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In his new novel, Greenwich, Howard Fast lifts the picture-book cover of this posh Connecticut suburb and reveals the currents of ambition, violence, guilt, doubt, and compassion that swirl underneath. The town, however, is less a shaper of action than it is a social petri dish in which cultures and classes of all sorts germinate.

Occurring over two days in June, the narrative pivots on a small dinner party given by the rich and ruthless Richard Bush Castle and his supposed "trophy wife," Sally. In attendance are Castle’s mistress, a nun, a priest, a best-selling author, a linguistics professor, and his schoolteacher wife.

As Castle secretly confronts the consequences of his murderous past as a high government official, the best-selling author, Harold Sellig, presses his theory of collective guilt on all those who will listen. Castle’s wife knows about the mistress, but the mistress doesn’t know she knows. And so it goes, ’round the table.

It’s all fairly academic, though, until a rush of events — ranging from attempted rape to multiple murders — topples the characters’ untested assumptions of right and wrong. With the priest and the nun as his primary prisms, Fast also examines the utility of religion in reconciling people to the stresses of life and the prospect of death.

In a droll shift of perspective, Fast gives the reader intermittent glimpses of the main figures through the eyes of a celebrated African-American chef, who feeds both their stomachs and sense of self-importance, and an Italian-American plumber, who grudgingly mops up their wastes. While the characters are uniformly engaging — particularly the strangely innocent Sally — Greenwich is essentially a novel of ideas.

"I’ve lived in Connecticut on and off for 35 years," Fast says in a telephone conversation from his home. He admits that his story might just as easily have taken place in Beverly Hills. "Greenwich is a well-governed, well-run city — a pleasant place to live," he reports. "Old Greenwich, which is a village that’s part of Greenwich and where I live, is lovelier and even more desirable. It’s like a step back in time."

At the age of 85, Fast remains dauntingly productive. He has written more than 40 books of fiction and nonfiction, plus numerous screenplays, short stories, essays, and commentaries. And he still writes a weekly newspaper column on politics.

In January, the Arts and Entertainment channel aired an adaptation of the The Crossing, his novel about George Washington. According to Fast, A&E has asked him to write a followup, but he has not yet agreed to do so. The sticking point to the sequel, he says, is that he wants to focus on the period just before Washington assumed the presidency, while A&E wants a story with "more battles."

Fast knows a lot about battles. He’s fought enough of them. An open and defiant member of the Communist party until he quit in disillusionment in 1956, Fast spent three months in prison in 1950 for refusing to "name names." He was blacklisted for years afterward. Instead of stopping him, the blacklist simply made him even more inventive. He began writing under pseudonyms, and he formed his own press — Blue Heron — to publish works that other publishers feared to touch. One of his self-published books was Spartacus, his story of a Roman slave revolt, which was turned into a multiple Academy Award-winning movie.

His time as a political pariah also led Fast to write the E.V. Cunningham series of mysteries. "I wrote a novel called Sylvia when the blacklist was still on," he explains. "I wrote it just for the pleasure of writing it. My agent said, ‘We can’t do anything with your name. You know that. Let me put a name on it.’ . . . So he put ‘E.V. Cunningham’ on it, and it was immediately snapped up by Doubleday. It was so successful that I did another E.V. Cunningham. And then more and more. I finally ended up publishing 21 of them."

His place on the political spectrum has never changed, Fast asserts: "I’m a lefty. I was born one, and I’ll die one."

Fast has little affection for most contemporary fiction: "I find it absolutely ephemeral, filled with a phony mysticism and a phony spiritualism. Nobody, except an occasional writer like [Tom] Wolfe or one or two others, writes about what is happening today. They write about the future or the far past, or they write these ghost stories and vampire stories. I often think if your father or mother haven’t abused you, you have no story to tell."

Edward Morris writes on music, politics, and fiction from Nashville.

