Author interviews archive

Lisa Lutz

Interview by Iris Blasi

Lisa Lutz never anticipated writing a book. An aspiring screenwriter, she began the script for a mob farce in 1991 at age 21, and quit her day job the moment Hollywood producers came calling. But it was more than a decade and 25 revisions later that the film, Plan B, starring Diane Keaton, Paul Sorvino and Natasha Lyonne, was actually made. Following a West Coast premiere set for September 11, 2001, the movie had a week-long limited release after which with the exception of a few small film festivals it was rarely shown in the United States.

But that's OK, because Lutz herself gives two thumbs down to the final product. "I don't recommend anyone watching the version that is out right now," she says. "I enjoyed to an extent how funny and silly it was. But [for this] to be my life's work? That felt so insane." Her dream of writing a Hollywood movie had been realized, but Lutz was smarting from her bumpy road to the big screen. "Nothing went well," she says of the process. "We started to call the production 'the curse of Plan B.' " Somewhere around rewrite number six, the producers decided to cut a secondary character on which a major plot point hung, and Lutz's story caved in on itself. The finale of the writing process was a fax from the producers demanding that a lead character die by being eaten by an alligator. Lutz made the change, but was distraught that the story was no longer hers. "It's really hard to have something you worked that hard on be massacred," she says.

Soured on Tinseltown, Lutz vowed never to write a script again, instead holing up in a relative's 200-year-old house in upstate New York in the dead of winter in 2004. Six months later, she emerged from hibernation with a first draft of what was to become her first novel.

"I think I wrote a better novel than I ever wrote a screenplay," she says. The first in a planned series, The Spellman Files tells the story of Isabelle Spellman, a tough-talking 28-year-old (described by another character as "Dirty Harry meets Nancy Drew") who works for her eccentric family's P.I. business. Investigating others is their formal objective, but the family including alcoholic gambler Uncle Ray and Izzy's 14-year-old sister Rae (who is known to snap incriminating photos of family members to use as blackmail) regularly probe each other's lives as well. This comes to a head when Izzy starts dating nice-guy dentist Daniel and can't go on a date without turning around to find her mother hot on her tail.

"The truth was, I never doubted for a moment that my parents loved me," Izzy says of this parental over-involvement. "But love in my family has a bite to it and sometimes you get tired of icing all those tooth marks." To save her sanity, Izzy wants out of the P.I. dynasty. Her parents agree to let her go, as long as she completes a final assignment. As Izzy tries to solve the near-impossible 12-year-old missing persons case, Rae suddenly disappears, leading Izzy to reevaluate her priorities and put her skills to the ultimate test: finding her little sister.

Lutz didn't have to look far for research. While writing Plan B, she did a two-year stint working for a private investigator, and the tricks of the trade she picked up (such as smashing the taillights of car you're following to make it easier to spot a tactic Izzy employs on a regular basis) populate the novel. Though these details are drawn from real life, Lutz is adamant that her family is nothing like the meddlesome Spellmans. And as for Izzy? "Izzy has my sense of humor, because I don't think I could write in a totally different sense of humor," Lutz says. "But I'm no taillight-smashing vandal."

The Spellman Files has been optioned by Paramount, but Lutz swears she won't play a major role in the film's production. Instead, she's wrapping up the Spellman sequel, planning her next novel, thinking about writing a play and reflecting on the lessons she learned from her ill-fated Hollywood foray.

"People think you can get what you want if you just keep trying. But the moment I tried something different and approached it from a different way, I got what I wanted," she says of her open-mindedness about writing form.

Then she pauses for a moment. "I think it's luck, too," she says. "I do think I got very lucky this time around."

Fiction

Dorothea Benton Frank

Interview by Lynn Hamilton

When Dorothea Benton Frank's mother died, her family's old beach house on Sullivan's Island went up for sale. Frank wanted to buy it. Well, she wanted her husband to buy it, and when he wouldn't, she pitched a little temper tantrum about the size of Russia, the author says.

So she told him she was going to write a bestseller, sell a million copies and buy back her mother's house. She started writing about her childhood on Sullivan's Island, a then sparsely developed barrier island off the coast of South Carolina. Out of that came her first book, Sullivan's Island: A Low Country Tale. Writing that book helped Frank deal with the death of her mother and the loss of her childhood space.

It was also a bet she placed on herself and won. Sullivan's Island did sell a million copies. Frank chased that success with six more books. Her work continues to explore the same themes of childhood memories, loss and, above all, the beautiful islands of South Carolina, that made her first novel successful. Now Frank has drawn on her experience of reinventing herself in her 40s to bring her growing readership The Land of Mango Sunsets.

The novel features Miriam Swanson, a late-40s desperado who is barely clinging to a joyless New York high society lifestyle. Married at 18, Miriam now finds herself bitter and demoralized by a messy divorce. She fought gracelessly against the rift and drove a wedge between herself and her beloved sons, her future daughter-in-law and her grandchildren. With no college degree and no career to buffer the blow, Miriam's days stretch out in a series of desperate, panic-ridden moments. Miriam strives valiantly against this fate, hoping to balance the scales through volunteer work at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which throws her among elite society's grandest dames. In one of the novel's most horrific and hilarious moments, Miriam stumbles, falls and spills an urn full of coffee on hundreds of laboriously handwritten invitations.

But Frank doesn't paint Miriam in purely dark or tragic strokes. Instead, her story is infused with funk and humor. She takes refuge in her pet parrot Harry who periodically lambastes Miriam's ex with the chant Charles is a horse's ass. Miriam also takes comfort in a platonic friendship with her tenant Kevin Dolan, who is by all measures a saint, a devoted friend and an exceptional drinking buddy. Miriam and Kevin jump headfirst into the lives of Miriam's second tenant, a naive young woman named Liz, whose dalliance with a married man turns into a dangerous liaison without warning.

Miriam, Kevin and Liz form what Frank calls a chosen family, something she thinks is becoming more typical as people move further away from their families and their roots. "A lot of people I know don't have a stitch of family around them, don't have a relative within 500 miles. Those people you run around with become your chosen family," Frank says.

Miriam's life of quiet stagnation comes quickly to an end after her disaster at the Met. That disgrace is the catalyst for sweeping life change, and it begins with a return to Sullivan's Island, which is as much Miriam's childhood home as it is Frank's. Will Miriam reinvent herself as successfully as her author did? "You'll have to read The Land of Mango Sunsets to find out."

We're not spoiling your surprise. But we will say that Frank admits she drew on her own ability to make big changes late in the game. She had a lucrative career importing garments from Korea and Hong Kong. Then, after her mother's death, she taught herself to write novels and succeeded at that, too. In her latest novel, Frank draws on her extensive knowledge of the garment industry as inspiration for the career of Kevin, a window display designer for a high-end New York department store.

And Frank also draws on her own extensive experience as a volunteer, especially at New Jersey's Montclair Art Museum, where she saw a coffee accident similar to Miriam's. "In the highly strung world of society volunteering, such an incident brands its victim," Frank says. "You become the one who blew the invitations. That kind of thing just follows you around until you're dead."

But it would be a mistake to see Miriam as a thinly veiled version of her author. The similarities are there, but Frank describes Miriam as a citizen of her own planet, both self-absorbed and mired in outdated traditions. "She is the last vestige of small-town America when women were expected to be very prim," Frank says, adding, "She hangs on to it a little too long.

It's fine to practice the good, old-fashioned Southern virtues that define a lady," Frank says, "but what happens when the world of the Southern belle falls to pieces?"

