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If self-proclaimed lazy environmentalist Josh Dorfman isn’t the Earth-friendly being of the future, he certainly is the eco-guy of the moment. Through his blog, his radio show (on LIME Radio and Sirius) and now his book all sharing the Lazy Environmentalist tag Dorfman aims to show that you don’t have to give up life’s pleasures in order to save the planet. He favors a friendlier approach, avoiding gloom and doom predictions and applying Madison Avenue techniques to the message instead. You have to understand human emotions, how we make decisions, Dorfman says over lunch at a Nashville eatery. Whatever the hooks are, that’s what still works. For Dorfman, that means adding aesthetics and convenience to the environmental equation, as he does in his new book, The Lazy Environmentalist: Your Guide to Easy, Stylish, Green Living, a compendium of ideas, suppliers and options that take reusing, reducing and recycling to a whole new level.

In the book’s 272 pages (which are printed on 100 percent post-consumer waste, as one would expect), Dorfman discusses the clever refashioning of leather miniskirts into shoulder bags; using organic, as opposed to conventionally grown, cotton, the latter being one of the most heavily sprayed crops in the world ; and making bamboo flooring selections. The good news for people who want to live green, but who may not have or want to spend a lot of, well, green, is that national chains and manufacturers Macy’s, Wal-Mart, Levi’s and Nike among them are increasingly turning to these sorts of materials.

Dorfman is a smart, funny guy with whom one could easily discuss any- and everything. However, one might also come away wondering how seriously he takes saving the planet. It was just this sort of questioning of Dorfman’s environmental cred that led to the launching of the entire Lazy Environmentalist enterprise.

You see, he wasn’t brought up sans electricity and red meat by hippie parents, though he jokes about throwing Saturday bake sales as a child in honor of his family’s cause of the day. And, OK, there was the time he was kicked off a kibbutz after only a week for organizing a labor protest. But, he also has a solid business background and his environmental epiphany came while he was selling bicycle locks in China (he had to be quite the salesman since, as he says, the locks were a little more expensive than the bikes ). Contemplating the Chinese fascination with American lifestyles, Dorfman says he saw a connection between a billion bikes and a billion cars . . . and starting thinking about, not necessarily a doomsday scenario, but about quality of life. Fast-forward a few years after Dorfman earned an M.B.

A. in international business; worked in Geneva, Paris and Hong Kong; took a stab at screenwriting in Los Angeles and dropped out of a Ph.

D. program in D.C. and he had figured out a way to combine his business acumen and his growing concern for the planet. The solution was Vivavi, a furniture and home-furnishings company launched in 2003 and whose motto, Live Modern + Tread Lightly reflects the philosophy of greener living through good design.

Along with water-conserving bathroom fixtures, paints low in VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds) and electric cars the products Dorfman talks about in The Lazy Environmentalist he also praises Method’s all-purpose cleaners. It’s the best-looking cleaning product ever and it’s cheap, he says. It’s also available in places like Target and Costco. I love that product for all those reasons. He gets practically rhapsodic talking about TerraCycle organic plant food. Fast-food waste is fed to worms, the worms poop it out, then it’s packaged in soda bottles, he explains. Everything is recycled it’s waste and it’s packaged in waste. How could anyone question the commitment of someone who gets so excited about worm poop (especially while eating lunch)? Well, one of Dorfman’s first Vivavi employees did. He says she was almost hyperventilating when she tearfully asked him whether he truly was an environmentalist. You don’t talk like an environmentalist, you don’t act like an environmentalist, he quotes her as saying. Dorfman mulled things over and then blogged about how he didn’t mind saving the planet, but he wasn’t going to give up long, hot showers. The blog led to an offer for an Internet radio show, which led to a contract with Sirius. Now he’s bringing his laidback environmental platform My voice is: I’m your pal, man; I’m with you, he says to a new medium. Whatever the medium, his focus is the same, concentrating on what people are willing to do to take better care of the planet and mixing in a little style.

If self-proclaimed lazy environmentalist Josh Dorfman isn't the Earth-friendly being of the future, he certainly is the eco-guy of the moment. Through his blog, his radio show (on LIME Radio and Sirius) and now his book all sharing the Lazy Environmentalist tag Dorfman aims…

Even after 12 installments, readers can’t get enough of Janet Evanovich’s best-selling Stephanie Plum novels. Starting with 1994’s One for the Money, the series injected a healthy dose of humor into the mystery genre and turned the smart-alecky but tough New Jersey bounty hunter into one of fiction’s most memorable characters. Putting her likeable heroine into outrageous situations with hilarious sidekicks (not to mention two sexy love interests) proved to be a winning formula for Evanovich, who is also the author of a NASCAR-themed series set in Miami and three other co-written series. On June 19, Evanovich serves up Lean Mean Thirteen, which finds Stephanie a suspect in the disappearance of her ex-husband, Dickie. We asked Evanovich a few questions about the new book, her work and what really motivates her to write.

Stephanie has bad luck with cars. Have you ever had a car of your own burst into flames? Do any cars bite the big one in the new book?
I’ve never had a car burst into flames, but my daughter has at one time or another driven most of Stephanie’s cars. She doesn’t so much destroy them, as they die their own natural death. Of course cars bite the big one in Thirteen! Will

Stephanie ever choose between the two men in her life? And do fans seem to want her with Ranger or Morelli?
The fans run 50/50 in the Morelli versus Ranger debate. Many don’t want to choose, and I can’t say I blame them. Eventually Stephanie will choose, but not until the end of the series.

Stephanie wouldn’t be caught dead: a) with flat bangs b) at the mall without makeup c) eating pizza without beer d) leaving the house unarmed e) all of the above
A, B and C. Stephanie leaves the house unarmed all the time, not counting her can of hairspray.

Like James Patterson, you take a very practical, businesslike approach to your writing you’ve even referred to your work as carrying the Evanovich brand. Do you get impatient with writers who talk about muses, writer’s block and the like?
I have muses. They just come in the form of birthday cake and the occasional tankard of beer.

Though you write the Plum series solo, you work on three other series with co-authors. What’s it like writing with someone else?
The co-authored books add variety to my life. I don’t look for a co-author who can clone me, but rather someone who can live with the Evanovich promise (easy to read, entertaining, feel good, happy ending).

Do you do any research for your writing?
I do a lot of research when I’m starting a new series. For instance, I had to attend a lot of NASCAR races for the Metro series. Sort of self-serving since I’m a NASCAR addict.

Your tours draw huge crowds. What’s the craziest thing that’s ever happened to you at a book signing?
That’s hard to say. Crazy is pretty much the norm.

How do you unwind?
Unwind? I’m afraid if I ever unwound I wouldn’t be able to wind again.

Any plans for a Stephanie Plum perfume or line of lingerie?
A perfume that smells like pineapple upside-down cake. I like that idea!

What books are you taking with you on vacation this year?
Vacation???!!! There’s no time for vacationing this year. After Thirteen comes out I have to get ready for the No Chance (co-authored with Stephen Cannell) tour and then my daughter is getting married (hallelujah!) and early next year Plum Lucky (St. Patrick’s Day holiday novella) comes out. The year is packed.

 

Even after 12 installments, readers can't get enough of Janet Evanovich's best-selling Stephanie Plum novels. Starting with 1994's One for the Money, the series injected a healthy dose of humor into the mystery genre and turned the smart-alecky but tough New Jersey bounty hunter…

The crowning irony of British actor Jim Dale's stellar career is that he will best be remembered for having been heard and not seen. As the sole performer of the entire Harry Potter canon on audiobook, including the seventh and final installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Dale is more likely to be swarmed by fans who suddenly recognize the voice of young Harry and some 130 other characters than Dale himself, the show-stopping, Tony Award-winning song-and-dance man from the 1980 Broadway musical hit, Barnum.