Thomas Sanchez is convinced that the type of novel he spends years and years writing has fallen out of fashion. "We’re in a very cynical time in America," he says. "Everybody wants to be famous for their five-and-a-half minutes. They want to go out and get rich dot com by the time they’re 22. They’re not going to spend ten years writing a novel that may never be published, may never make any money."

We’re sitting in Francis Ford Coppola’s cafe in San Francisco’s North Beach. Sanchez has just returned from Paris, where an intense auction for the rights to his new novel, Day of the Bees, is underway. Instead of seeming jet-lagged, however, Sanchez is passionate, energized. Words spill from him.

He’s delighted that the two main contenders for the French rights to the book have strong family ties to the French Resistance. The activities of the Resistance during World War II are an essential part of the emotional and narrative background in Day of the Bees. "I had to know the price of kerosene on the black market and on the white market," he says. "I had to know how many ration books it would take to make an apple pie, or if that was even possible. Most of these details weren’t directly used in the book. Instead, they are what shape how Louise and the other characters in the book respond in a given situation." Sanchez believes that the bids of these particular publishers validate the exacting historical research he conducted. He also believes he can hear the cynics sharpening their knives, getting ready to carve up Day of the Bees.

Maybe he’s right.

Since the publication in 1973 of his magisterial first novel, Rabbit Boss, Thomas Sanchez has shown himself to be a writer of towering ambition, a writer who is intent on exploring personal and historical landscapes that are alien to most contemporary American writers. "The obligation of a writer," Sanchez says, "is not simply to write evermore diminutive domestic dramas about himself. Rather it is to state, to elucidate, how we are all part of something larger, something grander."

Despite the fact that Day of the Bees is in many ways Sanchez’s most intimate work, like Mile Zero (1990) and his other highly regarded novels this one strives for something larger and grander. At its most essential, Day of the Bees explores the mysterious love between Francisco Zermano, a great Spanish painter in the mold of Picasso, and his French muse, Louise Collard. After the Nazi invasion of France, Zermano takes Louise to Provence in the south of France for her own protection. Zermano returns to Paris, and the two lovers never meet again. After the war, while Zermano’s fame grows, Louise becomes merely a footnote to history. Then 50 years later, after Louise’s death and quite by accident, a scholar happens upon Louise’s unsent letters to Zermano, and a powerful counter-history unfolds.

According to Sanchez, three emotional strands inspired the book. The first was the story he heard about a famous artist’s mistress, who had been abandoned by her lover during the war and then lived a life of almost total isolation in Provence until her death. The second was the story of a woman who had been active in the French Resistance during the war; when her group was betrayed, the men were shot and she was nailed by the hands to the door of the village church. The third emotional strand was a personal one: Sanchez’s father was killed during World War II before Sanchez himself was born. On his 50th birthday, Sanchez’s mother gave him his father’s love letters to her, some of which she received after she learned of her husband’s death. Little wonder, then, that Day of the Bees has a dense emotional and metaphorical weave.

The story unfolds largely through Louise’s letters, which are by turns, beautiful, plaintive, courageous, combative, and embarrassingly carnal. "People do two things in letters," Sanchez says. "They express themselves in ways that they would not normally do when they are speaking. And they withhold information. The information that people withhold, especially emotional information, is every bit as important as what they expose."

Among the most moving and mysterious letters in the book are those in a section called "Night Letters," which reveal Louise’s harrowing activities on behalf of the Resistance. Reflecting on the art and psychology of these letters, Sanchez says, "When people go through a profound trauma, like a near-fatal accident or a smash-up in their emotional life, they often have a sense of otherness, where they are suddenly looking down on themselves being themselves. It’s a strange sort of paranormal state where we have a sense of being transported outside of our own skin. I think that state gets very close to the origins of existence. And I wanted to design the language of these letters to show that kind of fragmentation of Louise’s consciousness."

