literary career. He's written two other novels, a memoir about growing up with his wonderfully eccentric father entitled Running in the Family (1982) and 11 books of poetry. "Prose is much more public; I would like it to be as private, intimate, casual, not structured as poetry, not having an agenda. That's why I do not plan my novels."

Earlier works like Running in the Family, his first two novels, and a book of poetry, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), focused on a single character. The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat. Then you see the link between strangers, which we do all the time, wherever we are. We may be strangers brought up in different cultures, but there's always a link. What links Anil's Ghost and The English Patient is their depiction of strangers thrust together in a time of war. Anil neither knows nor trusts her Sri Lankan partner Sarath when they first meet, but by the end of the book, her life depends on him.

Ondaatje, who sees connections between all things, hastens to add that the situation in Anil's Ghost is not endemic only to Sri Lanka. "Other countries, other cultures have tried to obliterate the truth, obliterate their very own history. It's more a state we're all living in now, in Africa, in Yugoslavia, in South America. It's a very contemporary situation that goes on everywhere around us."

It is still difficult for the author to reconcile the Sri Lanka of his childhood with what it has become. "I grew up in a country that was very different the germs of racism were there then, I just wasn't aware of it. But I didn't want the dark violence to be the only portrait of the country. It's not just a culture of death, it's an intricate, subtle, and artistic culture," said Ondaatje. "I wanted to celebrate it. In a way, the archaeology was there for that purpose, as well. I allowed that to represent the country, not just generals and politicians."

Though it explores the darkness, Anil's Ghost shimmers with beauty and hope and ends with a human touch. "I had no idea how I was going to end that book," Ondaatje said, and laughed. "I was terrified." He wrote until he reached the truth, the bones.

Ellen Kanner writes from Miami.

Tom Robbins believes in truth in advertising. His novels lure the adventurous and warn the timid with outrageous titles, which accurately predict outrageousness within. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Still Life with Woodpecker, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, Skinny Legs and All — these are not your usual well-behaved titles of popular novels. You won't see Robbins calling his books The Firm or The Notebook.

But for sheer mouthful of chewy syllables, you can't beat the title of Robbins's latest novel — Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue; however, it's more appealing than the rejected working title, Syrup of Wahoo. In a recent interview, Robbins explained that he changed the first title because he didn't like the misleading connotations of sweetness ("while the book is upbeat and exuberant, it decidedly is not sweet") and because he kept having to explain to Generation X friends that "wahoo" was a cry of exhilaration that did not require "a dot and a com" after it.

Robbins says he took the title from his own translation of a line from a Rimbaud poem. "While it has quite literal significance within the context of my plot," he adds, "it has wider meanings, as well. All of us who've managed to survive intense love affairs, political confrontations, or periods of personal debauchery might be said to be fierce invalids home from hot climates."

Fierce Invalids, Robbins explains, was inspired "by an entry from Bruce Chatwin's journal, by a CIA agent I met in Southeast Asia, by the mystery surrounding the lost prophecy of the Virgin of Fatima, by the increasing evidence that the interplay of opposites is the engine that runs the universe, and by embroidered memories of old Terry and the Pirates comic books."

Why so long since his last book? "Hey, it's only been five and a half years. And I have no idea where they went. I've been writing, yes; and building a house and traveling and generally following the Charmer's pipes down oblique paths of mysticism and eroticism. Certainly, I'd like to write faster, but whenever I've tried it, the language has suffered. I tend to sift my mental lexicon for the fresher, more unexpected word the way an old prospector pans for the bigger, more valuable nugget. That takes time."

Robbins's many fans won't mind the wait. Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates is everything they've come to expect — humor, sex, adventure, ferocious rants about society and religion, characters who swear on the Bible and Finnegan's Wake, asides on everything from etymology to violence, and a disregard for anybody else's definition of good taste. Switters, the protagonist, is a gun-toting pacifist anarchist who works for the government. In other words, by embodying contradictions, he is in the tradition of such Robbins heroes as the Woodpecker and Sissy Hankshaw.

Robbins says he never goes back and reads his novels once they've been published. "I'm saving that experience, and any selection of favorites that might ensue, for my golden years. Provided my golden years aren't here already." He does, however, have favorite characters. "I suppose I'll always be in love with Amanda, the uninhibited young nature goddess from Another Roadside Attraction. Although I disguised her as a child of the '60's, she danced directly out of the collective unconscious, did not pass Go, did not give a damn for any stinking $200. At the moment, however, I'd have to say that I'm most particularly fond of Switters, the rascally protagonist of Fierce Invalids."

Not surprisingly, Robbins is impatient with political correctness in the arts, especially the variety that expects writers to stay in their own yards and not trespass upon the sacred turf of some other group. "What novelists do — what screenwriters and playwrights do — is get inside other people's heads and look out. The ability to do that convincingly, no matter whose head is so entered, is what separates the real writer from the polemist, the philistine, and the poseur. To say that artists should be limited to portraying their 'own kind' is to say that Shakespeare erred in giving us Lady Macbeth, that Anne Rice's books ought to have been composed by 200-year-old male vampires, or that Bambi should have been written by a deer. Show me, for example, the Japanese woman who's written a more accurate life of the geisha than Arthur Golden and I might be tempted to buy into such a politically correct, asinine notion."

Like many creative children, Robbins seems to have turned to art partially as self-defense against his upbringing. "The family in which I was reared," he remembers, "was kind of a Southern Baptist version of The Simpsons — except that my father never would have eaten pie off of the floor and I played the part of both Bart and Lisa. Which is to say, I was, on the one hand, a rambunctious little troublemaker, and on the other, a highly sensitive, creative, artistic type." Apparently the combination hasn't faded, because Robbins adds, "That dichotomy of personality can sometimes confound me even today."

However, Robbins credits his background with feeding his yearning for life and art. "Growing up in the mysterious old mountains of North Carolina (there was a Blair witch project behind every ridge), I was fed a fair amount of superstitious brain poison and homogenized ignorant pap." His parents, although not well-educated, were avid readers, and they inspired young Tom to read "numberless books." At school he was known as a basketball player and class clown; he kept his intellectual side secret. "What my background lacked in sophistication, it made up for in natural beauty, colorful language, and ample incentive to overlay numbing Sunday School ennui with dreamy longings for a romantic elsewhere. It gave me an appetite." Despite his anarchic sensibilities, Tom Robbins says that he maintains a regular writing schedule, because "sitting around waiting for inspiration is for amateurs." He's at his desk every morning at ten o'clock, whether, as he puts it, the muse shows up or not. Not surprisingly, Robbins offers no magic formula for the aspiring novelist. "Writing is an enterprise that demands unabated discipline and concentration — but by God, it sure beats working."