She's seen it happen to people she knows. "They're so stunned. What they were told to do by their parents didn't work because the world changed when no one was looking," she says.

For her extremely realistic portrait of Miriam as a desperate, lonely and defeated divorcee, Frank drew mostly on the experiences of people she knows who have had to live through similar events. Frank's own first marriage was so short, she describes it as a drive-through or maybe a drive-by.

There's no question that Frank's books have struck a chord with a lot of readers. She thinks it's because she writes about things that are on her mind as she deals with the death of loved ones, raising teenagers and growing old. "I'm talking to people my age about things I'm thinking about," she says.

Her audience is "a lot of very old ladies, bless them every one, and [baby] boomers." But sometimes a teenager will turn up in her fan club. It might be because the girl's mother gave her one of Frank's books, hoping it would help the reader understand her mom.

Frank's avid readers can count on seeing the South Carolina coast form the backdrop of books to come. Frank's love affair with Sullivan's Island and the area around Charleston doesn't look like it's going anywhere. She finally bought that house on Sullivan's Island, though not the house she grew up in. At the end of the day, though, that's okay with Frank. The island draws her home, and she realizes now that her childhood home may be redolent of too much sadness.

"I grew up in a Southern gothic novel, by the way," she explains. But that's not the kind of thing Frank writes. Her own books are breezier, funnier and more optimistic than that. On her website, Frank describes her novels as "good beach reads for people who want something to think about while they're soaking up the sun: Yes, I write to entertain but I also write to understand this complicated world and want to take you with me on the journey."

Lynn Hamilton is editor of the Tybee News in the coastal community of Tybee Island, Georgia.

Children's & YA

Brian Selznick

Interview by Heidi Henneman

2008 Caldecott Medal Winner

Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret is not your everyday children's novel. Its storyline is drawn from incredible, real, almost unbelievable events; its characters are in-depth, intricate sketches of compelling real-life and imagined personas. Most extraordinary, though, is its format: a mixture of the traditionally written novel, the graphic novel, the picture book and the film storyboard, yielding a unique format that draws the reader into an almost movie-like experience. It is, in short, a work of inspired genius, melding the literary and visual worlds into one beautifully drawn and thrilling tale.

The storyline follows a young Parisian orphan, Hugo Cabret, in the early 20th century as he rescues and rebuilds an automaton, an early robot-like machine, while struggling to stay alive, protect his treasure—his only remaining link to his dead father—and avoid being caught by the police. In the process, young Hugo uncovers the identity, endures the wrath and captures the heart of a crotchety old man who turns out to be a renowned magician and filmmaker—and the very person who created the automaton Hugo is trying so desperately to rebuild. The result is a story of love and loss, discovery and magic.

Selznick is not a newcomer to the children's book world, having illustrated many acclaimed books, including The Frindle, Amelia and Eleanor Go for a Ride, Riding Freedom and The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, for which he won a Caldecott Honor. He has also written one of his own, The Houdini Box, winner of the Texas Bluebonnet Award and the Rhode Island Children's Book Award. "From an early age, I always liked doing things with art," Selznick recalls. "I would sketch on my notebooks in high school, and my advisors kept telling me that I should do illustrations for children's books." But Selznick didn't want to pursue the field. "I rebelled against it for a long time," admits the New Jersey native, who purposely avoided classes on the genre while attending the Rhode Island School of Design, and at one point, steered clear of a visiting Maurice Sendak. Instead, he focused his efforts on theater, but when his dreams of graduate school in that area fell through, Selznick had a change of heart: "I realized maybe everyone had been right about me after all—maybe I should become an illustrator."

With his new ambition to create children's books, but with no practical knowledge of the genre, Selznick used the only resource available to him—his personality. "I charmed my way into working at Eeyore's Books for Children," the author says, referring to New York City's legendary children's bookstore. There, Selznick was taken under the wing of Steve Geck, the store's manager at the time (now an editor at Greenwillow Books), who taught him everything he knew about children's books. "That's really where I first saw the potential for what a book could be," Selznick says. It is also where he was introduced to his first editor, Laura Geringer, who later hired him to illustrate Doll Face Has a Party, the first of many books he would illustrate before trying his hand at writing.

>For Hugo Cabret, Selznick initially set out to write a "regular" novel with perhaps one drawing per chapter, but that concept was soon dismissed. "I wanted to do something unusual with the pictures," he says, "but I didn't know what." While researching the book, the author came across the works of René Clair, an early French cinematographer who incorporated bursts of sounds as narrative elements in his silent films. Selznick became inspired to incorporate pictures in much the same way: bursts of images throughout the text that provide a narrative themselves, not just an illustration of the words. "The goal is that you won't remember what was text and what was imagery," the author says. To this end, Selznick opens the book with a 26-page sequence of illustrations that grabs our attention and "teaches" us how to read the book.

The idea for the book itself was also inspired by a French filmmaker (and magician), George Méliès, who appears as a main character in the story. "It started when I first saw A Trip to the Moon [Méliès' most famous film]," Selznick recalls. "I remember being struck by the film and how beautiful and odd it was." After seeing it, he would periodically come across an article about the filmmaker and file it away in his head. "For about 10 years, I kept learning all these little things about Méliès," Selznick says. He learned that Méliès developed and built his own equipment; that during World War I, his films were melted down by the French army to make shoe soles, and forever after, he hated the sound of tapping heels on hard floors; and that after being driven out of the film business, Méliès ran a toy shop in the Montparnasse train station. Selznick later incorporated all these elements into his book.

Then two years ago, Selznick stumbled upon a review of the book Edison's Eve by Gaby Wood, about the history of automata, and found out it contained an entire chapter about Méliès and his work on the lifelike machines. "His collection of automata had been housed in a museum in Paris, but had all been thrown away," Selznick says, "and as soon as I read it, I had a very clear image of a boy finding these automata in the garbage." Thus our young Hugo Cabret was invented.

It took Selznick two years to complete the book. "You can't rush a story," he says. "It is so important to take the time it needs." These days, the author, who splits his time between Brooklyn and San Diego, is in the midst of a multi-city tour promoting the launch of Hugo. He is also working on the audio version of the book, taking on new illustrating projects and starting to do research for his next writing project. After all, Selznick is not your ordinary author—and if Hugo is any indication—his next book won't be ordinary either.

Director of Creative Services for MAC Cosmetics, Heidi Henneman is currently working on a picture book for all ages.

2008 Caldecott Medal Winner

Self-Help Lifestyles

Sara Davidson

Interview by Deanna Larson

A flower child who attended the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s, Sara Davidson epitomized her trailblazing generation. After studying at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, she became a national correspondent for the Boston Globe, covering the election campaigns of Bobby Kennedy and Richard Nixon, as well as Woodstock. She helped establish the new journalism movement with articles for Harper's, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly and Rolling Stone, then became the literary voice of the baby boomer generation with her 1977 book Loose Change: Three Women of the Sixties. Davidson then alternated between writing books (including the best-selling novel Cowboy) and producing and writing for television, including her Golden-Globe-nominated tenure as writer/producer of "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman."