Also astonishing are the descriptions of nature and the French region of Provence. In the pivotal moment of the book, the moment that lends the book its title, Louise is enveloped by a swarm of bees. It’s surely one of the most amazing emotional and metaphorical scenes in recent fiction. Sanchez seems to have found a particular inspiration for this scene and for the book in the landscape of Provence: "Living deep in the country of Provence, you are so connected to the earth, to the life force of the place, to the movement of the place, that the real tick of time is the flick of a wing of a bee or the song of a cicada. It is nature overwhelming you with sound and energy. That became important to me, because we so easily lose sight of nature and become disconnected from it."

Returning to his passionate concern about our current era, Sanchez says, "We’re living in a very dangerous time. We’re being told that our emotions aren’t real unless television tells us they’re real. We’re being told to deny our emotions or not to have emotions. In literature we’re being told to write from the gut and not from the heart. If you write from your gut, you write from instinctive reflex. A dog has a reflex. But if you’re writing from your heart, interacting with your intellect, then you are making a statement as an individual, not as an animal. In Day of the Bees, I’ve tried to write directly from the heart, to find a language that is simple on the page and that goes directly to the heart."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

One day, T.S. Spivet gets a phone call from the Smithsonian Institution, informing him that he has won a national award for his mapmaking and will be the keynote speaker at an upcoming celebration in Washington. What the Smithsonian doesn’t know is that T.S. is only 12 years old. What T.S. doesn’t know is how he’s going to get to Washington. What his rancher father and scientist mother don’t know is that he will get there, making the crossing from the family ranch in Divide, Montana, to the Mall in D.C. all on his own. He will run away from home, from the unbearable memory of his little brother Layton’s accidental death, which–unaccountably–he had a hand in.

So begins Reif Larsen’s miraculous The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, a debut novel narrated by the pre-pubescent cartographer, filled to the very edges of each page with his hundreds of drawings and other assorted marginalia. In the center of the novel appears a book within a book, a narrative of T.S.’s ancestors written by his mother. The novel is a cabinet of wonders, an odyssey of self-discovery, a family romance, a symphony of topography, geology and American history. The book hardly seems able to stay between its covers, bulging as it is with so many astonishments, so many crossings of fictional lines.It is, moreover, a genuine publishing phenomenon over which the book world (and even the film world) is buzzing with barely contained excitement. All of 28 years old, not even out of graduate school, Larsen is dazzling the industry with a precociousness not unlike that of T.S., who takes the Smithsonian by storm.

BookPage spoke with Larsen at his home in Brooklyn about the spirit of the book, its sources and its structure. "I’m a practicing Zen Buddhist and I’m influenced by my readings in that tradition, such as the notion that everyone is born a perfect being and we spend most of our lives with a clouded vision trying to realize our perfection," he says. At critical moments in the book, T.S. registers his inkling of this realization. When he makes his maps, it feels like taking down dictation from the universe.

Larsen, who is finishing his M.F.A. in fiction at Columbia, is also a filmmaker and has made documentaries in the U.S., the U.K. and Africa. He has a special insight into children, having organized the U.S. tour of a band of teenaged Botswanan marimba players last year to benefit their AIDS orphanage back home. "I find myself often writing about children who have a range of extraordinary skills. They provide a lot of insight into seeing the world for how it is. My father is an art teacher and his way of teaching is to get students to see like kids again, to draw a tree as they see it instead of replacing it with a symbol of what tree should be," he says.

"I was initially nervous about illustrating the book because I’m a writer first and foremost and I wanted the illustrations to match the text. Originally I was going to hire someone to do it, but I realized I would drive this person crazy with all my tiny requests. Finally I said, OK, I’ll do it myself. And then I realized I could always fall back on the fact that T.S. is 12, if I didn’t do it well," Larsen says.

So much of the book flows like a dance between opposing forces. Larsen illuminates one source of this energy: "A lot of the characteristic polarities came right out of Westerns. T.S.’s mother and father typify the forces at work in the history of the American West. On the one hand, you have a nostalgic sense of the land on the part of the ranchers who work it. On the other hand, you have all these scientists and geologists who went out there and tried to grid a map of meaning on the place. I think the story of the West is very much about these two ways of seeing and ways of knowing bumping up against each other. It was interesting to see how all of this could play out in a single household."