"I've been acting for 50 years now and the last eight or nine years, more kids have gotten to know me than ever did when I was a young man," the 71-year-old Dale says from his Manhattan apartment. "There's a whole new generation out there that don't know me to look at but they know me when I speak, and that can be quite funny."

Funny because, unlike those mellifluous, immediately identifiable voices from the British stage (Gielgud, Burton, et al.), Dale once considered his voice one of his biggest obstacles.

" I was born with a very broad accent in the center of England, which is Shakespeare country, these small communities that have dialect that goes back 300 or 400 years, and it took me a long time to get rid of that. I never really thought my voice was anything special," Dale admits.

In fact, prior to Potter, Dale's stock in trade had always been a robust comic physicality. Stage-struck at birth, he began training at age nine in everything from tap, ballet, ballroom and eccentric comedy dancing to tumbling and judo. By 17, he was touring Great Britain as a standup comedian. During an appearance on "6-5 Special," Britain's first rock 'n' roll television show, Dale commandeered a guitar and rendered a song as a lark. Impressed, the producers offered him a regular singing slot.

Overnight, the comedian became a pop star whose record producer, George Martin, also worked with four lads from Liverpool. Swinging London, mid-'60s, what's not to like? Dale gave it two years and three albums, then returned to his first love, the theater.

" I really had a love of comedy and acting," Dale says. "I didn't enjoy the pop singing that much. I was quite happy performing for laughs rather than trying to perform over screaming teenage girls. I didn't enjoy that at all."

He left pop music on a high note however when "Georgy Girl," a song he wrote with Dusty Springfield's brother Tom, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1966. It lost out to "Born Free." Dozens of stage productions followed, mostly Shakespeare and musical comedies, first in London's West End, then on Broadway. But it was the Carry On series of British comedy films shot between 1963-1992 ("As popular as M*A*S*H' at the time," says Dale) that made him a cultural icon in the U.K. Like most Britons, Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling was a fan and sought out Dale to give voice to her blockbuster series.

Dale wasn't quite sure what he'd signed on for when he arrived to record Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in 1999.

"I had never done an audiobook before, so I started putting voices to the characters as I started to read on that first day and the engineer said, No, no, no Jim, you don't have to give the characters voices; it's going to be a hell of a lot of work. Just read. I said, I think it will bring the characters more to life, and they said well, OK. Little did I realize what I was letting myself in for—I didn't realize that the snakes and spiders had voices as well!"

On average, it took Dale three weeks to record each Potter book, working from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., or as long as his voice held out. "Whatever my voice is like in the afternoon must be the same as it will be the next morning after it has recuperated overnight, so I mustn't let it get too gravelly and worn down," he explains.

At the time of our interview, Dale had not yet recorded Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the much anticipated final volume of the series. He doesn't typically receive a Potter book until two or three days before he's scheduled to go into the studio, and doesn't even read it then because he's too busy organizing the characters so he can voice the parts.

Everybody was fair game as models for Muggles, hobgoblins and ghouls. Dale crafted Hermione after his first girlfriend, Professor McGonagall after a Scottish aunt and Professor Dumbledore after his friend John Houseman. Harry, of course, will always be the voice of young Jim Dale. To keep his audio cast straight, Dale makes a reference tape of all the different voices, then cross-references each character with page and line numbers.

Harry has been very, very good to Dale, earning him a 2000 Grammy Award (for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), four Grammy nominations, a shelf full of Audie Awards and the Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) from Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 for his work on behalf of British children's literature. He also notched a couple of Guinness World Records for creating 134 character voices for one audio (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) and occupying the top six places in the Top Ten Audiobooks of America for 2005. His excellent audio adventure won't end with the Potter series; Dale continues to record the new Peter Pan adventure series (Peter and the Starcatchers, etc.) co-authored by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson.

All this magic seems to have rubbed off on Dale. This fall, he plans to trade Hogwarts for the lead in a Broadway remake of the Tommy Tune musical, Busker Alley, playing an old busker whose true love, another busker, ran off to pursue the big time.

" Seventy-one is only my age; I'm 25 inside," says Dale. "Finishing Harry Potter, there will be a sadness in a way, but at the same time it will be an accomplishment. It's going to be lovely to be remembered in generations to come as the voice of Harry Potter."

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin, Texas.

 

The crowning irony of British actor Jim Dale's stellar career is that he will best be remembered for having been heard and not seen. As the sole performer of the entire Harry Potter canon on audiobook, including the seventh and final installment, Harry Potter…

One of the many pleasures of Dog Days, Jon Katz’s latest collection of "dispatches" about life on his 110-acre farm an hour or so north of Albany, New York, is witnessing a person in the process of opening up at a time in life when others tend to start closing down.

"Sometimes I feel there are two deaths for some people," the 59-year-old Katz says during a call from Bedlam Farm, which sits astride Patterson Ridge, overlooking the churches and 50 or so dwellings of the rural hamlet of West Hebron, New York. "The first comes when people enter middle age and start closing doors and windows and say the world is going to hell and change is bad. But occasionally you’re lucky enough to have the opposite experience. Something happens that opens you up and you have a chance to learn, to change, to grow and experience new things. The animals and the farm have done that for me."

Katz, the "grandson of Russian immigrants who lived their whole lives in two rooms in a tenement in Providence, Rhode Island," has been chronicling his change and growth from a big-city journalist to a rural dog trainer and farm owner since the 1999 publication of Running to the Mountain, which described the beginning of his "Midlife Adventures." A former reporter and editor for publications such as the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Washington Post, as well as executive producer for "CBS Morning News," Katz made a radical shift in his life and career that surprised even his family. He now spends most of his week on Bedlam Farm by himself or with his helpers; his wife Paula Span, a journalist who teaches at Columbia University in New York, is a frequent visitor. They have a grown daughter, Emma, a sportswriter who will publish a book of her own next year.

The story of Katz’s midlife conversion to rural living will be in theaters with the upcoming release of an HBO Films adaptation of his 2002 book A Dog Year, starring Jeff Bridges in the role of Katz himself.

"A SWAT team from the movie came in and grabbed two bags of my clothes," Katz reports, laughing. "They said they were going to bring them back, but never did, of course. They ordered exact replicas from L.L. Bean and had interns sandpaper them so they would look as rumpled as mine. I have to tell you there’s no weirder experience than having this handsome, incredibly charismatic movie star wander around in my clothes. Because right off the bat, I am none of those things."

Katz’s dog training guide Katz on Dogs, along with his articles in Slate and his "Dog Talk" show on Northeast Public Radio, have somewhat gleefully antagonized the snobbish segment of the border collie community, who sniff derisively at Katz’s desire to train his sheep-herding dogs himself. In other words, Katz has often created a bit of a stir.

If not exactly mellower – Katz maintains strong, often provocative and sometimes unexpectedly humorous points of viewDog Days strikes a new, slightly more philosophical chord. Like his previous books, which include The Dogs of Bedlam Farm (2004) and A Good Dog (2006), his latest work is rooted in the daily challenges of running his farm – interacting with his dogs Rose and Izzy, tending his 30 sheep, four donkeys, various and sundry chickens and barnyard cats, and restoring his 1862 farmhouse and its barns and outbuildings. But while focusing on the specific activities of a single season (the " dog days," Katz discovered, begin on July 3 and end on August 11, the period when Sirius, named "the Dog Star" by the Romans, rises with the sun), Katz is a natural storyteller and the topics covered in his new book range widely. He considers his friendship with the "farm goddess" Annie, who manages his farm. He observes the comically truncated, "grunt and grumble" conversations of local farmers. He ruminates on his lifelong sense of alienation, of being a "citizen of nowhere." He thinks long and hard about his moral responsibility to his animals.

