All Interviews

Fiction

Anthony Swofford

With Jarhead, the unflinching account of his six-month tour of duty as a Marine scout/sniper during the first Gulf War, Anthony Swofford delivered furious broadsides at the inanity and insanity of modern warfare. From the moment his boots hit sand, he cursed his decision to follow his "family clan of manhood" into combat. When, after months of training to kill, the war ended practically before it began, Swofford returned home feeling shortchanged and sucker-punched.

Having purged himself of his battlefield bitterness by writing Jarhead at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Swofford returns with Exit A, a surprisingly fresh and playful fiction debut. Part coming-of-age story, part epic quest, Exit A is the flipside of Jarhead, told by those other casualties of war, the wives and children of America’s armed forces.

Part One is set in 1989 on a U.S. air base in Yokota, Japan, where high school football star Severin Boxx is fighting his attraction to Virginia Sachiko Kindwall, a half-Japanese teen siren whose father is both his coach and the base commander. Severin is torn between his loyalty to his coach and his curiosity about Virginia’s punk-rock life in Tokyo, which she accesses via the Exit A subway stop.

Her rebelliousness against her domineering father leads Virginia into a secret life of petty street crimes, a life into which she hopes to lure Severin. When she unwittingly becomes involved in an international kidnapping plot, Severin calls the Japanese police to rescue her. Instead, they throw her in prison, prompting Severin’s parents, who fear the general’s reprisal, to dispatch their son to an uncle in San Francisco.

In Part Two, 13 years later, Virginia is a social outcast living near the old Yokota base with an illegitimate daughter by a prison guard, and Severin, now married to academic wiz Aida, is squandering his doctorate by mowing lawns at Aida’s university. When the dying Gen. Kindwall contacts Severin from Vietnam for one last favor, it sets in motion a quest that ultimately reunites Severin and Virginia.

Swofford’s sexy, angst-ridden tale demonstrates an engaging new fiction voice trying out several themes at once. The fact that the whole of Exit A manages to congeal despite the disparity of its parts is testimony that Swofford’s truly got the stuff.

Did he feel pressure to further pursue the grim realities of soldiering, perhaps with a Jarhead II?

"Actually, I felt the need to ignore Jarhead," Swofford admits. "Jarhead was of no interest to me, really. There was a deliberate turn in a different direction in how the story is told, a female point of view and a view from the other side of war, from those left behind."

Swofford knows that landscape well. From age 4-8, he and his family lived on a base in Tokyo. "The aftermath of the [Vietnam] war for my father definitely colored my childhood, colored my home life," he says. "I think growing up on base truly qualifies as a subculture, one that is not regularly depicted or understood."

Exit A examines the cost of the choices we make, be it Gen. Kindwall’s fanatical devotion to discipline, his daughter’s rebelliousness or Severin’s indecisiveness. As in thermodynamics, every action in Exit A has an equal and opposite reaction.

" It was an assessment of my late teen years in a way," Swofford says. "I wanted to capture these fascinating years, 17 and 18, where there is a lot of anxiety about what one is going to do in the world and what one’s place is. And there is the anxiety and excitement of leaving home and the influence of your parents."

Although Part One leads the reader to expect to see the young lovers reunite, these two characters obviously didn’t get the memo. In fact, even when they do meet, we’re never quite sure of their own motives, much less each other’s. Does Severin have lingering feelings for Virginia, or is he merely using Gen. Kindwall’s summons as a convenient excuse to pull the plug on his marriage? Does Virginia love him, or merely want a father for her daughter?

"I never answer it specifically," Swofford says. "He has fondness for Virginia, but he also has this fondness for her father. His own father is dead and he is attempting to make reparations with Gen. Kindwall."

Swofford is now a happy civilian who has been living in New York City for the past two years. "It’s really the first time in my adult life that I’ve been in one habitat for longer than nine or 10 months, and that’s very settling," he says. " There is a regularity to how I’m living and working that is both satisfying and good."

He still receives cards, letters and e-mails about Jarhead from soldiers serving in Iraq. How has a soldier’s lot changed in the 16 years since he took part in Desert Storm?

"What is different, obviously, is the carnage, the length of the war and what is happening politically in America because of the war," he says. "That changes the meaning of the war for the people who fight, and that’s important when you come home and you perhaps have lost friends or been injured yourself and need to attach some kind of meaning to the war. That’s a major difference. The meaning of this war is, as of yet, undecided."

Swofford sees no easy solution to America’s involvement in Iraq. "I never thought we should have gone, but I do think that if we stay, we have to put more troops on the ground, because obviously what we’re doing now isn’t working. Security has to improve, and the only way that will happen with our assistance is with 100,000 more troops on the ground. But I’m not sure that Americans can stomach that, both in terms of cost and the loss of American and Iraqi lives."

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin, Texas.

 

With Jarhead, the unflinching account of his six-month tour of duty as a Marine scout/sniper during the first Gulf War, Anthony Swofford delivered furious broadsides at the inanity and insanity of modern warfare. From the moment his boots hit sand, he cursed his decision to…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Lalita Tademy

Tademy plumbs family history for glimpses of a violent past Lalita Tademy’s journey to Red River began long before she left the corporate world and her prestigious job as vice president of Sun Microsystems. It began before she wrote her much acclaimed debut novel Cane River, which became a bestseller and an Oprah Book Club selection in 2001. It began when she was born a Tademy, a name that carried with it responsibility and inspired respect, a name that originated in the Nile Delta and was reclaimed by her ancestors.

To say that Lalita Tademy’s family history is rich and complex would be an understatement. As anyone who read her first novel Cane River knows, the author comes from a long line of strong women. In her debut, Tademy traced her family history on her mother’s side. Now, in Red River she turns her attention to the Tademy men and relates a disturbing, and until now, obscure chapter of American history. On one of her research trips to Louisiana, Tademy stumbled upon something that would alter the course of her genealogical research, and her life. She found herself in the small town of Colfax, near the center of the state, standing before a monument dedicated to three white men, Heroes, who died in the Colfax Riot of 1873. There is no mention on the monument of the 100-plus black men and boys who were slaughtered or their families who were terrorized and displaced afterward. No mention of how, on that Easter Sunday, white supremacists massacred blacks as they tried to protect their hard-won voting rights by taking a stand in the courthouse.

During a phone call to her California home, Tademy talked about making this shocking discovery. She says that initially, she was angry and perplexed; it was far removed from any way of living that she knew from her life in California. This is some anomaly, a wrinkle in the fabric of American life, Tademy recalls telling herself. She says, I did not want to be disrupted from my own life . . . [it was] something I would have preferred not to have happened. She felt strongly, however, that the task had fallen to her to tell this story and offer a different perspective on what took place on that fateful day and during the weeks that followed.

I could imagine the time, and that is what I try to do when I write. I try to transport both myself and a reader into the time . . . not as if you are looking backward but really as if you are there. With her powerful writing and attention to detail, Tademy accomplishes this, which makes Red River both a hard book to read and a hard book to put down. It is, at turns, heart-wrenching and transcendent.