When the subject comes up of a possible connection between his T.S. and another wandering boy named Huck Finn, Larsen says, with a touch of awe in his voice, "I feel honored even to be mentioned alongside Mark Twain. That book is one of the great, great American novels. Twain is so smart. It’s the way he tackles the world from the point of view of a relationship between a runaway slave and a boy from the country. By contrast, one of the difficulties of my own book was when I realized that T.S. has to go on ‘The Crossing’ all by himself. That’s when I discovered the historical part, with the journal of T.S.’s mother accompanying him on the trip. He’s in dialogue with his mother and his whole history. He is completing a cycle, a ‘conservation of migration’: what goes West must come back East. Likewise, it’s the perpetual motion of Twain’s book–the feeling that he’s always got his foot on the accelerator–that’s what affects me."

About T.S.’s own ordeal, Larsen meditates with characteristic generosity. "At first, I was so fully inhabiting T.S.’s voice that I found it really difficult to write about certain things, especially the death of his little brother, Layton. Early on, T.S. lacks the emotional language to talk about this, and he subjugates all of it to the sidebars. It’s like in music; when you’re improvising you hit a note and you don’t want to come back to that note until you’re ready again. The rhythm of T.S.’s voice told me when I could go there. But this changes, and the function of the marginalia shifts. Over the course of his journey, he learns how to talk more upfront about his grief, and his effort becomes part of the main text."

Larsen says, "I’m always interested in the question of whether to end a book in the head or in the heart." But he does not say how he answers the question for himself at the end of The Selected Works. This is just as well. We don’t need a map of this book. All we need is to read it and marvel. In doing so, we gain a map of the world, a vision of our own troubled heads and hearts, a legend for our own bewildered epoch.

Michael Alec Rose is a professor at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.

In The River King, ghosts appear in photographs and people are knocked out by an overwhelming smell of roses "though the weather was dismal and no flowers bloomed." This isn’t the real world, it’s the world of Alice Hoffman, whose 13 novels sparkle with enchantment.

"There are people who write fiction to come to terms with their own lives. I’m much more interested in creating alternate universes, not everyday reality," said the author, speaking from her home outside Boston. Hoffman, who has peopled her novels with witches (Practical Magic, 1995) and giants (Illumination Night, 1987) and armed her merely mortal characters with charms and spells, never outgrew her love of fairy tales. She thinks at heart, no one has. Everyone wants to believe.

As a girl, Hoffman adored Mary Poppins and stories by the Brothers Grimm and Ray Bradbury, but more than that, she believed in them. "I believed anything can happen. It was a huge escape for me as reader. I loved anything that could remove me from reality and make me see possibilities," she said. "Fiction in general gives you the freedom of exploring the truth without boundaries, to get to a deeper truth, and fairy tales have always been my model."

The River King, with more than a whisper of fairy tale to it, takes place in Haddan, Massachusetts, at a school haunted by the ghost of Annie Howe. "Most newcomers are apprised of Annie’s fate as soon a they come to Haddan. . . . The house is called St. Anne’s, in honor of Annie Howe, who hanged herself from the rafters one mild evening in March. . . ."

Once Hoffman envisioned this gothic image, the rest of the story unfolded. "It’s a strange process, writing fiction," she said. "Here, the town kind of appeared for me, then the school and the river, and people moved in and filled it up." Among the people filling up Haddan are new students Carlin Leander and Augustus Pierce, new teacher Betsy Chase, and Abel Grey, the town’s policeman who has lived there all his life. They meet as strangers, but the mysterious death of one unites the other three. While uncovering the truth, they each discover some truths about themselves. Hoffman writes, "It was the truth that was always as clear as water until it had been broken; shatter it and all that’s left is a lie.""More important than the story you tell is the voice you have," said the author, who achieves that voice by not thinking about it too much. "I’ve always tried to go directly from sleep to the computer, before I have the time to start censoring myself. I like to get up at 5:00. I do my best work early in the morning before the world’s awake. For the kind of fiction I write, which is emotional fiction, you have to let go. Let the walls down, the defenses down. Don’t worry about what people are going to think."