Clearly, Davidson wouldn't accept a conventional retirement of baking bread and knitting baby blankets in a McMansion by the links. But after her children left for college, her lover abandoned her, and Hollywood suddenly stopped knocking on her door, Davidson was stripped of every meaningful role she had known almost overnight. What was she supposed to do with the next 30 years? It is so hard to make a dent in the culture now, Davidson admitted. So she picked up her tape recorder and started interviewing boomer friends and acquaintances about their own final-chapter transitions. Leap! What Will We Do with the Rest of Our Lives? reads like a long, meandering and fascinating Esquire profile, documenting Davidson's own experiences, and those of more than 150 interview subjects including Jane Fonda, Dam Rass, Tom Hayden and Carly Simon, along with plenty of juicy facts from studies on aging.

Boomers forge their own way and look to each other, Davidson discovered. Following the struggle with every demon inside what you should do, what you're due, a lust for joyful work and personal excellence re-emerges in this laid-back generation. There's air and possibility at the end, Davidson says. We can be freer now. We've checked off so many things. The author answered questions about the book from her home in the mountains near Boulder, Colorado.

Leap! is categorized as self-help. Do you consider this a self-help book?
I never set out to write a self-help book because I don't get help from books. I love story, I love narrative and I learn from narrative. I think people learn through story, and it's so much more enjoyable.

The book is full of anecdotes, but few directives on how to age. Was this intentional?
I didn't want to make a list of things people should do, because there's no one blueprint. This is our last best shot. At this point in life, you shouldn't give a damn about what people are thinking. I wanted to stimulate people to think and come up with what's authentic for themselves.

Were you surprised by what you discovered?
Every interview was full of surprises . . . everyone was changing all the time. Nothing was as I expected it to be. People who made adamant statements changed. I went away feeling inspired and happy and envious that I didn't have what they had. Everything I learned was affirming. It's okay that it changed. I have a very different relationship with change now. Nothing else has the solidity that's the reality.

Did the process of writing the book ease your own transition?
I was so moved that I wasn't in this alone, that I wouldn't fall that far. We all have networks, so many people we can call.

How would you sum up the aging process?
Going through the narrows that rough passage everybody has to go through. If you don't volunteer, your body or the world will force you to.

What does being relentless and fearless mean now that you've passed 50?
I'm fearless about my career future. I have no idea what work I'll do next. I don't have a stack of things lined up. I have no clue, but I have trust that it will be OK.

Every person has gifts and nobody can take those away . . . and what your gift is, matters. You have a rhythm with that one tune that's yours to play. What else is there? At the end it's going to be about the moment[s] you're fully alive, loving and being loved.

Memoir

A.M. Homes

Interview by Alden Mudge

Her closest friends call her by her initials: A.M. She reminds a caller that her often hilarious and frequently unsettling novels – This Book Will Save Your Life (about an L.A. businessman in midlife crisis); The End of Alice (about the correspondence between a college coed and a pedophile murderer); and Jack (about a teenage boy whose father comes out of the closet) – are anything but autobiographical. And while she is funny, friendly, even chatty during a call to her home in Manhattan, A.M. Homes deftly deflects any and all questions about her personal life: "What can I tell you about my family life? I have one child, I live in New York City, I have a dog and, you know, a really busy life," she says with pleasant finality.

No wonder that Homes, who is something of celebrity in New York literary circles, has a reputation for being a very private person. No wonder, too, that she found writing her extraordinary memoir about meeting her birth parents 30 years after being put up for adoption "so incredibly, god-awful hard."

The Mistress’s Daughter opens in 1992 during a Christmas visit Homes made to her family in Washington, D.C. After dinner on her first night there, Homes’ parents sit her down and tell her that her birth mother wants to meet her. Homes had always known she was adopted. Even as a child she remembers feeling she was "kind of in service to other people in some way" because of this. "So I was often paying attention to other people’s moods and what they might be thinking and feeling. Part of that is who I am as a person anyway. But always being slightly on the outside and always watching a bit more than participating is in some way a combination of the experience of being adopted and of my own personality." It’s also an experience that helped define her as a writer, she says. "I tend to observe people’s emotional lives. I’m not that observant of the physical world in some ways, but I really do know how to read people."

Homes’ appraisal of her own conflicted emotions about her birth parents is both unsparingly honest and psychologically harrowing. Of course there is much to be conflicted about. Homes’ birth mother, who was 22 when Homes was born, never married or had another child and was a complicated, needy, unpleasant woman who died alone of kidney failure in 1998 after walking away from an operation that might have saved her life. Homes’ birth father was a much older, successful businessman with a family when he began his affair with a teenage girl working in his shop. He demanded that Homes take a DNA test and when the test proved she was his daughter, he promised to make her part of his family. He also said "Now that I’m your father, I think that I have the right to ask – are you dating anyone?"

The Mistress’s Daughter is A.M. Homes at her mordant best. "I don’t think I could have written this book without all the experience I’ve had as a writer of novels, of editing and trying to be concise," she says of her struggles to complete the book. "One of the hardest things about it was taking something that was so emotional and psychological and finding words for it. It’s an emotional experience that’s very primitive. It’s the basic experience of being separated from your parents."

Homes wrote the first section of The Mistress’s Daughter shortly after her birth mother died and her birth father reneged on his promise to introduce her to the rest of her family. A version of the book’s first section appeared in The New Yorker in 2004. The publication was problematic and her professionalism was threatened because she shielded her birth father’s identity. "The guy never behaved particularly well but I always felt protective of him because it wasn’t like something he had asked for," she says.

But in 2005 Homes finally opened the "toxic boxes" of papers and photographs and memorabilia rescued from her mother’s apartment after the funeral and kept for years in mini-storage, and The Mistress’s Daughter became a book with a much larger purpose – the exploration of adoption, identity, questions of nature vs. nurture and the very meaning of "family" itself. "I suddenly wanted to be sure that I was going somewhere further, doing something more than just telling that story," Homes says.

One result of this enlargement of purpose was that Homes could no longer protect her birth father’s identity. "I had to be true to the story and not hide from it despite how painful it was for me to tell it and what it might feel like to somebody else," she says. "To not use the names [of her father and his ancestors] meant to negate the story all over again, when the whole point of this is to say that you do have the right to your own life story, that one person cannot decide that you are not allowed your lineage."

Another result of the process was the expansion of Homes’ own emotional point of view. She attained a new understanding and sympathy for her birth mother. And she accepted that her birth father’s family will see him differently than she sees him. "They would because they have a very different experience of him," she says. "Honestly? As you grow up you just realize that life is more complicated and people are more complicated than they first appear, which is kind of a great thing and kind of hard to deal with. It’s hard to reconcile and accept that people who are capable of great things also do horrible things. But the sophisticated approach is to realize that a person can be different and behave differently in different situations."

And it is this movement from personal history to broad understanding that makes A.M. Homes’ The Mistress’s Daughter such a powerful read.

Alden Mudge, who serves as a juror for the Kiriyama Prize, writes from Oakland.

Her closest friends call her by her initials: A.M. She reminds a caller that her often hilarious and frequently unsettling novels - This Book Will Save Your Life (about an L.A. businessman in midlife crisis); The End of Alice (about the correspondence between…

Fiction

Lionel Shriver

Interview by Katherine Wyrick

During a recent call to best-selling author Lionel Shriver's London home, she reflects on the questions her new novel raises about the serious stuff of life: romantic love, the road not taken and, well, snooker. (The English pronunciation sounds like "snu-ker"; the American one rhymes with "looker.") Though relatively unknown in the States, snooker takes up more space on TV than any other sport in Britain, up to 12 hours at a stretch, according to Shriver. It also plays a big part in The Post-Birthday World, Shriver's brilliant, inventive new novel. She says of the billiards-like game, "The rules are pretty simple, but the execution is complicated. The skills required are fantastic, and it's a subtle game." Shriver could very well be describing her own novel.