Katz is quick to acknowledge that his farm isn’t exactly like the other farms in the neighborhood. "I have all the issues of a real farm and it is a working farm. I make a living from it, but I do it indirectly," he says. "The other farmers come by here and say, what are you doing here exactly? And I say, well, I grow stories. That’s my crop."

"I always try to write from the heart," Katz continues. "Whether it’s something difficult, something beautiful, or something surprising, I try to find the emotional geography that exists between me and the place or between me and my animals."

He works "very religiously" from early morning until early afternoon in a small room at the back of his farmhouse that looks out over the pig barn and the dairy barn. "The animals all come and stare at me when they’re hungry. I’ll look up and there will be sheep and donkeys and cows staring at me. There’s a lot of groaning and baaing and get out here and feed us. It’s very unnerving," Katz exclaims.

But these sorts of interruptions seem to lie at the center of Katz’s ongoing transformation. "Talk about humility," he says. "A writer gets pulled off his high horse every day here. This idea that you can just hole up and work in a pristine and pure environment? Forget it. I have people pulling into the driveway all day long. I have animals escaping, animals getting sick, pipes bursting, I don’t know when the shearer will show up or when the hay will be delivered because these people don’t make appointments. I looked out the other day and my 2,400-pound cow Elvis had gotten a little lonely and had strolled right through the fence and was underneath my window staring up at me. Elvis loves donuts. So I went out with my donut and walked him back and we bonded a bit. Then I called somebody to fix the fence and while I waited – and this is new to me – I realized that these distractions, interruptions and crises inform what I do and give me things to write about. They are not intrusions on my work. They are my work."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

One of the many pleasures of Dog Days, Jon Katz's latest collection of "dispatches" about life on his 110-acre farm an hour or so north of Albany, New York, is witnessing a person in the process of opening up at a time in life…

During a reader’s first 10 minutes of acquaintance with Samantha (Sammy) Joyce, she discloses much of her loveable character. Spooked by a rogue fireworks display, Sammy dives off a boat into the Potomac right in front of her boss, the Vice President of the United States of America. The title character in Kristin Gore’s new novel, Sammy’s House, is a super-competent aide, but also a magnet for Kodak-worthy embarrassing moments that include riding a pissed-off camel and attempting to buddy-up to her boss during an in-flight movie on Air Force Two.

As the daughter of former Vice President Al Gore, Kristin Gore is well-placed to portray the intrigue, suspicion and high-stress atmosphere that pervade national politics at its top echelon. She accomplishes just that in Sammy’s House, which takes readers on a hilarious and suspenseful six-month romp through the nation’s capital. BlackBerrys strike up their competing orchestras every few seconds while top staffers spy on executive meetings through peepholes and security makes its rounds, routinely checking on automatic weapons closeted throughout the West Wing. When she’s not pushing for a bill that will lower the cost of lifesaving prescription drugs, Sammy worries about the president’s drinking problem and tries to ferret out just who on his staff is feeding information to a hostile blogger whose (frequently accurate) accusations make national headlines. Meanwhile, she tries to manage feelings of jealousy and insecurity concerning her boyfriend Charles, who stubbornly neglects to fulfill her fantasy of being whisked off to Paris for a marriage proposal.

Sammy’s charming goofs, mixed with her romantic yearnings for a modern-day prince, probably explain why some reviewers compared the character to Bridget Jones when Gore’s debut novel, Sammy’s Hill, was published in 2004. In an interview with BookPage, Gore says she doesn’t really agree with the comparison. She only read Bridget Jones after reviewers made the connection, she says. "On the one hand, I’m flattered,"  Gore says, acknowledging that Jones is a beloved character. But she thinks her own character is more defined by her work than the weight-obsessed, ditzy Bridget.

It’s also tempting for readers to see Sammy as the alter-ego for the author herself, who has rubbed shoulders with world leaders and who is close in age to her young heroine (Gore turned 30 in June). But, as Gore sees it, she’s not really that similar to Sammy. She likes the character, especially her passionate idealism, but "Sammy is based on lots of people I came across on Capitol Hill,"  Gore explains. "One of the good parts of that world was the interaction with people who want to make a difference." Because Gore’s new novel has the White House world so realistically pegged, down to its smallest details, many readers will inevitably look for parallels to current world leaders and ex-presidents. And Gore’s background including a stint at the National Lampoon while a student at Harvard certainly invites such conjecture. When asked if her fictional former President Pile is inspired by George W. Bush, Gore responds that such speculations reflect in a funny way more on readers’ perceptions of Bush than on her intentions as a novelist. While she admits that her novel has a satirical element, she insists, "It’s absolutely fiction."  Similarly, if Gore’s fictional president, the closet alcoholic Max Wye, looks a lot like the controversial Bill Clinton, "that means you probably see Clinton as a brilliant but addictive personality," according to Gore.

While Sammy’s House makes its debut in bookstores this month, Gore will be finishing work on the screenplay for Sammy’s Hill. Columbia Pictures has bought the film rights and David O. Russell (I Heart Huckabees, Three Kings) is set to direct. Gore says she and Russell have approached Kirsten Dunst about playing the part of Sammy. Though Dunst hasn’t signed on yet, Gore thinks she’d do well in the role because she’s "smart, quirky and funny. She can pull off comedy pretty well, but she also brings that fresh-faced enthusiasm that would be good for Sammy. And people can believe she might not have the rest of her life together."

While Gore finds it incredibly exciting to see her first novel turned into a film, it’s not her end goal. After all, she quit her job writing for television to write novels, she notes, adding, "I really love books as books."   Somewhat surprisingly, Gore doesn’t foresee rounding out Sammy’s adventures in a trilogy. "I kind of like where I leave her,"  says Gore, though she’s not ruling out the possibility of returning to the character.  "I do love her. I hadn’t planned on it being two books; that took me by surprise. Now, I really feel like I’m done with her for a little while."

Gore is at work on a new novel with a brand-new set of characters. She’s not saying much about it yet, but she did reveal that it has nothing to do with politics, and it’s set in the South. Gore, whose family fortunes spring in part from tobacco farming, reveals, "There might be a farm involved."

Gore’s work for Harvard’s National Lampoon gave her a fine-tuned sense of how to churn out comedy, she says. But we can’t rule out the possibility that she inherited some writing talent from her father, who spent several years writing for the Nashville Tennessean before getting into politics. Do Kristin Gore and her father swap manuscripts? They sure do, she says. She describes her father and her mother, Tipper Gore (who took her author photo), as really supportive and encouraging of her writing career. "He and my mom are two of my first readers,"  says Gore. She also gets to read works in progress by her father, who is famous not only for his political roles, but also for his books, Earth in the Balance, An Inconvenient Truth and his current bestseller, The Assault on Reason. "I don’t generally rewrite him that much,"  Gore says with a chuckle,  "but I do enjoy reading it as he’s producing it." Given her vicarious absorption of national politics, you might think Gore would be tempted to get into political commentary, but she says fiction and comedy are more my thing. "I really enjoy inventing things,"  she concludes. "If you do that in nonfiction, you get in trouble."

Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

During a reader's first 10 minutes of acquaintance with Samantha (Sammy) Joyce, she discloses much of her loveable character. Spooked by a rogue fireworks display, Sammy dives off a boat into the Potomac right in front of her boss, the Vice President of the…

Nothing is more miserable—or more exhilarating—than a good case of lovesickness. But what does it mean to be lovesick? Is it high school puppy love, dreamily doodling the initials of a crush? Or is it something much darker?

In Peony in Love, the elegant and haunting follow-up to her extraordinarily successful novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), author Lisa See explores the true phenomenon of lovesick maidens: privileged but cloistered Chinese girls who fell under the spell of a romantic opera and literally wasted away.

The Chinese government actually censored the 1598 opera, "The Peony Pavilion," believing it to be dangerous. The opera tells the story of Liniang, a young woman who meets her lover in a dream, and upon awakening is so lovesick that she dies of a broken heart. In the end, her lover brings her back to life. The opera was revolutionary in its time, because it depicted a young woman choosing her own path.

In 17th-century China, the setting of See’s Peony in Love, it was customary for the wives, concubines and daughters of wealthy men to live their entire lives behind the gates of the family villa. Young women were promised to men they didn’t meet until their wedding night, when they were transferred like property from their natal family to their in-laws. Even if the girls were allowed outside the "inner chambers" of their homes, the disfiguration caused by their bound feet—an indication of good breeding and wealth that rendered women unable to do the hard work that should be left to servants—made it impossible for them to travel far.

These well-educated but sheltered girls who died in the name of love intrigued See.

"These girls were living more or less totally confined lives," See says in an interview from her home in Los Angeles, where she was preparing to embark on a 15-city book tour. "They never met their husbands. A lot of them never went out. They thought that in emulating Liniang, maybe they, too, would have some choice in their lives. Maybe true love would bring them back to life."

That fate doesn’t await the doomed 16-year-old in See’s new novel. Peony meets her soul mate during a forbidden late-night walk on the outskirts of her family villa. She sneaks away again the next night to meet him while her family is engrossed in a local production of "The Peony Pavilion." But Peony knows she is destined to marry a man she’s been promised to since birth. Soon, she finds herself obsessed with the very opera that has condemned so many other girls to their deaths. She sets off down the same dark path as she awaits her wedding day.

At its heart, Peony in Love is a ghostly coming-of-age novel.

"Peony learns the way we all learn: She makes horrible, stupid mistakes," See says. "Her heart is always in the right place but like all of us, sometimes that isn’t enough."

See uses her book to explore the mythology and beliefs that still linger in her own Chinese-American family, including the tradition of honoring the spirits of family members after they die. Although she and her grown sons are thoroughly American, See still identifies with the culture and customs of her ancestors.

"I have red hair and freckles," she said. "I don’t look Chinese, and (my sons) look even less so." But, she says, most of the some 400 relatives they have in Los Angeles are fully Chinese.

"When my kids think about family, that’s the family they envision," she said. "Those people, they were my mirror."

Writing is another tradition that runs in the See family. See’s mother, Carolyn See, is an accomplished novelist and book reviewer who taught her daughter to commit to her writing.

"Ever since I was a little kid, she was saying, ‘Write a thousand words a day,’" See recalls. "She also taught me to not be afraid to go to some pretty dark places in my writing."

Although See is able to disconnect from her work at the end of the day ("I still make dinner and go to the dry cleaners," she laughs), being immersed in such intense projects does affect her.

"When I write, I don’t have dreams," she says. "The first six weeks after I finish a book, I have the most vivid dreams. I think in some ways I’m doing my dreaming during the day, and by the time I’m done writing for the day, I can wake up."

It might have seemed to See that she was dreaming when Snow Flower—which now has almost a million copies in print—became a bestseller. See keeps on her desk a photo she snapped of a Snow Flower promotional poster she saw in a Paris Metro station.

"What happened with Snow Flower was and still is such a shock and a surprise to me," See says. "Of all of my books, I thought, no one is going to read this. I thought, if I’m really lucky, 5,000 people will read this book. But they’ll be the right people."

Part of the novel’s magic was See’s fascinating depiction of two nearly forgotten Chinese customs: the secret women’s language of nu shu, and foot-binding, a gruesomely painful custom in which mothers would break their daughter’s feet to reconfigure them in a smaller, daintier shape. See likens the practice to our society’s current fixation on breast enhancement.

"Breast implants are now a big high school graduation gift," she says. "It’s that same thing. Who’s giving that gift? Mothers to daughters. At its core, it’s to make her more marriageable. I live in L.A., so there are a lot of men walking around with women with these big plastic things on their chests."

Having already uncovered the lost worlds of nu shu, foot-binding and lovesick maidens, what’s left for See to explore? In her next book, she’ll write about the Chinese-American experience through the eyes of two girls sent to California from Shanghai for arranged marriages. See views it as a chance to write about the rapidly disappearing Los Angeles of her youth.

On a recent visit to L.A.’s Chinatown, she discovered that the community in which she grew up is already changing, with shops and buildings closing or being demolished.

"They were so much a part of my identity and who I am," she says wistfully. "In five to 10 years I won’t have any more ties to Chinatown. I’ve been kind of reeling from it, actually. This book is about people and places that disappear."

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

Author photo by Patricia Williams.

Nothing is more miserable—or more exhilarating—than a good case of lovesickness. But what does it mean to be lovesick? Is it high school puppy love, dreamily doodling the initials of a crush? Or is it something much darker?

In Peony in Love, the elegant and…

Betsy Carter is no stranger to hard times. Her own roller coaster of a life story, as recounted in her intensely honest memoir, Nothing to Fall Back On, includes cancer, a collapsed marriage and a house fire. Yet Carter a journalist who has worked at Esquire, Newsweek and Harper's Bazaar has taken every curveball flung her way.

Her humor and optimism shine through in her second novel, Swim to Me. It's the graceful and intriguing coming-of-age tale (or should we say tail?) of a young girl in the 1970s who searches for life beyond the confines of her unhappy home in the Bronx. Delores Walker's quest takes her to Weeki Wachee Springs, Florida (a real-life attraction, profiled in the box at right), where she becomes the star mermaid in an underwater show. Carter answered a few questions for BookPage about her new novel, the allure of mermaids and her own personal ups and downs.

Delores is thrilled at age 17 to find work as a mermaid in a Florida tourist attraction and as a weather girl for a local news station. Growing up, what was your dream job?
From the moment I went to Cypress Gardens and saw the water skiers with their tiaras and elbow-length gloves, I vowed to become one of them.

Swim to Me is set in the early 1970s, in the era of Watergate and Archie Bunker. What were you up to in 1973?
Alas, I was not a water skier. I was the media researcher/reporter at Newsweek.

You've set two novels in Florida, yet you live in New York City. Why are you so drawn to the Sunshine State?
We moved to Miami from New York when I was 10. I still haven't gotten over the colors, the heat and that behind many gas stations were cages with live bears and old Seminole Indians wrestling with alligators. Stuff you don't see in New York City.

Who would you rather be: Ariel (the Little Mermaid) or Esther Williams?
I envy Ariel's underwater lifestyle and her red hair, but Esther Williams got to wear those fabulous bathing caps with chin straps and the rubber flowers. I'd have to go with that.

Do you have a pool? If not, where's your favorite place to swim?
Chelsea Piers in New York is on the Hudson River with views of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It's the most beautiful pool in the world.