Trying to get myself into that space was difficult, it still rankled, Tademy says, but as painful as the process was, she felt it was imperative for her to write about this episode in Reconstruction history. As Jackson Tademy, one of the heroes of Red River , tells his grandson from his deathbed, Names of men you never gonna know lay buried in the ground for you. . . . No matter how much time pass . . . you not allowed to turn your face to the wall, throw up your hands, forget. We need reminding, says Tademy. Younger generations don’t know that there was a time when we couldn’t vote. Getting information about what happened during and after the battle turned out to be more problematic than Tademy expected. She thought it would be as simple as asking people, but no one wanted to talk about it. She did, however, have a wealth of family stories to draw upon which were lovingly shared by surviving relatives. Tademy also did a lot of research in the public sphere, drawing on newspaper accounts and official documents, which, of course, were written by segregationists. She says it was a challenge trying to recreate a story, events, where there were certain things that you knew, and filling in all of the shading. Asked if she came across any surprises during her research, Tademy says that she made a jarring revelation. Late in the process, too late to include it in the book, the author discovered that her maternal great-great-grandfather was at the siege of the courthouse, fighting on the white side. Narcisse, who appeared in Cane River, is one of Tademy’s white ancestors who was a slave holder and a complicated figure. It was a challenge to try to write this and keep multiple points of view, she says. Narcisse did such harm and good at the same time. Though Red River focuses on the men in the Tademy and Smith families, the story begins with the voice of Polly, Sam Tademy’s wife. Tademy says Polly’s voice came easily to her. It was there, it was very strong, she was a strong young woman, and she was a strong old woman. She stresses that though women occupy a less central role in this book than in the last, they are there, they are the rock. When Tademy left the corporate world and began work on her genealogy just over 10 years ago, she assumed it was a singular personal attachment to finding out these stories. She was gratified to discover that so many readers would be drawn to her stories. I do think this is American history, and I am very proud to be able to offer American history with a different point of view, she says.

Though the characters in the book endure great suffering, Tademy was determined not to portray them as victims. One of the things I was mindful of was that I did not want there to be a victim mentality in this book, because these were people who went through unbelievable hardship and obstacles and they kept going. And they not only survived, they thrived. Her novel reveals the horror of racial violence, but also the strength of the human spirit. Particularly when it’s family pulling family and community pulling community, you get beyond, you move forward, and you get to the point where you can rise. It’s a book about a tough period of time, but it’s very redemptive to me, and I draw an enormous amount of strength from these people. Tademy’s readers will undoubtedly draw strength from them, too. Katherine Wyrick lives in Little Rock.

Tademy plumbs family history for glimpses of a violent past Lalita Tademy's journey to Red River began long before she left the corporate world and her prestigious job as vice president of Sun Microsystems. It began before she wrote her much acclaimed debut novel Cane…
Sports

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar became the greatest scorer in the history of professional basketball by perfecting a game based on finesse, agility and phenomenal shot-making technique rather than brute force or physical bulk. Since his retirement 18 years ago, he’s become a fine historian and narrative writer, delivering valuable works on subjects ranging from overlooked African-American World War II veterans to the year he spent coaching basketball on a Native American reservation. Just as his game on the court had a stylized and distinctive flavor, Abdul-Jabbar’s books have always done more than simply stating facts by offering his personal insights on events and personalities he’s found inspiring.

That trend continues in his latest book, On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance. Rather than giving readers an academic treatise on this important cultural movement, Abdul-Jabbar turns the book into both a memoir and a reflection on the debt he owes to the figures who came before him. Focusing on basketball, jazz and writing, he shows how key people and developments in these areas influenced his life. One of the reasons I chose the Harlem Renaissance period is that it came on the heels of one of the great migrations of black people in America, Abdul-Jabbar says in an interview from Los Angeles, where he’s working as an assistant coach for the Lakers. I also wanted to show people the difference between the fantasy world of Harlem that’s often depicted in films and the real community, the place where people were living and working, and where remarkable achievements and cultural and political history was being created. When you consider that what happened in Harlem during the ’20s and ’30s came during an era when KKK membership was climbing and a major backlash was occurring, it’s even more incredible. Though he’s been a student of history, particularly African-American history, since his days as an undergraduate at UCLA when he was known as Lew Alcindor, Abdul-Jabbar acknowledges that he made some unexpected findings while doing research for the book. I was pretty surprised to discover that the great bandleader Cab Calloway actually tried out for and made the Harlem Globetrotters, he says. Things would have been pretty different had he decided to play basketball, but it’s good he chose music. The book’s early sections detail the sordid history and ugly treatment blacks suffered in the pre-Renaissance period and also outline the scope of the migration from both the South and the Caribbean to Harlem during the early 20th century. In a call-and-response format, co-writer Raymond Obstfeld contributes chapters that summarize the history of the era. Then Abdul-Jabbar shifts the treatment to specific periods and people, spotlighting his artistic and athletic heroes, such as writers Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay and Chester Himes, and the effect they had on him from time he was born in Harlem in 1947.

A key section of the book considers the achievements of the New York Rens, a basketball team named for Harlem’s Renaissance Casino and Ballroom, whose 1939 World Championship made them the first black team to win any pro title. Ironically, Abdul-Jabbar himself originally planned to be a baseball player rather than a basketball player. Because baseball was the predominant sport for African-Americans prior to the 1960s, Abdul-Jabbar says, the exploits of many great black basketball players were largely forgotten.

There was a time when baseball was the main sport among African-Americans, which is why there’s so much written about the Negro Leagues, Abdul-Jabbar said. But without the Rens and other great black teams and players from that period, there’s a major gap in the knowledge that many people have about the growth of basketball in the nation.

Another thing that so many people overlook about the Harlem Renaissance was the boom it triggered in terms of writing and publishing, Abdul-Jabbar adds. These people were writing and publishing poetry, essays, short stories and books, developing an artistic tradition, yet there were still people in America doubting the humanity of black people. Their resilience, their versatility, their awareness of the importance of art as a political and personal weapon that could be used to help better everyone’s lives is something that has always resonated with me. I think some people don’t understand how the example of the Harlem Renaissance writers is still influential and important in contemporary times. But so much of what came later, from the civil rights movement to the black arts explosion, can be traced to the Harlem Renaissance. The son of a jazz musician, Abdul-Jabbar devotes plenty of space to instrumentalists, vocalists and composers in On the Shoulders of Giants. The young Alcindor knew such immortals as pianist Thelonious Monk and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and has since become a prominent advocate of jazz. He finds links between that style’s expressiveness and flair and basketball, while also establishing a connection between the improvisatory elements of jazz and those of rap. One of the things that I hope young people understand is that nothing begins in a vacuum, Abdul-Jabbar said. Without people like Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and others, there wouldn’t be any subsequent musical forms. Their emphasis on individuality, on never playing something the same way twice, is a vital part of the African-American heritage and is no different than what’s happening in today’s music.

Perhaps the greatest lesson of the Harlem Renaissance is how so many people’s efforts, whether in literature or sports, were done on behalf of others, Abdul-Jabbar notes. Langston Hughes or the Rens or Duke Ellington truly felt what they were doing was vital to improving the lot of all African-Americans and ultimately was also part of helping America become a more just society for everyone. They weren’t trying to get rich, they were trying to make a difference.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar became the greatest scorer in the history of professional basketball by perfecting a game based on finesse, agility and phenomenal shot-making technique rather than brute force or physical bulk. Since his retirement 18 years ago, he's become a fine historian and narrative…
FictionWomen's Fiction

Jill Conner Browne

Jill Conner Browne, the self-appointed Sweet Potato Queen, captured hearts from the start with her outrageously outspoken debut, The Sweet Potato Queens' Book of Love, which documented her exploits with a bunch of gal pals in Jackson, Mississippi, including taking over the local St. Patrick's Day parade dressed in green sequins and long gloves. Her best-selling, Southern-fried empire now features a series of books including The Sweet Potato Queen's Field Guide to Men: Every Man I Love Is Either Married, Gay or Dead; a stage musical in development, with book by Rupert Holmes, music by Melissa Manchester and lyrics by noted songwriter Sharon Vaughn; a reality show pitch; and a website with gaudy spud stuff. Doing so well for herownself, Browne celebrates the publication of The Sweet Potato Queens' First Big-Ass Novel by answering questions that many Queens-in-training want answered but are too-busy-being-fabulous to ask.