"This book is all execution," says the author. The plot doesn't take any dramatic twists or turns, the storyline and subject matter aren't terribly complex—as Shriver says, "I'm not trying to surprise you." Instead, she brings her matchless skills to the table in a character-driven novel that explores the different shades of love.

Those who know Shriver's work will find a definite departure from her last novel. The controversial We Need to Talk About Kevin hit bestseller lists and won the prestigious Orange Prize for fiction in 2005. In that weighty novel, a mother attempts to come to terms with the fact that her son has gone on a Columbine-like rampage. The Post-Birthday World is lighter fare, though no less thought-provoking or significant.

"I wanted to do something nicer," says Shriver. While We Need to Talk About Kevin polarized readers, Post-Birthday will (pleasantly) resonate with them. Irina McGovern is a modestly successful children's book illustrator and expatriate living in London with her longtime partner Lawrence, a think-tank researcher and fellow American. Everything changes for Irina one fateful night when she and a dashing snooker player, Ramsey Acton, share a kiss or not over his snooker table. The two tales spin out from this encounter as Shriver follows parallel versions of Irina's life with each of the two very different men.

Shriver says, "I'm hopeful that one of the things that will make this book work for readers is that while Ramsey and Lawrence are supposed to be distinctive literary characters, they also stand for archetypes that have often popped up in a reader's life. . . . It's not just a woman's issue, but I'll speak in the female. Most women have had the experience of being in a relationship with both a Ramsey and a Lawrence. One is steady, safe, companionable, the best-friend model, while the other is rocky, passionate, unstable, frightening and exhilarating." Shriver suggests that there exist many kinds of love, one not better than another. "We use this very broad term, but the truth is that the feelings that you have for individual people are like tiny one-of-a-kind works of art," she muses.

"I was especially interested in exploring the kind of strange embarrassment that creeps in even between people who are supposed to be intimate."

Shriver writes flawlessly about the physical connection between Irina and Ramsey. Of the often steamy scenes, she says "when writing about sex you can so embarrass yourself if it doesn't work." Let's just say, it works. It really works. She is equally insightful when writing about emotional intimacy.

"I was especially interested in exploring the kind of strange embarrassment that creeps in even between people who are supposed to be intimate." One of her favorite lines from those scenes is when Lawrence refuses to tell Irina his fantasies: "Tragically Lawrence cared more about being respected than being known." Shriver believes that sometimes you can't have both. She says that she tried to keep the sides of the book balanced and notes that there is a high price to pay for each of her two male characters. "What is harder," she asks, "losing someone through betrayal or illness? Is it worse to betray or to be betrayed?" Shriver chooses to let the answers remain ambiguous. "I don't want to lecture my reader or draw too many conclusions for the reader," she says.

The Post-Birthday World is a book to reflect upon, preferably over a glass of wine, or a whole bottle—if you're Ramsey. "In which instance was Irina better or worse off? Very hard to say. Up to you. I enjoy that. . . . In a way, it creates a burden on the reader, I suppose, but a welcome one," Shriver says. At one point in the book, Irina explains to Ramsey the theme of the children's book she's illustrating and writing. "The idea is that you don't have only one destiny . . . as if everything hinges on one decision. But whichever direction you go, there are going to be upsides and downsides. You're dealing with a set of trade-offs. There are varying advantages and disadvantages to each competing future. But I didn't want to have one bad future and one good. In both, everything is all right, really. Everything is all right."

Born in Gastonia, North Carolina, Shriver fled the South like her heels were on fire. She says that she had that feeling that "you weren't where the action was . . . especially if you were ambitious." It was years later when visiting that she discovered that it was "a nice place to live . . . agreeable people . . . more cosmopolitan and sophisticated and that you could finally find sun-dried tomatoes there, not just fried green ones." Now in her late 40s, she's lived all over the world, in Northern Ireland for more than 10 years, and currently she and her husband, jazz musician Jeff Williams, divide their time between London and New York. Where does she feel most at home? It's comforting to know that even someone as fiercely intelligent as Shriver occasionally indulges in schmaltz. She says that recently watching the silly post-apocalyptic movie The Day After Tomorrow, in which New York is the target of a number of cataclysmic events, made her realize that if she has any emotional pull to a certain place, it's New York.

Shriver says her hope for The Post-Birthday World is that it will be "inviting, accessible and entertaining to readers." It is all those things and more. A caveat: For those who like their novels neatly tied up with the proverbial bow, well, they're not going to get that kind of present. With this book, however, Shriver has given readers a gift, one to be turned over in the hands and appreciated, held up to the light and admired and, most importantly, enjoyed.

Katherine Wyrick lives in Little Rock.

Fiction

Christopher Buckley

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Christopher Buckley had just endured that baby boomer rite of passage, a colonoscopy, when he received a blind-sided compliment that trumped every glowing review he's ever received. "I remember being wheeled out to the waiting room, I was gaga on Demerol, and the attendant who was transporting me said, are you the Christopher Buckley who writes books? I said, well, I think so. She said, well, my husband had spinal surgery and while he was recovering in the hospital, we gave him your book, Little Green Men, and he laughed so hard that the doctors took it away."

"That was a sweet moment. Those are satisfying moments," Buckley recalls. "At least I think she said that."

Fresh from promoting the film version of his archly funny, lobbyist-lampooning satire Thank You for Smoking, Buckley now turns his over-caffeinated imagination loose on his own g-g-g-generation in what may be the funniest book of a very funny career, Boomsday.

The premise is priceless: Cassandra Devine, a 29-year-old blogger incensed because her dot-com failure of a father wouldn't send her to Yale, incites America's youth to riot on ritzy golf courses to protest the mounting Social Security debt. Devine's plan gains momentum when she proposes legislation that would offer boomers government incentives to kill themselves by age 75, thereby relieving the financial burden on her generation. Here she describes the details of what she euphemistically calls "voluntary transitioning":

"Free medical. Drugs—all the drugs you want. Boomers love that kind of pork. The big one is no estate tax. Why leave it to Uncle Sam when you can leave it to the kids? That'll get the kids on board. . . . By my calculations, if only twenty percent of the 77 million Baby Boomers go for it, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid will be solvent. End crisis."

Buckley laughs, slipping into the persona of Smoking's PR wiz Nick Naylor. "If you thought selling tobacco was challenging, try selling suicide! Well, we need to get a senator!"

Enter scion of American aristocracy Randolph K. "He's-No-Jefferson" Jepperson IV, a camera-ready Boston playboy whose call to public service came from JFK himself during a particularly vivid acid trip in the I.M. Pei-designed Kennedy Library.

Devine wants revenge, Jepperson covets the White House, and with the help of PR puppet master Terry Tucker, both may get their wish. Tucker deftly spins "transitioning" into a positively perky-sounding campaign platform. All aboard for Jepperson's hilarious run at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Buckley crams his sturdy framework with the kind of laugh-out-loud detail that can only come from a journalist's deep appreciation for the real-life absurdity that surrounds us. Southern pro-life candidate Gideon Payne, founder of SPERM (Society for the Protection of Every Ribonucleic Molecule), incumbent President Riley Peacham (who naturally detests his surname) and the over-the-top opposition group ABBA (Association of Baby Boomer Advocates, with a nod and wink to the "Mamma Mia" band) all take turns on this giddily spinning stage.