She tries to work quickly and never looks over her first draft until she has told the whole story. Then she burnishes her prose. "I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite," she said. It took three years before she was satisfied with The River King.

Though Hoffman may have the most in common with the book’s impulsive, exotic Betsy Chase, she feels the most protective of the teenagers, Carlin and Gus. The author’s children are 12 and 17, but Hoffman didn’t use their behavior for the book. She didn’t have to. Her own teenage years still feel achingly fresh. "It stays with you like no other time does. Falling in love for the first time, succeeding for the first time, failing for the first time — it’s intense. I remember how important, how dire everything seemed. Everything seemed so life or death. I think it’s still that way."

Adolescent angst may be eternal, but some things have changed since Hoffman’s high school years. The killings at Colombine High School occurred while she was writing The River King. "I felt like changing the book because of Colombine, but decided to leave it the way it is. There seems to be so much intolerance about sexual orientation, so much bullying, more people getting guns," said Hoffman. "It’s harder to be a teenager now."

Harder, even than when she wrote about New York gang life in her first novel, Property Of. The book came out in 1977, when Hoffman was in her early 20s, barely out of her teens, herself. "I was a baby, I knew nothing, I had never heard of Farrar Straus [her first publisher] when I started," she said, laughing. "Back then, you got no money, no publicity, but they took more chances. It was much easier to get published. [Her current publisher] Putnam’s stayed with me in a way I’m not sure publishers do anymore. If you’re not having huge sales, they don’t want to see you."

Hoffman doesn’t think about sales, huge or otherwise, when she works. "I always feel you’re writing the book you couldn’t find, so you have to write it yourself." Though she confessed, "Some people pressure you to write the same book over and over again," Hoffman doesn’t pay much attention. She’d rather stretch herself as a writer and keep her own council, something she learned to do as a girl. Back in elementary school, her "very, very smart" older brother was the teachers’ darling. Hoffman, who was not, wasn’t above filching his old papers and resubmitting them under her own name. "His would get an A and mine would get a C or D. I realized it didn’t matter what anyone else thought and whatever judgment I got was going to come from myself. You have to have faith in yourself."

The author of The River King also has faith in the power of myth and the power of literature. Though reading and writing may seem like solitary acts, she believes books bring people together, providing "that feeling of community, of what feels true for you feels true for me, the sense you’re not alone and somebody knows how you feel. I believe literature can change things," Hoffman said. She believes it the way she used to believe in fairy tales — with all her heart.

Ellen Kanner writes from Miami.

Author photo by Jake Martin.

Early 20th century detective novels served as the inspiration for the masterful new novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, the British author best known for his portrait of a loyal butler in The Remains of the Day.

"There's a certain kind of detective fiction that was enormously popular here in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s," Ishiguro says during a recent interview from his home near London. "These days it's a genre that's really looked down upon. It is thought to be kind of facile escapism, and to some extent that's justified. But reading these novels over the distance of time, I found them very poignant, because they were actually written and read immediately after the Great War, by a generation trying to recover from the trauma of that war. That was a generation that knew better than we do today what the real nature of evil and suffering was.

"These detective stories portray a very cozy functioning community where just one thing has gone wrong—somebody has murdered somebody. And all it takes is for this detective to come from outside and unmask the murderer and everything goes back to being rosy again," Ishiguro says. "It occurred to me that it would be interesting to take a detective who seems to come from that world, carrying the tools that would be adequate in that fictional world, and to actually hurl him into the 20th century as it moved toward the second cataclysm."