In a letter to her little brother back home in the Bronx, Delores writes, Things happen that you can never have imagined in your whole life. Tell us something that has happened in your own life that shocked you.
My life has fallen to pieces several times (see the last question). The surprising net of these disasters is a happy second marriage, a new career and the fact that I'm still here.

Delores and her fellow mermaids get a lot of attention when they stage an underwater take on The Godfather. What movie would best sum up your life?
No movie, but The Mary Tyler Moore Show came pretty close. Heaven help me, I've got spunk.

Delores' mother is a janitor at a New York City fashion magazine, where she hears a fashion assistant get quite the chewing out. You're a former magazine editor yourself. Are magazine offices really such snake pits?
Hmm, some places are worse, some are sheer joy. Mostly, I've worked at the latter.

You got rave reviews for your debut novel, The Orange Blossom Special. What's it like to write a follow-up? Nerve wracking?
It's a kind of disconnect. I write in my living room at home with only my dog, Lucy, as company. I find it remarkable that what happens in those hours gets turned into books that people actually read.

You wrote an incredibly candid memoir, Nothing to Fall Back On, in which you chronicled what you call your dark years: divorce, illness, career troubles. What was it like to lay bare your whole life for public consumption?
Insane. Horrifying. Liberating. And, God willing, I will never have enough material for another one.

 

Amy Scribner learned to swim in her grandmother's pool in Yakima, Washington.

Betsy Carter is no stranger to hard times. Her own roller coaster of a life story, as recounted in her intensely honest memoir, Nothing to Fall Back On, includes cancer, a collapsed marriage and a house fire. Yet Carter a journalist who has worked at…

Luck, chance, serendipity and coincidence: Patricia Wood knows well these four spices of life. It was through extraordinary good luck that her father, Ray "R.J." Dahl, a Boeing retiree, won $6 million in the Washington State Lottery in 1993. It was chance that her late ex-husband, an alcoholic Vietnam vet, had a brother with Down syndrome who remains a functional two-year-old at the age of 54. It was serendipitous that Wood met a valuable mentor in novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux (The Mosquito Coast, The Great Railway Bazaar) who encouraged her to drop everything and pursue the novel she was uniquely qualified to write. And it was purely coincidental that BookPage assigned this reporter to interview Wood, who happens to be a former high school journalism classmate.

When Wood and I talk to one another three decades after graduation, it isn’t to gossip about our former classmates, but to discuss her debut novel, Lottery, which opens with this line: "My name is Perry L. Crandall and I am not retarded." Wood has shaped her life-affirming book around a most intriguing premise: What if a mentally challenged shop clerk hit the big one?

We meet 31-year-old Perry, IQ 76, shortly before the death of Gram, the cantankerous, caring grandmother who instilled in him ironclad values after his self-absorbed mother left him in her care. When Gram dies, Perry’s money-grubbing brothers sell her house from under him and kick him to the curb. He moves into a small apartment above Holsted’s Marine Supply on the working docks of Everett, Washington, where he has worked his entire adult life. There, kindly shop owner Gary, his second mate Keith, a hard-drinking Vietnam vet, and the pudgy, pierced cashier Cherry help Perry navigate the swift currents of sudden independence.

Then the unimaginable happens: Perry hits the lottery for $12 million. Before the vulture brothers can descend, Keith helps Perry wisely choose annuity payments over the cash-out. As the family maneuvers to pounce on his millions, Perry revels in his new role as a businessman savant whose simple, successful marketing ideas spring from years spent listening to—while being ignored by—customers.

Owing to its cognitively impaired narrator, Lottery will inevitably bring to mind The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and Forrest Gump, though a more apt comparison in tone and emotional impact might be Ron McLarty’s touching 2005 debut, The Memory of Running.

Wood, who lives with her architect husband Gordon aboard Orion, a 48-foot sailboat moored in Ko’Olina, Hawaii, was just a thesis away from completing her education doctorate on disability and diversity at the University of Hawaii when Lottery sold at auction for a handsome sum. With healthy advance orders and Hollywood sizing it up as the next Rain Man, that thesis may have to wait; she has three more manuscripts waiting to see daylight.

"I’ve had this kind of windfall now twice in my life," she admits. "I was under the mistaken impression that I would be able to write my thesis and promote Lottery at the same time. Ha! All of a sudden, my Ph.D. has served its purpose; I have the learning. I wanted the degree because then I could get a job. But that doesn’t seem to be an issue right now."

Wood has led a varied life: She served in the U.S. Army, worked as a medical technologist, and taught marine science and horseback riding. But it was her encounter at 19 with her then-husband’s brother Jeri that sparked her interest in cognitive impairments and society’s often-insensitive reaction to them.

"I was uncomfortable at first; I really struggled with my feelings," she recalls. "You could tell that there were periods of time when he knew he was different." Years later, the author herself had that same feeling of otherness when her father won the lottery.

"You would think it’s a life-changing moment, but it is more a change in your own cognition," she says. "The perception is that money solves all your problems. The life-altering events of the lottery are more in what you choose to do after that point. Is it going to define you?"

Her father, who was comfortably retired from the Boeing test flight program, had been playing the lottery for less than a year when a machine issued him the winning ticket. His only celebration was to upgrade from coach to first class on the European vacation he and his wife had already booked.

But an equally harsh blow accompanied his good fortune.

"Very shortly after they won, it became readily apparent that something was dramatically wrong with my mother," Wood says. "Her down-spiraling into dementia made me think, is this a pact with the devil? I started thinking, what would you want, win the lottery but know that you would be affected by dementia? I visualized one of those linear graphs—at what point as the wealth increases and the IQ decreases do you become acceptable socially? That was my premise."

Wood’s mother passed away last year. This spring, Wood used part of her advance for Lottery to take her 87-year-old father on a trip to Norway to boost his spirits.

Wood received help and encouragement from Theroux, her horseback riding student, and novelist Jacquelyn Mitchard (Deep End of the Ocean), whom she met at the Maui Writers Conference and Retreat. She modeled Perry’s supporting cast after people in her own life; there is much of her father in Gram, and her late ex-husband in Keith. Unfortunately, the less savory characters also resided close to home.

"The inspiration for the brothers, in part, comes from my own family," she says. "It caused hard feelings. It causes relatives to stop speaking."

Wood dismissed the suggestion of editors that she abandon the first-person narrative, knowing full well how challenging it would be at times to advance the story through Perry’s limited understanding.

"The authenticity is very important. I want people who are termed normal to really feel what it’s like to be like Perry. I didn’t want to have another book where this person is so inspirational, and celibate. A lot of parents of these kids who have read my book say, yes. Yes. I want to believe that my child has a life."

Jay MacDonald and Patricia Wood were classmates at Shoreline High in Seattle. Go Spartans!

 

Luck, chance, serendipity and coincidence: Patricia Wood knows well these four spices of life. It was through extraordinary good luck that her father, Ray "R.J." Dahl, a Boeing retiree, won $6 million in the Washington State Lottery in 1993. It was chance that her…

Jonis Agee didn't intend for her 10th book, The River Wife, to become her first historical novel. Instead, she set out to tell a more contemporary story of life in the heartland, as she had done in her 1993 novel Strange Angels, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and in her highly praised short story collections Acts of Love on Indigo Road and Bend This Heart. But sometimes a book has intentions of its own.