No one wrings more laughs than Buckley from the interstitial space between truth and fiction. The son of conservative National Review founder William F. Buckley has largely followed his father's blueprint, having dabbled in politics as a speechwriter for Vice President George Bush between 1980-1982 and written for and edited a number of magazines (he currently edits ForbesLife) before turning to fiction. If his fancy runs more toward cultural observation than political ideology, what can he say? He's a boomer.

"I love our culture for all its amazing preposterous-nesses," says Buckley. "I have an underlying affection for it. My stuff is not mean. It may not be the best there is, but it's very far from the meanest there is. Boomsday is targeted at our boomer self-preoccupation, but on the other hand, I also love our generation. I mean, some of my best friends are boomers!"

The state of the world today provides abundant targets for Buckley's rubber-tipped arrows. In fact, it's all a satirist can do to stay ahead of the real-life punch lines, as Buckley found out when Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards hit a rough patch due to the anti-Catholic blogs of a staffer.

"I am frequently overtaken; it happens all the time, especially writing a novel that takes about nine months," he says. "You'll write something in February and you slap yourself on the back for being so clever and then in March you open the paper and it's already happening. You've got to run pretty fast if you write reality-based humor."

He was especially tempted by the revelation that $12 billion in cash had somehow gone astray en route to Iraq.

"Yeah, how about that—363 tons of money? Where did it go? Well, that's George Clooney's next movie, Oceans 14 or Four Kings. There is a sense of, didn't we use to be able to do this stuff? What's going on here?" he wonders.

Buckley admits there's some genuine concern behind his Boomsday premise. "Consider the economic and cultural ramifications of having 77 million seniors; of course, it won't happen all at once. Unless certain things are done, it's going to have calamitous economic ramifications for the poor dears following us who have to pay for all this," he says. "The kernel of anger in the book is the idea that we try to leave the world better off for the next generation, but what we're actually doing is writing checks on their bank accounts."

At 54, Buckley is just as bewildered as the next boomer to find the ads on the evening news suddenly aimed at him.

"I don't even know what restless leg syndrome is, and yet I'm being urged to see my doctor about it. And of course these Cialis ads: 'In the event of an erection that lasts more than four days, immediately consult a doctor.' Consult a doctor? I'm going to consult the nearest bordello!" Buckley says, laughing. "Bring me myseraglio!"

Jay MacDonald writes from deep in the heart of Texas.

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

David Baldacci

Interview by Eve Zibart

This is something all Southern writers know: Truth makes the best fiction (and not infrequently, vice versa). With more than 50 million copies of his books in print, and seven screenplays, including the Clint Eastwood/Gene Hackman film Absolute Power, under his belt, Virginia-born novelist and screenwriter David Baldacci is no exception. He still looks like a Richmond kid, prone to khakis and loafers and collared shirts, and his office in the Washington suburbs recalls a Virginia gentleman's library, complete with leather couch and armchairs—except that nearby building signs read Northrop Grumman and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

Perhaps that's part of the reason that the details of Baldacci's political thrillers, featuring agents of the FBI, CIA, DEA, Secret Service and so on, are so accurate that increasingly higher-up officials are willing to talk to him. His novels based on true crimes, like the Bill Clinton favorite Simple Truth, have a human impetus more moving than mere righteous indignation.

Even when his plots are not inspired by real events, the procedures, the prejudices, the in-fighting and the more literal hand-to-hand fighting are meticulously researched and reported. And when Baldacci can throw in a famous puzzle, a musical code, a prison-camp escape tunnel and a real-life secret government installation, not to mention a childhood trauma or two, he has a story recipe that's hard to top.

This year, however, Baldacci will try to top himself. Instead of coming out with his annual fall thriller, he's publishing two—Simple Genius, the third adventure of former Secret Service agents-turned-private eyes Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, and Stone Cold, a follow-up to 2005's Camel Club. He is also re-releasing the most Southern novel in his repertory, and the book closest to his heart: Wish You Well, a semi-autobiographical reflection on his family history. Simple Genius and Wish You Well are out this month; Stone Cold, already into second draft, will be published in the fall.

Baldacci has always been a writer, or at least a talker, which is how all storytellers start. He says he talked so much as a kid that finally, when he was eight or nine years old, "my mother got me a book with blank pages to write on, mostly to keep me quiet." But, like most Southern-bred writers, Baldacci originally set out to write short stories. "It's the characters," he says, citing the quality of the characters in what might be called the Southern canon: To Kill a Mockingbird, Walker Percy's Lancelot, the stories of Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty and Truman Capote. "I really loved them. I still prefer my books to be people-driven rather than plot-driven."

As it transpired, Baldacci was better suited to clarity than simile. He was writing briefs (after graduating from the University of Virginia Law School, he worked as a litigator in a prominent Washington firm) and trying to write short stories at night, when he gradually realized he had a stronger narrative drive.

"I like economy in language; it makes it stronger," Baldacci says. "There's much to be said for narrative flow—saying something decisive in a paragraph instead of two pages. I love to edit; if I can find a section of a [para]graph that's not necessary, I'm delighted." Having said that, he wryly admits that the experience of turning in a screenplay and having the director "challenge every word" can really "focus one's attention."

He works out much of the story in his head before writing the first draft on a computer, and then edits in longhand. He keeps notebooks with details and "backstories," but although he generally has a character's future, and past, sketched out, things occasionally take an unexpected turn. "Spontaneity is not a bad thing," he says. "You shouldn't be afraid to go off the road, because if you surprise yourself, you'll surprise the reader."

Simple Genius involves ciphers, computers, childhood traumas and the CIA, among other elements. Woven through the evolving relationship between King and Maxwell are forays into classical codes and Internet encryption (factual), Virginia colonial history (slightly fictionalized) and modern-day government operations at Camp Peary, a CIA "farm" on the York River. While the story and characters that Baldacci places at the installation are entirely fictional, the camp itself is not, although "if you call the CIA and ask them about Camp Peary, they don't admit that it exists."

To research it, Baldacci went along the river as close to the station as he could, and talked to locals who have lived with its various agencies (it started out as a Navy base) all their lives. One of the most chilling sentences in the book has to do with the unidentified jets that land there: A small-town newspaper editor tells King and Maxwell, "I knew something was up before Gulf One and Afghanistan and Iraq started because that damn runway at Peary looked like Chicago's O'Hare what with all the traffic going in." That's precisely what a local resident told Baldacci—a quote not only stranger but stronger than fiction.

Baldacci's villains are not the only ones playing games. His books are filled with literary allusions, historical "borrowings," name games, etc. Simple Genius includes a reprint of the famous Beale Cypher, only one page of which has ever been deciphered—using the Declaration of Independence as the key—and which allegedly leads to a vast treasure buried in Tidewater Virginia. (Baldacci, whose family owns a country place in Bedford County, says he grew up with treasure hunters digging holes all around the area.) And the new edition of Wish You Well has an appendix encouraging readers to begin to track their own family histories.

Baldacci has another quintessential trait of the Southern writer: As a man who loves to read, he wants others to love reading, and most of the programs funded by his Wish You Well Foundation are literacy campaigns. He's concerned about a general disappearance of literacy tools—not only reading, but writing, which is the gateway to creativity. "I think it's great that the SATs finally include an essay, but did you realize that 80 percent of students wrote their essays in block letters?

They don't even teach writing in schools anymore." Among the programs Baldacci has created is "Feeding Body and Mind," which partners with America's Second Harvest food banks to provide used or new books along with the meals. So far, they have distributed more than 40,000 volumes. If you're interested in contributing, you can find out more at davidbaldacci.com, which also lists Baldacci's reading schedule.