From this thread of inspiration, Kazuo Ishiguro has created Christopher Banks, the English detective of the 1930s who narrates the new novel, When We Were Orphans. Banks's parents disappeared in Shanghai when he was nine years old, and he is obsessed with solving the riddle of their disappearance. He eventually returns to Shanghai on the eve of World War II and hunts through a nightmarish war-torn city for his parents, whom he believes have been held captive for more than 20 years.

In previous novels, Ishiguro has often explored the intersection of personal and historical events, looking at how, as he says, "The luck of the draw you had historically had profound implications on how your small private life went." In the Booker prize-winning The Remains of the Day, for instance, the butler aspires to serve greatness but instead facilitates his employer's efforts to promote Nazi appeasement.

In When We Were Orphans, however, Ishiguro's uses his historical backdrop in a more psychologically resonant manner. "Here the turbulence of Shanghai is almost like an externalized version of Christopher's sense of the whole world crumbling," Ishiguro says. "Christopher's world as a child collapsed when his parents disappeared. He thinks if he can only go back in time and solve that mystery, the whole world will be put together again. I suppose it's a crazy equation, but Christopher does equate his subjective world crumbling with the world around him hurtling toward the Second World War. He thinks he'll be able to stop that war from happening if he can solve this case. It's difficult to explain, but I think large areas of what we do in the world often come from exactly such a crazy bit of logic, an emotional logic."

And it is the unfolding of this weird logic that makes When We Were Orphans sometimes challenging, and, ultimately, very rewarding. Much of the novel's challenge has to do with the fact that Christopher Banks's account of himself is unreliable. His memory is faulty and ignores, denies, or distorts painful reminders from his past. For a great detective intent on turning up clues, Banks is sometimes clueless, particularly about his own emotional life.

"In each section Banks narrates," Ishiguro says, "Christopher's mind has gone further away from what we call reality. When he goes back to Shanghai, we're really not quite sure if it's the real Shanghai or some mixture of memory and speculation."

Ishiguro often uses an unreliable narrator in his novels; he says he is simply drawn to this kind of writing. "I don't think in any technical sense about an unreliable narrator. Where my writing is pitched is in that realm where you're not quite sure what reality is. Because to some extent, I think that's where we all live—in a bit of a fog. When I write, I do like to narrate from that fairly murky inner point, not from some kind of external camera's eye point."

For a writer so fascinated with the exploration of the inward experience of consciousness, Ishiguro is relatively untroubled by public demands of his growing fame. "Writing is a very introverted activity," he admits. "But these days, in the professional life of a writer, at least a writer who is being marketed to any degree, there is this very extroverted side. You have to tour around doing these public performances, sometimes in front of sizable audiences. I know a lot of my colleagues find that aspect of things difficult. But I never find it very difficult."

Ishiguro says he does occasionally wonder if the growing demand for public literary events presents a kind of threat to literary culture and to the subjective pleasures of reading. "I don't know if this fear is justified," he says. "There needs to be a balance, I suppose. But I sometimes worry that these events where an author reads from his work and answers questions become [all there is to] literary culture. So that when people are interested in Philip Roth's new book, what they think isn't, 'Oh I must go to the bookstore and buy the book and read it;' they think, 'Oh, I wonder if he's coming to our town to do an event, because I'll go and do that.' And that becomes the main excitement about Philip Roth bringing out a new book."

Of course, a lack of actual readers is not a likely fate for When We Were Orphans. After all, Ishiguro's previous novels have each been widely read, reviewed, and discussed, and this is his most accomplished novel yet. And this from someone who had no ambitions to write fiction until he was in his mid-20s.

"Until I was 24," Ishiguro says, "I wanted to be a singer-songwriter. I did the whole thing of sending songs and demo tapes around, and after years of being rejected, I moved from writing songs to writing short stories. When I started to write stories, they started to get published almost immediately. So it was like a lot of things—you do what life allows you to do."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.