"I was in despair often," Agee says of her efforts to keep the novel recently named both a Book of the Month Club and a Literary Guild selection on track. She spoke about the particular challenges of writing The River Wife during a call to her home in Omaha, Nebraska. Agee and her second husband, to whom the new novel is dedicated, moved there this year, returning to the city of her birth after years in Iowa, New York state, Los Angeles, the Twin Cities and Ann Arbor as an itinerant student/writer/academic. Agee now teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. "I'm one of those writers who have to be in a place that works for me," she says. "I love Ann Arbor, it's a truly great university, but I felt like I was in an upside-down Tupperware bowl there. I had to leave. I like places that are not peopled. I need that immensity of space and that ability to feel small so that other parts of life can expand against that openness."

But Agee's compositional struggles had less to do with place and space than with the novel's back story. In the background of the work-in-progress lingered an alluring tale, based on a true account, of a young girl pinned under a fallen rafter and abandoned by her family during the catastrophic 1811 New Madrid earthquake, an event of Katrina-like proportions that changed the course of the Mississippi, destroyed nearby towns and altered a way of life.

"I couldn't get rid of the idea of that girl," Agee recalls. "Sometimes before I'd go to sleep, I'd figure out ways to rescue her. That story stayed with me for a couple of years, and my agent and my editor kept asking why I didn't tell it. But I resisted that stretch into historical material because I thought I didn't know enough. Finally I decided I had to try, and once I did, it just began working. Then it became a matter of paring things down, because I ended up writing a 700-page novel. That's the way it is for me: once the door opens, things just come flooding."

From that flood of imagination emerged the character of Annie Lark Ducharme, whose ordeal and eventual rescue in the aftermath of the earthquake is told in riveting detail in the opening chapter of The River Wife. Her rescuer and soon-to-be husband is a French fur trader named Jacques Ducharme. He is the magnetizing force of the novel, a soul-distorting mix of love and unbounded acquisitiveness that quickly transmutes him into a violent, rapacious river pirate and sets off an enduring contest of wills between Annie and himself, a conflict that reverberates through successive generations of Ducharme "river wives," through whose eyes we see and feel the action unfold, as recorded in the "family books" they keep.

The River Wife, with its familial conflicts, dark mysteries, regional history and evocative use of language, has the flavor and tone of a Southern gothic tale. This might be because Agee has always drawn inspiration from her "literary forebears" William Faulkner and James Agee, who is also a distant relative. But it is equally possible that she draws from an understanding arising from her own family history.

Agee's parents, she recounts, had a storied romance, meeting in third grade in a small Missouri town, falling in love despite the abiding hatred that existed between their two families and secretly marrying in high school, a fact their children learned only after their parents' deaths, which occurred within two days of each other.

"I grew up with a lot of family history, the way many Southerners do," she says. "You're told a lot of stories. There's a lot of gossip and there's always a little mystery involved: little entanglements adults won't explain, dropped sentences, suggestions. It isn't the sense of family that probably a lot of other people have. In every generation there is somebody responsible for keeping the family books, continuing the research, keeping the story going. I think I ended up writing this novel, which is historical, because in some way I am always working my way back."

Agee illustrates and enlivens The River Wife with vivid sensory detail. To achieve that depth of detail, she did large amounts of research, traveling through the region often, then surrounding herself in her workspace with old photographs and artifacts Civil War bullets, old handmade bottles dug from Mississippi River mud, pieces of stone, cotton gathered from the roadside during harvest near the site of New Madrid.

"Those tactile things kept me anchored to the work," she says. "I really wanted to enable my readers to bring their bodies to that place and time. I think one of my jobs as a writer is to preserve a time and a place like a historian. But a writer is also preserving more of the world than a historian. We're archivists not just of history, but of the physical and psychological and sociological world."

"I've always felt that our world is so endangered that I want to put as much of it in my books as is possible, so that we never lose it completely," Agee says. " I hope that if someone happens to read this book 50 years from now, they will be able to feel they are in the place and time, as we feel reading the novels and plays of other times."

 

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

Jonis Agee didn't intend for her 10th book, The River Wife, to become her first historical novel. Instead, she set out to tell a more contemporary story of life in the heartland, as she had done in her 1993 novel Strange Angels, which was…

Jay Winik doesn't prowl through the raw materials of history to prove a point or to bask vicariously in a time more congenial or exciting than his own. Instead, he looks for great, socially relevant stories lived out by towering figures. He found these elements in profusion in the accounts that became April 1865: The Month That Saved America, his 2001 bestseller. In his new book, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800, Winik's cast and canvas are immeasurably larger and even more earth-shaking.

Noting that the successful but initially fragile American Revolution set off reverberations felt around the world, Winik concentrates his jeweler's eye on the political machinations of the Founding Fathers, the barbarities and expansionism of the French Revolution and the attempts of Russia's tireless and formidable Catherine the Great to extend and consolidate her vast empire. Each of these theaters of action directly affected the others and, to varying degrees, the rest of the world. Common to the leaders of all three nations, Winik argues, was an attraction to the reforming zeal trumpeted by Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau. The crux of this belief eschewed an order based on the direct will of God and the fixed nature of the universe, writes the author. Instead, it focused a bright light on man-made laws and man-made authority. Speaking to BookPage from his home in Maryland, Winik first explains how he came up with the idea for the book. What I was hoping to do was search around and find something that was monumental, something that had narrative power, something where I could really make a fresh contribution and something that would play to my strengths as a writer. It took a while probably about two months of researching, reading and thinking about it. It was a little bit daring for me to take on something so extensive and so new, for which there was no model or template. . . . It just seemed to me that this was something that cried out for a book, he says. Once he had settled on the subject, it took him another six years to research and write it.

A senior scholar at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy, as well as a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, Winik is a master at character depiction and dramatic narration. The book has the cliff-hanging pacing of a fictional adventure. Under the rubrics The Promise of a New Age, Turmoil, Terror and A World Transformed, he alternates chapters that are titled simply America, Russia and France. Within these divisions, characters emerge, engage our sympathies or contempt and are then taken to a crisis point before a new chapter intervenes to carry on narratives that were previously seeded. It is particularly heartbreaking to watch the stories of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette play out and we are more than halfway into the book when those calamities happen.

While Winik does not play favorites he is meticulous in documenting flaws as well as virtues it is obvious that he has particular respect for Catherine the Great and George Washington as national leaders. If you were at a dinner party, Winik muses, and you got the chance of being next to Washington or Jefferson or Hamilton or Robespierre or Louis XVI or Catherine, she might be your most fascinating dinner partner. Even though she presided over a political system very different from ours, you can see that she felt as deeply and intently about [social and political] issues as the American founders did. What's so fascinating and what I really tried to bring out as it came to light for me is that whereas our founders, who had a highly different set of circumstances, drew one set of conclusions, say, from Montesquieu, [Catherine drew another]. They took from Montesquieu that we should have a separation of organs of government and a balance of power between the different organs. But Catherine, reading Montesquieu, took an entirely different set of ideas, which was that republics could not last over a large land mass and that a large land mass needs an autocratic-style government. Of all the titans Winik profiles, he concedes that Washington was the least charismatic of the group. He was not the most brilliant, not the greatest orator, not the deepest thinker and he certainly wasn't the most exciting. What he had was a vision and a sense of when to move the country fast and when to move it slow. I think it's fair to say that without Washington, we probably would not have survived that perilous first decade which really set the tone for America. Winik is at a loss, however, to explain the bloody excesses of the French Revolution. It was one of the great puzzles, he muses. On the one hand, the French Revolution, having been inspired in great part by the revolution that took place in America, gave us some of the loftiest words and ideas that mankind has ever received. By the same token, it gave us one of the most savage, totalitarian regimes history has ever witnessed, to the point where they were not only beheading in the most savage way the political opposition but often their own colleagues. . . . I guess if you were to reach for a larger viewpoint as to why, [it would be that] absent the rule of law and having a sense of such absolute true belief, they descended into barbarism. He likens the French bloodbath to Pol Pot's massacres of his fellow Cambodians.