As the title makes clear, this is your first novel. Which makes us wonder: What's harder writing the truth or making things up?
Making things up is way harder. Closely akin to lying, it requires that one constantly remember what one has said previously. Makes me nervous.

How did you spend your time before becoming a bestseller?
Before I became a bestseller, I never got to sleep late; I had to work hard every single day even on Saturday and Sunday. I also had to clean my own house and take care of my daughter and my sick mama. I had to do all the grocery shopping and cooking and errand-running. There was never enough time to do it all, it seemed. Hey! I still have to do all that stuff what's the deal?

Who is the funniest person you've ever met?
My daddy.

The doorbell rings, and it's unexpected guests. Name three things you'd grab from the closet and fridge.
You're saying I have to let them in, right? Can't drop them in the moat with the alligators? OK, if I must then I'd just hit the fridge. I could feed 'em something that would entertain them it'd take forever to make myself presentable. Most people are perfectly willing to be distracted by good eats.

What do you have on your nightstand?
A book light, a glass of ice water, lip balm, and at the moment, a book by Dan Jenkins.

Thong or granny pants?
Sweet Potato Queens Never Wear Panties to Parties. It's a rule.

Why are only Southern women described as sassy?
Only Southern women would utter the word sassy. And even though I suppose we are, by definition, sassy, it's one of those words like zany and wacky that if a person uses them, it changes how I feel about them as human beings. Not in a good way. Those are display words only they were never intended to be used.

Have you ever had a literary catfight with your sister Judy?
I have never had any kind of fight with my seester, Judy; but, if we were going to fight, it would more likely be over bacon than literature.

A librarian called your first book heavy handed. If you met her, you'd say:
a) but I'll wake up sparkly and fabulous in the morning and you will still be dull
b) I'm about to open a big-ass can of queenly whoop on your bottom, and ermine won't help you now, or
c) sneer silently while tossing a hot pink boa across your shoulders
Well, how unkind of her! I have learned that no matter who you are and no matter what you have written, Somebody Somewhere Hates It. Whatever. As my dear friend Willie Morris once said in response to a caustic critic, I'm sure I don't know what people will be reading 500 years from now but I do feel fairly certain it will not be the Collected Criticisms of _____! I'm proud of my books . . . but the humor is just the vehicle by which the Greater Message is delivered. Bless her heart, she didn't even get the laughs and that's the easiest part.

Which celebrity should play you in your biopic?
Reba McEntire because she's tiny and redheaded and sings up a storm. She is everything I would have been had I gotten any of my druthers!

Tattoo? Where?
No tatts. Can't commit. I never owned a garment I wanted to wear every single day for the rest of my life.

Jill Conner Browne, the self-appointed Sweet Potato Queen, captured hearts from the start with her outrageously outspoken debut, The Sweet Potato Queens' Book of Love, which documented her exploits with a bunch of gal pals in Jackson, Mississippi, including taking over the local St. Patrick's…

YA FictionYA

Ysabeau Wilce

Ysabeau Wilce lives a few blocks down from the Chicago bookstore Women and Children First in a neighborhood with enough cafes to keep an army of writers supplied with coffee. There is a Prohibition-era speakeasy in her basement, and an unusually placid border collie asleep in the study where she has been at work completing her second novel, a sequel to her just released debut, Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog.

Wilce, who has a graduate degree in military history, says, 19th-century dime novels always had long titles, such as Red Top Rev: Vigilante Prince, or How He Whipped the Regulators and Saved the World. "I tried very much to write Flora Segunda in the tradition of a dime novel."

Her first novel is an exuberant young adult fantasy set in the city of Califa (which bears, at times, a strong resemblance to an alternate historical version of San Francisco), whose Warlord has made an uneasy truce with the powerful Huitzil Empire. Flora Fyrdraaca, the 14-year-old narrator, a child of a much-decorated military family, longs to flout family tradition and join the Rangers, an elite corps of magic-wielding scouts.

"I come from a military family, and there is a definite caste mentality that I am very familiar and comfortable with. It was natural to make Flora's family a part of that." Speaking about writing more generally, Wilce says, "It's easier sometimes to use real details than to make things up I know an awful lot about 19th-century military culture, and rather than let all that useless knowledge go to waste, I figured I'd recycle it. It's funny for a fantasy writer to say, but I never make anything up when I might be able to use something real."

Wilce, formerly a museum curator, was sitting in on a lecture when the idea for Flora Segunda first came to her. "I was responsible for setup and cleanup at the event, but I didn't have anything to do during the lecture itself. So I was sitting outside the lecture hall, on a bench, bored, and I had a notebook with me. A sentence popped into my head, and I wrote it down." The first draft of Flora Segunda was done in two weeks.

The result is a book that begs to be read aloud, as well as one that should appeal to both teenagers and adult fans of books like M.T. Anderson's The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. As well as a rollicking old-fashioned plot full of pulse-pounding adventure and strong female characters, Wilce's novel offers the enticements of Flora's ancestral home, Crackpot Hall. She gives the 11,000 rooms of the title names like The Hallway of Laborious Desire, The Stairs of Exuberance and The Cloakroom of the Abyss.

"For a few years my family lived in an Elizabethan revival house in Mexico City, of all places. It had a musician's balcony over the great hall-like living room, a full English-style pub and four ramshackle floors. My room was in the garret, at the top of a very narrow set of stairs, and had dormer windows and a slanty ceiling. That house made a pretty big impression on me," Wilce says. "Perhaps because we moved every three years when I was a kid, I'm fascinated by families that have lived in the same house for generations."

When asked where she's lived, Wilce lists San Francisco, Anchorage, Miami, Mexico City, Madrid, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Philadelphia and Brooklyn. But she's always brought her books along with her. At present, she's reading Paul Park's A Princess of Roumania, Dorothy Dunnett "for the zillionth time," and Sketches from Texas Siftings. "It's a compilation of comic sketches originally published in a Texas newspaper in the 1880s. Each little essay concerns some aspect of Texas life The Texas Cow, the Pelon Dog, the Typical Texan, etc. They are very funny, plus good research on frontier life. As you can see, I am always reading several things at once. On a good week, I can put away five to eight books. There are a zillion books in the world I hope to get to maybe 10 percent of them before I go to my reward, so I don't waste any time."

As to the early buzz her own book is generating, Wilce says she is surprised and pleased, of course. "I've been working on Flora Segunda for so long that the book had begun to feel like my own private obsession. Now that I've had to let her go out in the cold world alone, it is gratifying to know that there is an interest in Flora and her travails beyond just me!"

Kelly Link is the author of the story collections Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners.