Memoir

Barbara Kingsolver

Interview by Alison Hood

" All stories, they say, begin in one of two ways: A stranger came to town,' or else, I set out upon a journey,'" writes novelist and essayist Barbara Kingsolver in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. The latter theme pervades her new memoir cum investigative nonfiction narrative, a faithful, funny and thought-provoking chronicle of a year in which the author and her family pulled up their big-city stakes and moved from Tucson, Arizona, to a farm in southwestern Virginia. The objective: to spend a year subsisting on food they would raise themselves, or purchase only from local sources, like farmers' markets.

"The project of taking this sort of sabbatical year really was something we had to do as a family," Kingsolver says, speaking from her Virginia farm. "I couldn't do it by myself. And we talked about it for years—it's not something we did overnight." Indeed, the experiment germinated a while; its roots are clearly visible in her essay, Lily's Chickens, (from the 2002 Small Wonder collection) in which she discusses the energy crime of American food transportation and the ethics of responsible eating.

Kingsolver's Appalachian adventure was her response to a conviction that America's food system has been kidnapped, that our nation's food production and consumption habits have been hijacked ("There are ingredients on food labels we can't even pronounce!" she exclaims). She observes that we are now a mostly urban society disconnected from the land the source of our sustenance. "To connect to it, we have to know what farmers do and how vegetables grow. It's a whole area of knowledge that has been lost from our culture in the last two generations," she says.

Contributing to this loss is America's reliance upon highly processed foods across all product lines, with foodstuffs routinely transported worldwide to satisfy our national cravings for any comestible, any time. "Americans put almost as much fossil fuel into our refrigerators as our cars," states Steven L. Hopp, Kingsolver's husband, in the book's first chapter.

As it turns out, this book has not one author, but three. It is a collaborative project that, Kingsolver admits, no one in the family saw coming. "The idea to make a book," she says, "had its genesis in practicality and generosity, a way to inform people about how small, individual lifestyle changes (such as buying food locally and cooking at home) can make a huge difference in quality of life."

And inform it does—accompanying Kingsolver's finely crafted, endearingly personal narrative are information-packed sidebars of no- nonsense prose by Hopp, a biologist. There are also delightful, earnest essays from her 19-year-old daughter, Camille, who comments on the whole adventure, nutritional issues and the sometimes embarrassing (sausage-making!) behaviors of parents. Rounding out this bi-generational perspective are family recipes and weekly meal plans (downloadable from the book's website, www.animalvegetable.com).

Readers—whether vegetarian or carnivore—will not go hungry, literally or literarily. Nor was the Kingsolver-Hopp clan famished during their year of cutting off the industrial pipeline and sinking into the local foodshed. Though Kingsolver reports that it was hard work cultivating the farm, and harvesting and storing the crops for use in the winter months, she says her family thrived on reconnecting with a bounteous earth and its cycles, and derived great pleasure from cooking and eating delicious meals. "This was a project that brought our family together," Kingsolver says.

This year of engaging with the land, of changing eating and purchasing habits, expanded a sense of plenty not scarcity. During our conversation, she reveals that there has been a tremendous interest in the book, even before its publication. And the question people repeatedly ask her is: What was the hardest thing to give up? This confounds Kingsolver, who feels that, in their year of eating consciously, they gained a sense of connection, awareness and fulfillment, and a gratitude for the earth's abundance and generosity. "We didn't drag through the year missing things," she says. "We had such a good time celebrating what we had and celebrating the seasons it's really such a lesson for life, isn't it?" One thing they did not eschew, however, was coffee. "We wheedled out of that one!" she laughs, explaining that they purchased only fair-trade java.

Though they handily solved the coffee conundrum, situations arose that were not so easily dealt with, such as harvesting their livestock for the table. Just before our interview, Kingsolver had been out checking on her animals. "We just had lambs born yesterday," she enthuses. One of the book's most powerful essays, You Can't Run Away on Harvest Day, rationally, but tenderly, discusses how humans kill other life forms from worms, butterflies and broccoli to cattle for sustenance.

"People do get emotional about killing animals, but less than five percent of the population is vegetarian, which means that 95 percent of us eat animals, and we know that somebody killed them," Kingsolver says firmly. She knows that humans don't want to think about this, and says that it's hard for her, too, even though she takes great care in raising and dispatching her animals in the most humane ways possible. "I am a very soft-hearted person," she admits, "and it's difficult to look your food in the eye and face the fact that someone had to kill it for you. But looking at it head-on allows you to make good decisions. Every book I've ever written is about something difficult I don't shrink from raising the difficult questions."

After all our discussion of flora and fauna, I realized I hadn't queried Kingsolver about the third element of her book's title. What, I asked her, was your particular miracle? "Realizing that I could change," she answers, "that I could joyfully embrace a simpler, more sustainable way to live. We can act sensibly, return to our local economies and have a different world. Whether or not people read this book, fossil fuels are going to run out. The dinosaurs are not going to lie down and make more oil."

Alison Hood tends her strawberry patch in sunny California.

YA Fiction YA

Paula Jolin

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Paula Jolin wrote her richly detailed teen novel, In the Name of God, over the course of 10 weeks. That’s a seemingly brief time frame in which to write an entire book especially a debut novel but the research process began years earlier, when Jolin was living and studying in the Middle East.

As a child growing up in Massachusetts, Jolin was always interested in other cultures. She always wanted to be an author, too, but at age 20, she realized she wasn’t yet ready to try her hand at writing a book. I thought I didn’t have anything to say, she explains. One of the reasons I started traveling was to have something to say. And travel she did. During her junior year at Brown University, she embarked on a study abroad program in Cairo that became the launching point for several years of cultural observation and exploration. After graduation, Jolin went to Tunisia, and then Syria, where she enrolled in The Ma`Had, or The Institute for Teaching Arabic to Foreigners. As a foreign woman in Syria, you get the best situation you get invited into homes, people feed you. A Syrian woman couldn’t sit alone in a cafÅ½, or have an apartment, like I did, she says. On the strength of her positive experiences, Jolin enrolled in the Islamic Studies department at McGill University in Montreal, and traveled to Syria and Yemen during her summers off. Later, she pursued a doctorate in anthropology and worked as a teacher in Sudan each summer. Eventually, though, she realized academia wasn’t for her. She had gotten married and was pregnant with her first child when she decided it was time, at last, to write.

Her strategy worked: Jolin found her writer’s voice and completed In the Name of God, a character-driven novel that offers a window into a Syrian family’s daily life as seen through the eyes of 17-year-old Nadia. Despite living in a place that is seemingly so different from America, Nadia has many experiences that mirror those of American teenagers. She struggles with feeling left behind as her cousins become more Westernized, and with her confusion as she realizes that her cousin Fowzi’s anti-government views may be risky, but they’re also intriguing, even empowering. In her search for a foothold in an ever-changing world, for a way to feel powerful in a community that is closely watched and controlled, Nadia enters dangerous territory. It is to Jolin’s credit that we understand Nadia’s decisions, even as we are shocked by them.

When people do things we think are totally out of bounds, there is a process. Nobody starts out that way, Jolin explains. I wanted to show someone who’s in a place we couldn’t imagine being to show how they got there. But, as Jolin makes clear in In the Name of God, while life in Syria may be different from life in America in important ways, there are common bonds human connections and similarities that are universal. There are so many things you can’t say in Syria you can’t talk about the government, and there is a sense that all taxi drivers are spies, Jolin says. But amid all this pressure and difficulty, people are happy a lot of the time. Jolin says she wanted to show readers the Syria she experienced, and the sort of people with whom she became very close: families that have joys and conflicts, secrets and celebrations, just like any other.