Whatever their methods, Winik ultimately concludes, these national leaders were all fighting desperately for the world they believed in. And, in the end, he argues, humanity benefited. Within essentially a single generation, he writes, arguably greater progress had been made politically than in all the millennia since the beginning of time. Currently immersed in the relatively tranquil chores of promoting the new book, Winik confesses that he hasn't a clue as to what his next project will be other than monumental.

Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

 

Jay Winik doesn't prowl through the raw materials of history to prove a point or to bask vicariously in a time more congenial or exciting than his own. Instead, he looks for great, socially relevant stories lived out by towering figures. He found these elements…

Valerie Martin is anything but an autobiographical writer. Her previous novel, Property (2003), which beat out books by Zadie Smith, Carol Shields and Donna Tartt to win the coveted Orange Prize, is set on a Louisiana sugar plantation in 1828 and tells the disturbing story of the loveless marriage between the plantation owner and his wife and the morally fraught relationship between the wife and the female slave she was given as a wedding gift.

Her 1990 novel Mary Reilly, which was made into a movie starring John Malkovich and Julia Roberts that Martin does not particularly like (and in truth, the book is far, far better than the film), is a brilliant recasting of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story told from the point of view of a household servant.

And even her rather amazing new novel Trespass, which tells an emotionally and politically charged tale of the elemental conflicts that are stirred to life when Brendan and Chloe Dale's only child, Toby, falls in love with a Croatian refugee named Salome Drago, does not in any obvious way follow the contours of Martin's own life.

Yet in conversation, one is struck by the way in which Martin takes bits and pieces of seemingly ordinary personal experience and coolly transmutes them into fictional events of extraordinary power.

"I had a poacher," Martin says, describing the origins of the book during a call to her home in Millbrook, New York. Martin and her partner, translator John Cullen, bought an old, four-bedroom Victorian house there not long ago. Before that, they lived in a house with a meadow and a wood very much like the one described in Trespass. "I did exactly what Chloe does in the novel: I walked out and went up to the poacher and said, 'Don't hunt here.' He had an accent so I guess I had a foreign poacher. I was interested in how I responded to that."

Martin's response to her trespasser was remarkably layered, as is her novel. Chloe Dale's response, on the other hand, is swift and visceral. Chloe is an educated, middle-class American mother whose husband, Brendan, is a university history professor on sabbatical while he slowly completes a book about Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and the Fifth Crusade. Chloe herself is an artist hard at work on the illustrations for an expensive edition of Wuthering Heights. Chloe sees her poacher as a threat and reacts, just as she sees Toby's new girlfriend Salome as a threat and reacts.

"One of the things I had been thinking about when I started was how often I've noticed that for my friends who have sons, their sons' girlfriends are never good enough," says Martin, the mother of one child, a daughter who now teaches ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "I've seen it often enough to make me think that this is some powerful force that they can't control. I'll often meet the young woman who has been described as just impossible' and she seems perfectly nice to me. But then I don't have a son."

Family conflict is not the only kind of uncontrollable force that permeates Trespass. Martin began composing the novel writing her scenes by hand on paper, then editing and typing them into a computer at the rate of about a page a day just as the Iraq war began. "I was thinking about the lead-up to the war and war in general," she says. "My original notion was that the poacher was Lebanese and I was going to write about his life. So I read a great deal about the Lebanese civil war, which was really complex. Then John, my partner, who used to work for oil companies as an abstracter in Louisiana, mentioned that the oyster fishermen down at the bottom of the [Mississippi] river were Croatian. Several generations of my mother's family were all from New Orleans, and I grew up there, but I hadn't known that and I got very interested in it. That's where the Croatian strand of the novel came from."

That strand the dark repercussions of a horrific, genocidal war on Salome Drago's family intrudes increasingly on the Dales' rather sunny life as the novel progresses. "I was conscious early on that the book was about both the fear and the attraction of foreignness, which I think Americans feel particularly," Martin says. And in that, Martin finds a parallel with Wuthering Heights, the book Chloe is illustrating. "It's a book about what my book is about, which is fear of foreignness and the ingratitude of the upstart. It's also a book I've always loved because I think it's profoundly sociological and at the same time mythical. The notion of people who live in the light and those who come from the dark is so important to that book, and I liked the idea that Americans live in realms of light and live in fear of the intrusion of the realms of darkness."

Martin weaves her themes of darkness and light deftly. Trespass is a book that keeps you up reading at night and stays in your thoughts throughout the day. It is full of surprises, large and small. Yet despite its complexity, the story moves swiftly, with sparkling clarity and remarkable compression, especially near the end.

"I noticed when I would finish reading a novel that I felt I had been dumped out of really rapidly, I liked the feeling," Martin says, explaining her interest in swift endings to her novels. "So for a long time I've had a routine when I get within three or four scenes of the end: I try to imagine how many scenes I can do it in, then try to do it in one less. But the ending should also come naturally out of the story. I just try to follow the story. I don't think about readers, because when you try to please them, that way madness lies. I'm always just trying to write the book I want to read."

Which in the case of Trespass works out very nicely for other readers, too.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

Valerie Martin is anything but an autobiographical writer. Her previous novel, Property (2003), which beat out books by Zadie Smith, Carol Shields and Donna Tartt to win the coveted Orange Prize, is set on a Louisiana sugar plantation in 1828 and tells the disturbing story…

Sports and musical theater may seem like an unusual pairing, but not in the hands of children’s author Deborah Wiles. Her memorable new novel for middle-grade readers, The Aurora County All-Stars, artfully combines drama and baseball, friendship and loss, in a story that is by turns hilarious, poignant and poetic.

Wiles, the author of two picture books and two previous novels (including the National Book Award finalist Each Little Bird That Sings), says childhood summers she spent in Mississippi were the inspiration for her characters and her enduring love of storytelling.

" As the oldest of three children in an Air Force family," Wiles says, "Mississippi was an important place for me, because we moved all the time. Having a place to call home, to go back to over and over, no matter where we lived during the year Mississippi is so instrumental to who I am."

The author, who recently moved to Atlanta after spending many years in Maryland, says she harks back to those summers with every story she writes. "I love dialogue it comes naturally to me. It also comes from listening to the old people tell their stories over and over again. The cadence, the rhythm, the passion, the delight in the telling, stayed with me."

Her delight is evident in The Aurora County All-Stars, where humor and mystery abound: Who is Mr. Norwood Boyd, and what’s his relationship to young protagonist House Jackson? Will Frances Shotz, age 14, and her grandiose plans for a pageant derail the annual baseball game? Will Ruby play catcher, even though she’s (gasp) a girl? And is that pug really wearing a tutu? If those questions feel like dramatic cliffhangers, it’s no coincidence; The Aurora County All-Stars is filled with them, thanks to its origins as a serial novel in the Boston Globe. The newspaper asked Wiles if she’d like to write it as part of a project for Newspapers in Education. The specifications: Aim for a male audience, write for grades four to seven, and use eight 2,000-word segments.