Ysabeau Wilce lives a few blocks down from the Chicago bookstore Women and Children First in a neighborhood with enough cafes to keep an army of writers supplied with coffee. There is a Prohibition-era speakeasy in her basement, and an unusually placid border collie…

Arts & Culture

Joan Acocella

As if you don’t already have enough to read! Add to the top of your growing pile Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, Joan Acocella’s thrilling new collection of essays illustrating the "ordinary, Sunday-school virtues" that, she argues in her introduction, enable artistic genius to flower. Then dip into the nicely diverse set of books that provide the occasions for these intelligent, witty and provocatively entertaining excursions into the creative enterprise. Or some of the books at any rate.

"Sometimes the essay is longer and more ambitious than the occasion is huge," Acocella admits during an early morning call to her apartment near Union Square in New York City. Thus, she devotes a mere paragraph to a recent biography of Mary Magdelene before unpacking centuries of conveniently shifting views of Jesus’ closest female companion, who receives just 14 mentions in the New Testament. And she dismisses a tawdry biography chiefly focused on choreographer Jerome Robbins’ cruelty with a fatally funny quip – "Don’t worry, ladies. The Robbins story remains to be told." – then proceeds to convey vibrantly the importance of Robbins’ contributions to American dance, despite the conflicts that gnawed at his soul.

"I had some thoughts about Robbins that I wanted to unload," Acocella says simply. She speaks with a smoky, cultured voice that bears hardly a trace of a childhood spent in the hills of Oakland, California, back when it was "a nice place where you could roller skate in the street without getting run over." She came to New York with her husband, a native, for graduate school in comparative literature and made her "swerve to dance" while writing her dissertation. "I had a husband, I had a child, we needed money," she says. So she went to work as an editor and, later, as a writer. She also began attending the New York City Ballet and "had – I mean this happens to people – I had a transforming experience. I saw the works of Balanchine when he was healthy and when the company was simply wonderful, and I really lost my heart." Acocella has been the dance critic for the New Yorker magazine for more than a decade.

"I’m actually now as much a book reviewer as dance reviewer," Acocella notes. So while she is one of the great dance journalists of the era – as essays here on Vaslav Najinsky, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Martha Graham and Suzanne Farrell amply demonstrate – she devotes most of her attention in this collection to novels and novelists, many of them little-known or under-read.

In the essay "Devil’s Work," for example, Acocella writes about the difficult life and dark, satirical novels of English writer Hilary Mantel with a passionate appreciation ("I had been cooking that essay for years," Acocella exclaims, "and I just jumped at the chance to write about her"). Her penetrating essay on the remarkable novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, who published her first novel at 60 and her last at 83, includes a hilarious account of a non-interview with the author ("I flew across an ocean, I flew to England, to get that completely uninformative interview!" Acocella complains, laughing). Her essay on Primo Levi releases that author from the grip of his most extraordinary book – Survival in Auschwitz – and makes tangible to readers just how large and courageous were Levi’s spirit and works ("Certainly, Levi is the greatest moral hero in this book," Acocella says). And in the best essay of the book, "European Dreams," Acocella essentially resurrects the career of Austro-Hungarian writer Joseph Roth and his extraordinary novel The Radetzky March.

"I do like to call attention to people who I think are not getting enough attention," Acocella says, and adds: "In the first weeks after the publication of the Roth essay [in the New Yorker in 2004], you couldn’t find a copy of The Radetzky March in any New York bookstore. I took an enormous pleasure in that because I think he’s wonderful."

Part of what makes Acocella so persuasive is her gift for narrative. The best of these essays tell stories that are rich with insight, observation and the drama of artists transcending their limitations. "I try to describe with love what I love," Acocella explains. "My secret ambition is to pierce through the veil: think about a work and then not just describe it but arrive at something, an underlying principal or an underlying emotion and then say what the work’s true value and beauty really is."

Alden Mudge, a juror for the California Book Awards, writes from Oakland.

 

As if you don't already have enough to read! Add to the top of your growing pile Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, Joan Acocella's thrilling new collection of essays illustrating the "ordinary, Sunday-school virtues" that, she argues in her introduction, enable artistic genius to…

RomanceRomantic Suspense

Jayne Ann Krentz

Prolific and beloved, Jayne Ann Krentz is a New York Times best-selling author under several pen names. As Jayne Castle, she ventures into futuristic romance, and as Amanda Quick, she writes historical romance, including her recent bestseller, Second Sight, set in the late Victorian period. In that book, she created the intriguing Arcane Society, a secret organization peopled by psychics. Now she brings the society to the present day.

In the fast-paced, sizzling White Lies, descendants of the original society members are classified according to their abilities, and an entire network has developed to nurture and protect them but even that network has its failings. Claire Lancaster is a level 10 psychic, a human lie detector considered too highly gifted to be stable. She meets Jake Salter, who is a level 10 hunter, and the sparks fly as the two try to track down a killer who wants Claire dead. Krentz answered a few questions about her new book and the romance genre from her home in Seattle.

You've made no secret of your belief in the appeal of the alpha male in romance novels, and Jake Salter is an alpha in every sense of the word. What is the appeal of such strong male characters?

In my experience, readers don't like weak or insipid characters of any gender at least, not the readers in my genre. Our heroines are always strong, determined women with an agenda. That means those of us who write romantic suspense have to provide them with heroes who are their equals men who also present a serious challenge. No challenge, no conflict, no story.

The Arcane Society is a highly developed world (readers can learn more about it on jayneannkrentz.com). Is there any historical basis for such an organization?

Organizations devoted to paranormal research were huge in the Victorian era. I took that idea and ran with it, creating a secret society of psychics that is still going strong today. This allows me to provide a lot of history and background for the Arcane Society, which, in turn, makes for an interesting world. At least, I'm interested in it.

Will there be more Arcane Society novels? Contemporary or historical?

I'm hoping to make this a long-running series, although not every book will be an Arcane Society novel. My next Amanda Quick hardcover, The River Knows, is not part of the series. However, my next Jayne Ann Krentz title will be an Arcane story.

You write in three different areas of romance contemporary romantic suspense, historical romance and futuristic rom-ance. What is the appeal of moving between genres? Do you prefer one over the others?

I don't think of them as three different genres, just three different worlds. All of my novels feature a strong romance and a suspense-based plot. Heck, it's just what I do. But the three time periods allow me to do different kinds of plots and work with different kinds of romantic relationships. There are stories that work brilliantly in an historical, for instance, that just wouldn't fly in a contemporary and vice-versa. And I find moving between my three worlds very refreshing and invigorating. When I leave one I'm more than ready to dive into the next.

Your dedication to romance novels is well known—you've even edited a book of essays about the genre. Why do readers love romances so intensely?

Three reasons. First, women love stories about relationships all kinds of relationships. The romance novel revolves around the core relationship that is the basis for all the others: the one between a man and a woman. It is endlessly fascinating. Second, the romance genre is the only genre where women are guaranteed a story that will always put the heroine at the heart of the book. It is always HER story. Third, readers know that in these books the ancient, heroic female values will be affirmed: courage, honor, determination and the healing power of love.

What one misconception about romance novels would you correct if you could?

That the genre is only one story. The truth is, there is far more experimentation and innovation going on within the romance genre than in any of the others. We've got everything from Christian inspirational to classic historical romance to vampire romance. Take the current interest in the paranormal, which is just starting to infiltrate mystery and suspense. It is coming straight out of the romance genre, where it has been going strong for the past couple of years. And look how many enormously popular female suspense writers built their audiences first within the romance genre: Sandra Brown, Iris Johansen, Janet Evanovich, etc. They have gone on to change the landscape of the suspense genre by bringing their romantic sensibilities to it.