Jolin lives with her own family (her husband and their son and daughter, now 4 and 2), in suburban North Carolina. Their home is a welcoming one, where children’s toys share space with shelves filled with books of all sorts, and wonderful aromas waft out from the kitchen. There are no obvious indications of Jolin’s time spent in the Middle East, but her passion for travel and the people she met along the way is evident whenever she speaks about her experiences. Jolin’s passion for writing is clear, too. In fact, her second young-adult novel, Three Witches, is due out next year. Still, she says, I only recently started telling people I’m a writer. I’m a stay-at-home mom, and proud of it. I would tell people I’m a runner but not a writer. I’m a terrible runner, but I’ve been more comfortable calling myself one because there’s nothing at stake. She adds, laughing, Of course, when I sold the book, it was months before anyone asked me what I did. Even when I say it now, I wonder, Is this really true? Am I making this up? Not at all.

Linda M. Castellitto writes from North Carolina.

Paula Jolin wrote her richly detailed teen novel, In the Name of God, over the course of 10 weeks. That's a seemingly brief time frame in which to write an entire book especially a debut novel but the research process began years earlier, when Jolin…

Fiction World Fiction

Khaled Hosseini

Interview by Alden Mudge

After the unexpected success of his first novel, The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini decided to focus his second book on a part of Afghan society often obscured from public view its women. "There are women characters in The Kite Runner, but I wouldn't describe any of them as major characters," he says. "So there was this entire aspect of Afghan society and Afghan life that I hadn't touched upon. It was a landscape that I felt was rich with possibilities for storytelling."

Hosseini, a superb storyteller, realizes those possibilities fully in A Thousand Splendid Suns, his textured, deeply affecting novel about the intersecting lives of two Afghan women. Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Herat movie house owner. She grows up exiled with her mother to a hovel in the hills outside the city, visited occasionally by the father she adores. When her presence at the periphery of her father's life threatens family peace, she is forced into marriage with a shoemaker from Kabul. Life in Kabul goes from bad to worse under the Soviet occupation. Her husband brutalizes her and eventually takes in, then marries, a young, well-educated girl Laila who has been orphaned during the Afghan civil war. Most of A Thousand Splendid Suns depicts the extraordinary relationship that develops under grim circumstances between these two women.

"As a writer, the things that always move me are the intimate human stories, the links between the characters, their dreams, their disappointments, their crushing defeats and their atonements," Hosseini says during a call to his home in San Jose, California. Hosseini was an internist at a Bay Area Kaiser hospital before the phenomenal popularity of The Kite Runner allowed him to take an extended leave of absence. He and his wife have two young children. He briefly, politely, interrupts the call to kiss his son goodbye as he heads off to school. Hosseini appears remarkably unaffected by the hoopla over his first novel.

But later in the conversation, Hosseini admits the success of his first book, which has sold more than 4 million copies, cast a looming shadow over early attempts at composing the new novel. "Suddenly everybody was interested in what I was writing next," he says with a pleasant, rueful laugh. "You go through these crises of self-doubt. You wonder: Am I a hack? It took a little bit of work to ignore the noise outside my door." In fact, for a while, Hosseini rented an office in a nondescript office building, a room with nothing on the walls to distract him that he now calls his windowless bunker.

He worried about finding the right voice for the book, writing through four drafts using different approaches and points of view. He chastised himself because he had not only decided to write from a woman's standpoint, but had decided to write from the standpoints of two women. "I had to not only think about what it would be like to be a woman, but I also had to think about what it would be like to be a different woman. As long as I was self-conscious about the fact that I was writing from a woman's voice, it kept coming across as very self-aware and contrived. But as I wrote and as I began to know these women, began to understand their motivations, their dreams, began to understand them as people, the issue vanished on its own. At first I was a ventriloquist and they were dummies speaking with my voice. But as I began to know them, the characters took over and I became a mouthpiece for them. That was a watershed moment for me."

The completed book has the same big heart displayed in The Kite Runner, but even Hosseini (despite his writerly doubts) believes the new story is more masterfully told. "I feel this is a more subtle and somewhat more restrained book," he says. "I think that I, as a writer, have learned to trust readers and allow them to make their own connections." One sign of such mastery is the way Hosseini weaves recent history into the narrative. He says he struggled to restrain himself from getting too much into the history and political turmoil of those years. But he eventually found that the intimate story of these characters and the bigger story of what is going on in Afghanistan twisted around each other like a DNA strand. "It is really by necessity, because these two women happen to be living in the volatile period of recent Afghanistan history. There is no way I could have told the story of Laila and Mariam without telling the story of Afghanistan."

In addition to their concern for the plights of Hosseini's characters, readers will be carried willingly from page to page by the sensory and cultural details that enrich Hosseini's depiction of Afghan life in this era. Hosseini grew up in Kabul before immigrating to the United States as a youth. His family was originally from Herat, which he would visit for family gatherings. "I remember the city and how beautiful it was," he says. " I can speak Farsi in both the Herati and the Kabuli accent. This is part of my background." Breaking his rule of allowing only his wife to read and comment on drafts of his novels, he asked his father, a former Afghan diplomat, to read the final draft and serve as a sort historical and technical advisor. In 2003, a time of cautious optimism in Afghanistan, he visited Kabul. A Thousand Splendid Suns resonates with his remembered and recently witnessed details of Afghan life.

"The writer side of me," Hosseini says at the end of our conversation, "wants what every writer wants: that people respond to my characters, to feel their happiness and sorrow, and to be transported by them. Then there's the other side of me. I am from Afghanistan. And although it's not my intention to educate people about Afghanistan, I do hope that in some ways this novel gives people a window into Afghanistan, especially into the difficult existence of Afghan women over the last 30 years. Maybe this novel will give some identity to the nameless, faceless women in burqa walking down the street, so that a reader will now sense that these are real people who have dreams and hopes and disappointments. Just like everybody else."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Children's & YA

Patrick Carman

Interview by Heidi Henneman

Try to imagine a perfect world, where pollution, cell phones and poverty do not exist. A place where world peace reigns and no one has ever heard of war. This is Atherton, and it is the setting of best-selling author Patrick Carman's new book for young readers, Atherton: The House of Power.

Carman is not a novice when it comes to creating strange new worlds. His previous series, The Elyon Trilogy, took his readers into a place filled with talking animals, mysterious beings, evil and magic. In Atherton, Carman pares the planet down to just a few inhabitants rabbits, sheep, figs, horses, people and enormous garbage-eating bugs but he tackles a monster of an issue: the destruction of our environment.

The story is set on a man-made, self-sustaining planet, created by a brilliant but mad scientist. On a quest to understand this strange homeland, a young orphaned boy named Edgar encounters interesting new people, discovers mysterious lands and uncovers a deep, dark secret about Atherton—a secret that could lead to the end of the world as he knows it.

Carman came up with the idea of a self-sustaining planet while on tour for his first book, The Dark Hills Divide, the first entry in the Elyon trilogy. "My family and I were zigzagging across the country in a 40-foot RV," the author recalls, "and every time we stopped for gas, it would really bother me that we were using so much."

At the time, he was reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and over the four months that he spent on the road, the two ideas melded. "I was trying to come up with a topic that was important for young people to grapple with," he says, "and the concept of an environmentally balanced world designed by a mad scientist came to mind."