Wiles got right to work. "I decided to learn as much as I could about Victorian serial novels. They’re so much like Southern stories. They’re over-the-top, there’s mayhem involved, secrets and all kinds of dead guys. As for the baseball plotline, it wasn’t much of a stretch. I remember loving the Dodgers as a kid. I wanted Sandy Koufax to notice me and marry me. My brother loved the Yankees, so there was a big rivalry in our household," she recalls. Wiles says her longtime love of Walt Whitman’s poetry inspired the story’s poetry-centric plot elements.

The author’s own writing life has followed a long arc, from an early time of struggle to a new era of discovery and satisfaction.

"I married at 18 and skipped college," Wiles says. "I raised my first two kids as a single parent. Those were tough, lean years." She adds, "I had no skills and no education. My longest job was in the Washington, D.C., subway system, in the 1970s. I spent my lunch hours at the [now closed] Tenley Circle branch of the public library."

It was at that library, Wiles says, that she began to realize her dream of becoming an author. "I scoured the library shelves and used bookstores for books on how to write." Wiles began to publish her writing—mostly essays and articles 10 years after those library days, but her children’s book efforts were rejected for 10 more.

"Then, on my 40th birthday, an editor said, ‘I really like this one, do you want to work on it?’ The book sold five years later. It took decades, it was ridiculous," Wiles says. "Who would go through that craziness? But I wanted to tell these stories. They meant so much to me."

Wiles says she believes grief and sadness are important elements of storytelling. "When I wrote Each Little Bird That Sings, I was going through a lot of death: my mother, father and my marriage died," she explains. "Loss has shaped me an awful lot, but I don’t mind. If [our stories] deal with joy, pain, grief, fear or contentment, we’re here to help one another through."

That outlook has affected Wiles’ writing. "I try to be as honest as I can," she says. " [At first] I was afraid to let my characters’ hearts break, to let anything bad happen to them. Now I know I have to do that it’s a fact of life." But joy is the predominant emotion when Wiles speaks of her career as an author. "Kids are a great audience to write for. Their hearts are ready for stories, ready to be entertained and so is mine. I’m so fortunate to be, finally in my life, to be doing something that feels so purposeful and meaningful, the thing I wanted to do for so long."

Linda M. Castellitto writes from North Carolina, where she keeps her ears open for good stories.

 

Sports and musical theater may seem like an unusual pairing, but not in the hands of children's author Deborah Wiles. Her memorable new novel for middle-grade readers, The Aurora County All-Stars, artfully combines drama and baseball, friendship and loss, in a story that is…

As most Americans know by now, there are two Stephen Colberts. One is a quick-witted, classically trained 43-year-old actor, husband and father of three from Charleston, South Carolina, who drifted into comedy at Chicago's famed Second City improv troupe and fractured our funny bones as a clueless TV news correspondent on Comedy Central's Emmy Award-winning faux newscast, "The Daily Show." The other is the character Stephen Colbert (that's kohl-BEAR, as in beware of), the mirthfully egotistical uber-pundit whose nightly half-hour assault on reason, "The Colbert Report" (silent Ts, please), takes the huffing and puffing of the Bill O'Reillys, Sean Hannitys and Rush Limbaughs to hilariously absurd lengths.

We were frankly uncertain which Stephen would be handling the interview honors for I Am America (And So Can You!), the first book from the Colbert Nation. When an actor creates a monster like the irrepressible "Report" host, interviewers naturally wonder if they'll have another Borat on their hands. It turns out we wound up with a little bit of both.

" I like to jump back and forth between them," says a relaxed, congenial Colbert by telephone from New York. "It doesn't really matter to me how much of what I believe the audience knows. Do I believe what I'm saying or not? I sometimes cross that line.

Taking his lead from the success of the 2004 bestseller from "The Daily Show," America the Book, to which he contributed, Colbert and his dozen writers spent nine months crafting this warped populist manifesto on race, immigration, class, aging and the media.

As on the "Report," the deadpan Colbert here assumes laughably irrational stands on just about everything. A sampling: the elderly ("like rude party guests. They came early, they're always in the bathroom and now they just won't leave"), the New York Times ("I call it 'The Juice' because like steroids, [it] fills you with rage and shrinks your genitalia"), India's caste system ("These castes forever determine what level of tech support questions they are allowed to answer"), bass players ("It's like you made a poorly worded deal with the devil to be a rock star") and talking around the race issue ("If race were a sweater, it would be made of cashmere, and you could only wash it by hand").

Borrowing from his TV show's popular segment "The Word," Colbert underscores his satirical opinions in the book with equally outrageous margin notes.

" We've got a slightly different flavor in that 'The Word' is a counterpoint, and the margin notes in this book are my ability to add opinion to myself, so they're supportive," he explains. "I heard somebody say it's as if I'm reading the book over your shoulder and whispering in your ear."

Books, of course, are anathema to the Colbert character, who holds his truths alone to be self-evident. It's a paradox he tackles on the opening page: " I am no fan of books, and chances are, if you're reading this, you and I share a healthy skepticism about the printed word. I want you to know that this is the first book I've ever written, and I hope it's the first book you've ever read. Don't make a habit of it."

In reality, Colbert's a big reader. "I love them," he says of books. " I personally am a big fan. They're my best friends." Books—particularly science fiction and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings—helped him through a family tragedy. The youngest of 11 children, Stephen was 10 when his father and two of his brothers were killed in a plane crash in North Carolina.

His teenage penchant for Dungeons & Dragons led to an interest in drama. Colbert pursued serious theater at Northwestern University before a post-graduate gig in the Windy City lured him to the light side.

" I was a drama guy. I had a classical actor's education, doing the classics and studying Stanislavski. I pictured myself doing classics," he recalls. "But then I fell in with the comedy crowd in Chicago at Second City, and that just corrupted me for the rest of my life. I had to go do things that made people laugh because I got addicted."

Colbert broke in at Second City in 1986 as understudy to Steve Carell, now star of NBC's "The Office." The two would eventually share the Second City stage and team up again on "The Daily Show" in the point-counterpoint takeoff, "Even Stephven.

Colbert blossomed creatively on "The Daily Show," where his take on the clueless field reporter continues to set the standard for news parody. His most beloved segment, "This Week in God," lives on in his absence; those are still his "boops" on the God machine.

Colbert's solo shot came almost by accident when "The Daily Show" ran a fake promo for a nonexistent show called "The Colbert Report." "One of the early clues that we should maybe go do the show was that people kept contacting Comedy Central saying, when is that on? We want to see it," he says.

His oblivious TV reporter quickly morphed into the over-the-top narcissistic pundit with a thing for O'Reilly and an irrational fear of bears.

" The character that I do now is an extension of the self-important news correspondent in that I always wanted (him) to be, well-intentioned but poorly informed and high status, really on a certain level an idiot," he says. "I don't think guys like Sean Hannity don't want what's best for America; I just think their idea of what's best for America is wildly misinformed."

Colbert has abandoned, perhaps wisely, any dramatic aspirations.

"In 2004, I did a 'Law & Order' where I played a murderer and it's just hilarious. I'm completely serious, but for the entire thing you're waiting for me to do a slow take to the camera. It's like a 45-minute setup to a punch line that never comes," he says.

"After you say the things that I've said for the past few years with a straight face, who's ever going to take me seriously again? I think that's crossed the Rubicon. It's not going to happen."

 

Jay MacDonald writes from bear-free Austin, Texas.

As most Americans know by now, there are two Stephen Colberts. One is a quick-witted, classically trained 43-year-old actor, husband and father of three from Charleston, South Carolina, who drifted into comedy at Chicago's famed Second City improv troupe and fractured our funny bones…

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