Prolific and beloved, Jayne Ann Krentz is a New York Times best-selling author under several pen names. As Jayne Castle, she ventures into futuristic romance, and as Amanda Quick, she writes historical romance, including her recent bestseller, Second Sight, set in the late Victorian period.…

Fiction

Daniel Alarcón

Daniel Alarcón was just a toddler when his family emigrated from Lima, Peru, to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1980. It took his parents, both physicians, four years to finally decide that the growing insurrection by the communist Shining Path posed a greater threat to their family than did whatever cultural adjustments might await them in the United States. The family acclimated well, but news from back home grew increasingly disturbing, filled as it was with whispers of grim atrocities, unthinkable brutality on both sides, and the "disappeared" who were taken away, never to be seen again. One day, the war pierced the heart of the Alarcón family: Daniel’s uncle Javier, a radical leftist who opposed the Shining Path, had disappeared. The family would eventually learn that he was killed in 1989.

"For us, the war did not become a real thing, isolated as we were in the suburbs of a quiet American city, until then," Alarcón recalls. "When that happened, it shook everything in my family."

His uncle’s disappearance forms the emotional framework of Alarcón’s debut novel, Lost City Radio, a somber, moving elegy to all souls similarly erased or displaced by war, poverty or ideology.

Set in a factional, fictional Latin American country, Lost City Radio takes its title from a radio program in the capital city hosted by Norma, whose beloved husband Rey disappeared 10 years earlier during the waning days of a brutal civil war. Norma’s late-night voice soothes and comforts a post-traumatized nation as she reads the names of missing persons on the air, secretly hoping one day that she and Rey will be among the program’s tearful reunions. Norma is careful never to mention the insurgent Illegitimate Legion or the war itself, all strictly forbidden by the repressive government. But when 11-year-old Victor arrives from village 1797 (the victorious regime replaced town names with numbers) carrying a list of the "disappeared," Norma notices among the names an alias once used by Rey.

So begins an epic quest as the unlikely duo journey back to Victor’s village in search of answers to Rey’s disappearance and his possible relationship to the young boy. Through flashbacks to the civil war, we learn about "the Moon," a concentration camp where the "disappeared" suffered unspeakable horrors. Rey’s fate is slowly revealed and the list of the missing from village 1797 is eventually read as the author skillfully illuminates how the war has touched and implicated everyone from urban intellectuals to jungle dwellers.

Alarcón, who studied anthropology at Columbia, returned to his homeland in 2001 as a Fulbright Scholar in Peru, where much of the research for the novel was done.

"A radio show like that exists in Peru, and when I was living in Lima, I was a big fan of the show," he recalls from his home in Oakland, California, where he is a distinguished visiting writer at Mills College. "It’s totally apolitical and it’s saccharine, lots of string music, totally a sonic lullaby, but the actual premise is so fascinating and the reunions that were effected on the show were just harrowing. When I started doing research for the novel, I found that there are shows like this all over—in Nigeria, some parts of Russia, Pakistan."

Though he did not live in Peru during the Shining Path insurrection, which peaked in the early 1990s, the stories he collected while visiting various parts of the country a decade later are still unforgettable.

" I remember being in a restaurant in Ayacucho and the owner would come over to talk to us and end up telling us a story of an execution he’d seen," Alarcón recalls. "One family learned that I had studied anthropology and brought me a list of these people and said, You’re an anthropologist. We need someone to help us dig up a grave. I was 23 years old."

Alarcón returned to the U.S. to earn an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 2003. His heralded short-story collection, War by Candlelight, was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway prize. The war in his native Peru figures in many of his stories; they are his way of coming to terms with how it changed his life, even from a distance. " One of the things that happens when you’re an immigrant is, you create a vision of your country where all the food tastes good, everyone is friendly, the music is tender, and you forget what it is that was actually happening there and the reasons why you decided to leave," he says.

Alarcón chose to set Lost City Radio in a nonspecific Latin American nation to underscore how widespread the experience of war and terrorism has become in the region. Is there a lesson here for America?

"I think so," he says. "All our energy right now is focused on the Middle East and we’re not thinking about Latin America, and I think that’s a mistake. A lot of what’s happening in Latin America right now is related to what’s happening in the Middle East; the leftward swing, for example, is totally a rejection of American foreign policy in the other region. I would like Latin America not to get lost in the shuffle as we try to put out fires in various parts of the world, fires that in many cases we started."

With this novel, Alarcón has accomplished a sort of literary equivalent of Norma’s radio program. Although cloaked in fiction, it acknowledges the fact of that brutal civil war and the importance of speaking out about what’s happening, especially in times of fear and repression.

" For a long time, these things weren’t talked about, these stories weren’t told," he says. "The fact of the naming is therapeutic even. It’s a book about widespread amnesia, deliberate amnesia, putting everything in a box and just forgetting about it. This book is about telling the stories that people didn’t want to hear before, that were inconvenient to hear. The simple fact that they are being told represents some form of progress."

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin, Texas.

Daniel Alarcón was just a toddler when his family emigrated from Lima, Peru, to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1980. It took his parents, both physicians, four years to finally decide that the growing insurrection by the communist Shining Path posed a greater threat to their family…

Fiction

Joshua Ferris

Then We Came to the End, the debut novel by Joshua Ferris which has—deservedly—inspired so much prepublication buzz? It's the book that Ferris was sure would be locked away in a desk drawer forever. The sort of fledgling first effort a young novelist never returns to, perhaps recycles when he moves to a new apartment. Or burns.

"I thought this would be my burned-drawer book," Ferris says during a call to his home in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn. He and his wife moved to Brooklyn in 2003, after she had finished law school and he had completed his M.F.A. at the University of California at Irvine. She had a clerkship with a judge in Manhattan. He had won the Glenn Schaeffer Prize, which gives a substantial monetary grant to an emerging writer, allowing him to continue work on the book for a year or so without worrying about income. But Ferris soon "found the book wanting," put it in a drawer and started something new. "Then about a year later I had a real revelation about why it was that I had failed at it. And I got the first two sentences in my head."

The original version had been Ferris' "angry novel about work," based on his experiences working in an advertising agency in Chicago after earning his B.A. at the University of Iowa. "I never did advertising that was particularly sexy. I was more a news-letter and bill-insert man," Ferris says wryly. He apparently compensated for the routine nature of his work by conceiving a book that had a "far more fantastical and ambitious and unmanageable storyline."

Then We Came to the End is a much funnier, truer and wiser book "about work and the people who do the work" than its avatar. It tells the story of how a collection of go-getters, slackers, know-it-alls, petty tyrants, individualists and water-cooler gossips typical in offices throughout the land behave and misbehave when facing layoffs during an economic downturn. One of the many large pleasures of this novel is to see this collection of office archetypes gradually emerge as believable, often captivating, individual characters.

"With sufficient distance from work, I realized what I missed—the community that work provides, the feeling of identification, people stopping by your desk and asking you to go to lunch," Ferris says, explaining his change of disposition. He also realized "that along with those communal aspects, work provides a paycheck, puts the kids through college and takes care of the mortgage. With all of those things under threat, I could allow my characters to act in ways that were both more dire and also more reflective of the real value of work, of the office itself, and of the people we work with."

The most daring aspect of Then We Came to the End is that Ferris tells his tale from the first person plural point of view. This choral voice is technically difficult. But the effect here is both exhilarating and thought-provoking.