Carman, who lives with his wife and two daughters in Washington state, takes the challenge of protecting the environment seriously. "The smaller we can make our carbon footprint the better," he explains. To that end, he contributes to a carbon fund when he flies, rides his bike whenever possible and has retrofitted his house to be more green.

Most importantly, Carman makes sure that the next generation is aware of and working on the problem, too. "I talk to schools about trying to have the smallest footprint in their city," he says, "and as it turns out, a lot of young people think that's sort of cool."

Although environmental awareness plays a pretty big role in the book, Carman isn't necessarily trying to send a do-good message to his readers. "When I write, my number one focus is to engage kids to want to read." Having spent the better part of the past three years making author visits to more than 400 schools, Carman knows quite a bit about the subject. "There are a lot of kids, especially boys, who are hard to engage with a book," he explains. "Part of that is because they are surrounded by cell phones, iPods, video games, movies and television. And in the face of all of that, it's difficult to interest kids in reading."

In an effort to attract those would-be readers to his book in particular, Carman has incorporated a slew of interactive features into Atherton, including weblinks to videos, animation and voice recordings of the characters. "I wanted to reach into the world of kids today and bring them into the world of my first love, books," says the author.

In addition, Carman has filmed several behind the book segments that walk the reader through the writing process. "For one segment, I went to a climbing wall so I could get a feel for what Edgar would be going through as he climbed the walls of Atherton," he recalls.

Although Carman clearly enjoys the writing process and speaking to young people, he was not always on this path. Out of college, he started his own advertising firm, and after several years of success with that endeavor, tried his hand at creating board games, developed an online technology company, and dabbled in television production. "I guess I've always been a storyteller," he says, but it wasn't until he started telling bedtime stories to his two young daughters that the true storytelling bug emerged.

With another Atherton book scheduled for next spring, a prequel to the Elyon books coming out in the fall and a couple of new ideas brewing, it looks like he's going to be sticking with this career for a while. "I feel my calling is to go out to schools and get kids excited about reading," he says.

And if he is even half as successful in getting kids to think about their environment as he has been in getting them to read, Patrick Carman might just save this world, one reader at a time.

Heidi Henneman writes from the brave new world of New York City.

Fiction Horror

Chuck Palahniuk

Interview by Jay MacDonald

A chat with Chuck Palahniuk is not unlike reading one of his novels. Both offer a compelling mélange of the profound and the perverse, the terrifyingly strange and the strangely touching, viewed through the dark lens of a satiric minimalist whose intent is to get under our skin in order to reveal the humanity beneath. Like such clear-eyed predecessors as William S. Burroughs, Anthony Burgess, J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick, Palahniuk serves up a naked buffet of disturbing images from the bedlam of modern life in order to point out their desensitizing effects on us all. In less chaotic times, Palahniuk (pronounced Paula-nick) might have been put to the stake as a blasphemer, blacklisted as a pornographer or institutionalized as a loon. But these days, his many fans consider him a visionary, if not a full-blown prophet. Which only goes to prove his point—crazy times call for drastic measures.

Comes now Palahniuk's eighth wild ride, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey, a documentary-style faux oral history that stitches together comments of 100-plus characters on the short, extraordinary life of Buster "Rant" Casey, a teenage rebel whose iconic death in a fiery car crash made him a dashboard saint among a cult of teenage car-crash enthusiasts.

Rant unfolds in two parts. The first centers on Casey's unconventional childhood in small-town Middleton, where the lonely teen seeks a natural high—and in the process develops heightened sensitivities—by intentionally soliciting the poisonous stings and bites of various insects, mammals and reptiles. When he contracts rabies, he becomes Patient Zero, a "superspreader" whose saliva sets off an AIDS-like epidemic.

In part two, Casey departs Middleton for the big city, where the haves work days, the have-nots work nights, and government curfews enforce this bipolar disorder. He falls in with a group of Party Crashers, who endure their nighttime exile by intentionally crashing their cars into each other to feel in the moment, when time stands still. It turns out these "liminal" moments have a place in time travel as well, an unexpected second-act plot twist that hijacks the narrative in a baffling new direction.

On the V-for-visceral shelf that already holds his violent 1996 debut Fight Club, the sex-addict satire Choke and the Grand Guignol Haunted, this new novel is Palahniuk's ode to loners, losers, misfits and mavericks willing to risk everything just to feel one true thing in these soporific times.

Palahniuk, 45, prepared to write Rant, the first of a planned Middleton trilogy, by reading the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn "about a thousand times."

"Maybe my reason for writing this book is, I've fallen into a point in my life where I am fantastically nostalgic about my growing up, and I really wanted to go back and explore all those memories," he says. "My growing up was really s—ty, but I want to be honest and prove to myself that I'm not nostalgic for the actual past; I'm nostalgic for being a child again, and for the family I've lost."

Palahniuk's memories of growing up in Burbank, Washington, just upriver from his current home in the Columbia Gorge area near Portland, Oregon, take some macabre forms in Rant. Casey's mother, for instance, proudly shares her recipes for baking foreign objects, from razor blades to ground glass, into her cakes and pies to make eating them a memorable experience. It's hard to pin down the actual facts of Palahniuk's life, since he's a self-styled mystery man not above erecting a few facades to keep the world at a comfortable distance. Still, there is some truth behind the scene where Casey gathers graphic sensory information about his neighbors by sniffing their, uh, personal wastes.

"When big windstorms would kick up, everyone's trashcan would blow over and our barbed wire fences would be hung with everybody's secrets, all the tampons, all the rubbers, all the things they couldn't flush down the toilet or burn," he says. "People would have to go out with bags and pick these flags of shame off the barbed wire."

Palahniuk fashioned his young protagonist on the classic rugged individualist, an archetype in American fiction that stretches from Tom and Huck to Randall Patrick McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

" It's a character that Americans have always found really appealing, so what would be the next version?" he wonders. "How do you reinvent that character?"

The second act of Rant—which careens between the Party Crashers' various theme nights (formal wear for wedding night, lighted trees on top for Christmas, mattresses for moving day, etc.) and various Ph.D.s digressing on anthropologist Victor Turner's classic essay " Liminality and Communitas"—has its roots in Palahniuk's experiences at the annual counterculture gathering known as Burning Man. That festival once featured such shoot-'em-ups as a drive-by shooting gallery and a Big Car Hunt on the Nevada desert, until festival numbers grew so large that organizers were forced to abandon the cars-and-guns catharsis. The author, who once participated in the Big Car Hunt, contends that Party Crashing is now commonplace in some West Coast cities, including Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

"It's Fight Club with cars. It's an equal opportunity, non- gender-specific, non-age-or-race-specific fight," he says. "You need a physical activity like a rave or Burning Man for people to engage in that gives them this liminoid structure so they can come together in mutual communitas [an unstructured, egalitarian community]."

Palahniuk, who alternates edgier works (Fight Club, Lullaby, Haunted) with "lighter" satires (Choke, Diary, Rant), describes as "appalling" next year's offering, Snuff, about the making of an adult film that goes bad. Does this shock author ever give himself nightmares with his Boschian visions?

"That's the entire point, to get yourself to a place that you couldn't have planned or calculated, that is kind of beyond what you think you're capable of," he admits. "At that moment, you feel like you've done enough when you've gone a little bit too far, because otherwise, if you don't go that little bit too far, later you'll wish you had. You just keep reminding yourself, it's just words on the page."

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin.

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