"I strongly believe there is a sort of subterranean, elusive voice that burbles up from any group," Ferris, who has an undergraduate degree in philosophy, says. "Even in a group of two you can tap into a groupthink mentality that is given voice by members of the group. You see this in religion, in politics and certainly in advertising, where there is always an implied if not explicit 'we' that represents the company's message to you the consumer. If you spend enough time within a group this voice comes through in a weird canine frequency. Given that the book is set in advertising, it was sort of a no-brainer that that was how this book had to be told. And the group dynamic versus the individual, the group's assumptions versus the individual's assertions was always really important to me as I was thinking about the work dynamic."

Ferris says that once he had the voice and resumed working on the novel, it took him only about 14 weeks to complete it, even though 95 percent of the writing was new. He and his wife and their two cats have recently moved into a new, more spacious apartment not far from the one in which he wrote Then We Came to the End. The new apartment is cold on the day we speak; Ferris says he is "bundled in about 15 layers." In the old, presumably warmer, apartment Ferris wrote in a nook in the middle of a railroad flat. "My poor, long-suffering wife had to crawl over the piles of the book if she wanted to go to the bedroom. If she wanted to go to the bathroom or the kitchen, she had to move through me," Ferris says.

The piles of the book were the large sheets of graph paper he composes on. "When I know what I'm going to write about, I tend to overwrite, be too explanatory, leave no room for the reader's imagination to meet me halfway. But when I write something I didn't anticipate that takes me in a direction I didn't know I was going in and follow it to its logical conclusion, I feel that's a keeper."

"These long broad sheets physically allow me to move around. If something isn't improvisational enough I'll switch to another quadrant of the pad." Ferris later transcribes and revises what he's written onto his computer.

During the 14-week flurry that produced Then We Came to the End, Ferris worked 14 to 16 hours a day, every day. " It was the best and worst experience ever," Ferris says. "For the first two or three weeks I knew I could write the book but I didn't have anything substantial down on paper. I didn't want to go out and run in case I got hit by a car. I stayed inside and ordered from Brooklyn restaurants, which was probably actually more risky for my heart."

Now at work on a new book, Ferris continues to devote long hours to writing. "I have always said that I have absolutely no talent, but a tremendous amount of discipline," he says.

Readers of Ferris' marvelous debut novel won't believe that "no talent" bit. Not one whit.

 

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland.

Then We Came to the End, the debut novel by Joshua Ferris which has—deservedly—inspired so much prepublication buzz? It's the book that Ferris was sure would be locked away in a desk drawer forever. The sort of fledgling first effort a young novelist never returns…

Children's & YA

Cynthia Kadohata

Cynthia Kadohata's last two books 2005 Newbery Medal-winner Kira-Kira and Weedflower explore the experiences of Japanese families trying to build happy lives in America. The stories' protagonists are observant young girls who, even as they play children's games and wonder at the behavior of the adults around them, are able to discern the joy and beauty found in strong family bonds.

Kadohata's new book for young readers, Cracker! The Best Dog in Vietnam, is as moving, humorous and interesting as her previous young adult novels. But this time around, the observant, clever narrator is a bit different: It's a dog. A dog named Cracker, to be precise—a female German shepherd sent to Vietnam to serve as a scout dog during the war. The author says she's long been trying to sell a dog book to her editor, Caitlyn Dlouhy.

"I sent her a dog-from-another- planet idea. I spent all this time on it, but it didn't thrill her. So I kept looking for dog topics. When I sent her the idea for Cracker! she bought the book on the basis of just that e-mail," Kadohata explains from her California home, with her baby son, Sam, in her lap and her other baby her Doberman, Shika Kojika lying by her side.

A lifelong love for and fascination with dogs fed the author's desire to write a dog-centric book. In fact, she laughingly says, "dog-related childhood drama may well have been a contributing factor: When my sister and I were young, my mother would let us get a dog. We'd fall madly in love with it, and she'd decide we weren't taking good enough care of it and get rid of it. This happened five times, and I'd be just hysterical every time the dog was gone. In fact," she adds, "when my ex-husband and I first got a dog, he said it was like a nuclear explosion all that stuff from childhood coming back." Today, the author has in Shika Kojika a devoted companion ("my dog is always with me," she says) and in Cracker! a unique, compelling story that will captivate and educate readers.

The background of the story thousands of dogs were sent to Vietnam during the war to serve as scouts (German shepherds) and trackers (Labrador retrievers) may well be unfamiliar to many readers. But the real-life details about the dogs, gleaned from the personal stories Kadohata heard from Vietnam veterans, quickly bring the past to life.

"The dog handlers I spoke with were really enthusiastic about the book for that very reason that people don't know this went on—and very passionate about their dogs," Kadohata says. In fact, many of the men have difficulty talking about their dogs even today because, of the 5,000 dogs that went to Vietnam, none returned. And why didn't thousands of hard-working dogs make it back to America? "Because the dogs were considered military equipment," the author says, "and they were put down. Some of the handlers are still angry because they thought it was unnecessary a lot of them would have been willing to pay to transport their dogs home."

Cracker! not only pays tribute to the dogs who worked to serve their country, but to the owners who shared their pets and the trainers who became devoted, dedicated partners to the animals. The characters are complex and fully realized, making for an engrossing reading experience. Cracker! often is suspenseful, too; there are several scenes that can only be described as action sequences (and yes, nail-biting will likely ensue).

Initially, though, the human characters in the novel weren't quite ready for prime time: "When I handed in the first draft, my editor said the dog character was more fully developed than the human characters!" Kadohata recalls.

It's just that sort of from-the-hip feedback that the author welcomes from her editor, Dlouhy, who she says is one of her closest friends and the person who first suggested she write a children's book. (Previously, Kadohata published two adult novels.) "It's a good partnership," she says, "and she always just tells me, 'If you'd done what I told you in the first place. . . .'" Friendship is also at the heart of Kadohata's novel. The friendship between the German shepherd and her owner, 11-year-old Willie, and the bond forged between the dog and her trainer, 17-year-old Rick, are powerful examples of the ways in which twosomes can be strong and productive, loving and even life-saving. It's a heartening message, especially in our uncertain times, and it offers yet another way we can learn from our country's wartime past.

Linda M. Castellitto writes from North Carolina.

Cynthia Kadohata's last two books 2005 Newbery Medal-winner Kira-Kira and Weedflower explore the experiences of Japanese families trying to build happy lives in America. The stories' protagonists are observant young girls who, even as they play children's games and wonder at the behavior of the…

Fiction

Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was published in 1952 to great acclaim, and went on to win the National Book Award in 1953. The novel was taught in high schools and colleges across the country, but Ellison lived another 42 years without publishing another book.

Through the years, there were rumors of a second novel—in 1967, Ellison claimed he lost bits of the manuscript in a house fire. When he died, Ellison left behind boxes and boxes of chapters and notes that were handwritten, printed from a typewriter or saved on floppy discs. But there was no complete second novel.

In 1999, Ellison’s literary executor John F. Callahan, a professor at Lewis & Clark College, constructed Juneteenth from some of Ellison's notes—but this was a mere fragment of the author's plans for the second novel. The New York Times called Juneteenth “disappointingly provisional and incomplete,” although it was a bestseller.

On Jan. 26, 2010, after years of Callahan’s literary detective work along with student assistant-turned-collaborator Adam Bradley, the complete second novel was published. Callahan and Bradley share an editing credit on the 1,136-page text.

Titled Three Days Before the Shooting. . ., the novel tells the story of Alonzo Hickman and Adam Sunraider, a black jazzman-turned-preacher and a racist “white” New England Senator. Hickman raised Sunraider, a child of indeterminate race. The novel follows his quest to solve the mystery of Sunraider’s disappearance and reemergence as a race-baiter.

In an e-mail Q&A with BookPage, the editors discuss Ellison’s shift in writing style, the book’s main characters and what comes next after devoting so many years to a single project.

Why did you choose Three Days Before the Shooting for the book title?
“Three Days Before the Shooting” are the first words of Ellison’s prologue to Book I of the novel, and the opening words of “And Hickman Arrives,” the first excerpt he published from the second novel, back in 1960 in Saul Bellow’s [magazine] Noble Savage. It’s an arresting title that refers to the novel’s climactic event—the assassination of Senator Adam Sunraider, aka Bliss, the little boy of “indeterminate race” raised black by Reverend Hickman until he runs from this cherishing black world and uses racism to make his way as a white man in America.

Decades later as Ellison reworked and expanded the novel’s opening scene as the opening of the “Hickman in Washington, D.C.” narrative, he changed the phrase to “Two days before the shooting”: at that point the central action was going to happen over one fewer day. Ellison left no specific title for the second novel.

What is the central message in Three Days Before the Shooting?
The book is a novel—a story—I’m not sure there is a “central message.” That said, the thematic words that resonate most powerfully are those Ralph wrote to his old teacher at Tuskegee, Morteza Sprague ([the 1964 essay collection] “Shadow and Act” is dedicated to Sprague), in a letter written right after Ellison got word of the Brown v. Board decision in May 1954: “Now I’m writing about the evasion of identity which is another characteristically American problem which must be about to change.” From that national fulcrum Ellison imbues his second novel with the responsibilities of kinship, private (the offices of father and son, for example) and public (the offices of jazzman, preacher and senator). His book also explores what Ellison elsewhere called “our orphan’s loneliness”—another mark, for Ellison, his characters and story, of the human condition in America.

How would you characterize Alonzo Hickman and Adam Sunraider?
Alonzo Zuber Hickman is meant to be a vernacular encyclopedic figure. After he commits to raising the orphaned baby boy Bliss, he feels the Word surging within him and takes up preaching. Hickman is a man of many parts, a man of terrific vitality, at once forceful and contemplative, funny, stern and tender, a man for whom love is the test and the task.

Adam Sunraider typifies that “orphan’s loneliness” Ellison identified with American identity. Only on his dying bed does Bliss/Sunraider, hurt and vulnerable, articulate the wish that he could have “accepted you [Hickman] as the dark daddy of flesh and Word.” Together, Bliss/Sunraider and Hickman are Ellison’s 20th-century version of Twain’s Huck and Jim.

Do you believe that Ellison’s writing style was affected by his decision to compose on a computer?
The computer’s impact on Ellison’s composition of his second novel is at once palpable and elusive. It allowed him to revise incessantly, thus accentuating his lifelong urge toward perfection and fluidity. Ellison’s manuscripts, printouts and variants of the second novel reflect many styles, from stripped-down declarative American prose to stream of consciousness to the rollicking Southwestern tall tale and the African-American toasts, tales and dozens, and, finally, more and more prominent in his last years, an essayistic, expository bent.

To what extent the computer is an influence, to what extent the passage of four decades in Ellison’s life and mind, to what extent the changes in American life and the American scene and his changing conception of his story drive his style is an open question. Calculating the extent to which each of these factors influenced and altered his style is a finely calibrated process. For even as the narratives composed on the computer seem to become more and more expository in style, there’ll come an antiphonal burst from deep inside Hickman revealing his vocations as jazz trumpeter, preacher and storyteller extraordinaire.

If readers are discouraged by the text’s 1000+ page length, how would you encourage them to pick it up?
Maybe the book’s very length is a comfort, and eases the pressure for the reader. You can’t read or finish such an immense volume in a night or a few days. It’s a book one picks up and puts down sustained by knowing that Ellison worked on and with it for some 40 years. It’s meant to be savored, perhaps like intense conversations with close friends who live far away.

You have been working on this project for more than 10 years. What’s next?
Callahan: I am writing a novel called The Learning Room, whose protagonist (one of them) is Fergus, a five-year-old autistic boy who becomes witness to terrible things and somehow offers wordless comfort to someone dear. . . I’ll say no more until I finish the book except that the novel is set on Shelter Island and its narrator is Gabe Bontempo who performed the same office in my first novel, A Man You Could Love” (2007, 2008). As Ellison’s literary executor, I find there is always more to do. For now I’ll take a deep breath, finish my own novel then turn again to what remains to be done, perhaps an edition of his letters, and another of several extended fragments left in his papers.

Bradley: Later this spring, I’ll publish a book entitled Ralph Ellison in Progress (Yale University Press, May 2010), a critical study that looks at Three Days Before the Shooting. . . alongside Invisible Man, and both in the sweep of Ellison’s life and career. The work John and I have been doing with the second novel inspired me to write the book. I had so many things to say about Ellison and Three Days that it took another book for me to do it. Right now I’m working on the first anthology of rap lyrics, which sounds pretty far removed from Ellison until you consider how much he had to say about black music and folk culture. Editing the anthology, I find myself going back to Ellison’s essays and fiction time and again. I’m sure Ellison will never be far removed from the work I do in the years to come. I owe a great debt to his example.

RELATED CONTENT

Read a review of Juneteenth.

 

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was published in 1952 to great acclaim, and went on to win the National Book Award in 1953. The novel was taught in high schools and colleges across the country, but Ellison lived another 42 years without publishing another book.

Through the years,…

Memoir

Mark Doty

Life is ultimately about death, and nowhere is the reminder more poignant than in the brief and bittersweet relationship with a companion animal. Intense gratitude and joy mingled with sadness is a sort of concrete upon which adult life is built, writes Mark Doty, and this bedrock underlies the complex relationships with two special dogs captured in his memoir, Dog Years.

Good writing about animals is almost always about something else, says Doty, an award-winning poet and writer who has been honored with the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction, the T.S. Eliot Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The dogs as they always are are a vehicle to think about other things. Those things include an intimate chunk of Doty's life nursing his partner Wally who was dying of AIDS; writing; teaching college students; fixing up their 200-year-old house in Provincetown on Cape Cod; and caring for their dog, a shaggy black Lab-Newfie mix named Arden, an animal utterly devoted to the sick man.

When Wally requests a little lap dog to comfort him (Arden has gained so much weight after being fed the bacon meant to tempt the patient that he can't jump on the bed), Doty comes back with shelter dog Beau, a skinny, rambunctious Saluki-golden retriever mix who brings a much-needed chaotic, bounding energy to their house.

If you set out to write a full-length memoir about your pets, you're asking for trouble, Doty admits with a laugh. Who's not going to roll their eyes? People lack distance from their pets, just like they do from their children or their dreams. I thought from the beginning that I was doing something unlikely with this book. Determined to make this compelling to the reader, even though it shouldn't be, Doty is careful with telling moments and scenes that flesh out the laconic and contemplative Arden and the young whirlwind Beau, companions on the trajectory of his life. Elegiac and funny chapters are trailed by brief, delicate entr'actes, with tiny observations, like the thump of an arthritic dog's tail, and huge gaping gashes in life, like the death of a loved one, given equal weight and clarity.

Animals' lack of language feels like an invitation to the writer, Doty says. I wanted to talk about the role they had played in my adventures, but I also wanted them to stand on their own four feet, as distinct characters. He catalogs their sweet routines (one involves Arden being stretched by the legs between the two men as he growls appreciatively), their winsome quirks (Beau's obsession with the minute crumbs and leftovers tossed from seafood shacks and Dumpsters along the sea) and their hair-raising escapades (Arden is hit by a car after chasing a rabbit from a hedge, but found a bit dazed the following day, thanks to their tight-knit community). They're animals, that's part of what makes their company so pleasurable, Doty notes. They're not human beings! We can know that about them, without forgetting that they also have real emotional lives, and that they are complicated beings that we get to know at least to some degree. Animal company invites us to language, Doty said, because there they are, brimming with feeling and clearly thinking, but not having any words at all. There's a part of me that's a little jealous of that. How wonderful to be immersed in experience and not caught up in the world of words. But the bright always has a shadow, and so come the inevitable leave-takings: first Wally, then Beau as a young dog from kidney disease, and then most heartbreakingly, the valiant Arden. Cloaked in nearly unthinkable abundance and unutterable sorrow, the book is a deadened twinkling landscape of the human heart, with snow-covered undulating dunes and twisting roads, but also shining bright spots: Doty falls in love again and gains another companion who shares his love of dogs, and the emotional landscape, always slanted downhill, remains buoyant and oddly hopeful.

Cute dog stories and cute dog pictures don't really satisfy me, Doty said. So often they don't quite get it right. They make it cute instead of true. Dog Years points out what is true and dignified and magical about life with animals; rather than seeking out the exotic or new, we want to see the ordinary more clearly, Doty said, and there is no better way than through our dogs.

Somehow, memory seems too slight a word, too evanescent, Doty writes about taking a walk after the death of Beau. This is almost a physical sensation, the sound of those paws, and it comes allied to the color and heat of him, the smell of warm fur, the kinetic life of being hardly ever still: what lives in me.

Life is ultimately about death, and nowhere is the reminder more poignant than in the brief and bittersweet relationship with a companion animal. Intense gratitude and joy mingled with sadness is a sort of concrete upon which adult life is built, writes Mark Doty, and…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

T. Jefferson Parker

The town of Fallbrook is tucked into the fertile rolling hills north of San Diego, where temperate climate and rich soil combine to form the perfect growing medium for the region’s avocado, citrus and commercial nursery industries. Incongruously, the roar of Army artillery practice from nearby Camp Pendleton routinely punctuates the peacefulness of this otherwise pastoral setting.

Such unlikely contrasts appeal to T. Jefferson Parker, the town’s resident author, whose 14 thrillers have so rarely left the state that one wonders if they’ve been ordered not to by some suspicious investigating officer. The truth is, Jeff Parker (the "T" is silent) is one native Angeleno who finds all the story ideas he can handle in his own hometown.

Witness his latest thriller, Storm Runners, at once a revenge plot, redemption tale and love story that features the very sort of outrageous contrasts that tempt and tease readers before ultimately reeling them in.

Here’s the back story: Matt Stromsoe and Mike Tavarez are buddies at Santa Ana High, the former a drum major, the latter a marching band member. They part ways at graduation—Stromsoe becomes a San Diego sheriff’s deputy, Tavarez heads east to Harvard, then becomes a chieftain in the Mexican mafia. When Stromsoe directs a manhunt that captures Tavarez but accidentally kills his girlfriend, the kingpin retaliates with a car bomb meant for Matt that instead kills his wife and son. Severely disabled in the blast, Matt descends into self-pity and drink.

Two years later, a buddy pulls Matt back from the brink and offers him a job with his private security firm. Matt’s first assignment: protect Frankie Hatfield, a television meteorologist who is being stalked by a crazed fan. The closer Matt grows to Frankie, the more he suspects that her off-hours tinkering with a formula her eccentric ancestor Charles Hatfield used to make rain may be putting her life in danger.

Farfetched? Actually, Storm Runners is based on true events. As they say: only in California.

"Charles Hatfield is a real guy. Isn’t that amazing?" Parker says. "I’ve known about him for a while. The next village over, Bonsall, is where Hatfield had his secret lab. It’s real easy for me to sit here from a few miles away and go, wow, what if it’s still there, buried down in some old oak trees and grown over with wild cucumber?"

Could the garage scientist actually make it rain?

"Yeah! He was great at it!" Parker says. " The story in the book where he floods San Diego and then has to flee town because they want to hang him instead of pay him, that’s a true story right out of the history books. Of course, for every stupendous rainmaking success that Charles had, he would have a resounding failure also, so the rational scientific community never considered him as anything more than fraudulently lucky. But if you look at his successes, they really were spectacular."

OK, perhaps we’ll accept a beautiful modern-day rainmaker. But a Harvard-educated drug lord?

"The Harvard guy is real, too," Parker chuckles. "Nobody would believe that; I wouldn’t even write that character if, in fact, there hadn’t been a guy doing that right around the corner from where I grew up. He went to Harvard and robbed liquor stores on weekends. Sometimes when you get a little nugget of history or fact underneath you, you feel emboldened to exaggerate it or make it bigger."

Parker often sprinkles deft, defining touches throughout his breakneck tales that keep the characters grounded. In Storm Runners, it’s the Painted Lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui), one of which makes a lovely touchdown on a dead man’s shoe.

"Those are a real phenomenon here, and they’re spectacular and beautiful. It just seemed like a natural thing for the story because I wanted to portray Stromsoe’s re-entry into the world as a return to Eden, almost an idyllic place where it’s fragrant and peaceful. It’s a real starting-over story, and putting in butterflies just seemed a nice touch."

Growing up in suburban Tustin, Parker always had a taste for truths that were stranger than fiction, and nurtured it, after graduating in English from the University of California-Irvine, by signing on as a newspaper reporter in Orange County.

" I was a boyhood admirer of the Guinness Book of World Records, those weird things like the bearded woman and the fattest man," he admits. "I love those obscure facts that are so outlandish you really can’t believe them, but you have to."

After immersing himself in classic L.A. noir fiction, from Raymond Chandler to James Ellroy, Parker set out to reinvent the genre from the sunny, suburban perspective of the O.C. The result was his 1985 debut hit, Laguna Heat.

" I very purposefully tried to avoid all things that had gone before," he says. "It wasn’t a dark, moody, drinking L.A. noir story at all; it was set in Laguna Beach, for crying out loud, with eucalyptus trees and paintings and artists and beautiful waves. Even at that age, I knew you couldn’t put the gumshoe in the phone booth; it just doesn’t work anymore."

Along with a handful of West Coast contemporaries, including Don Winslow and Kem Nunn, Parker continues to refine and redefine what L.A. crime fiction can be.

"I like and respect the mystery genre very much, but I think sometimes you can find yourself handcuffed by convention a little bit if you don’t try to stretch those boundaries, and sometimes break them," he says.

"My last book, The Fallen, is completely noir-free; it’s bright and optimistic and the main character has not an ounce of darkness in him. And I think that’s a legitimate way to look at the world and a legitimate way to write a novel. If at some point during the writing of the book it becomes clear to me that I’m going to have to ignore certain conventions, I’m going to do it, because the book is more important than the genre."

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin, Texas.

 

The town of Fallbrook is tucked into the fertile rolling hills north of San Diego, where temperate climate and rich soil combine to form the perfect growing medium for the region's avocado, citrus and commercial nursery industries. Incongruously, the roar of Army artillery practice…

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