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The signs are everywhere, if you know how to read them: fireworks, birds, poppies, music. Signs of joy, remembrance or of something yet to come or could they be merely figments of your imagination?

In award-winning author Patricia MacLachlan's new book for young readers, Edward's Eyes, we meet a young boy with a special ability. His eyes are not only remarkably beautiful, they are so perceptive that they can see the future, appreciate the past and be fully conscious in the moment. Through Edward, we are able to understand a world that is more magical than many of us can ordinarily perceive. MacLachlan, who won the Newbery Medal two decades ago for Sarah, Plain and Tall, came up with her latest story after a conversation with her son, a former photographer who now works in Tanzania with the renowned primatologist Jane Goodall.

"I saw his driver's license and realized he was an organ donor," MacLachlan says. "Since he no longer uses his eyes for photography, we joked about how great it would be if someone else got a chance to use them." That conversation stayed with MacLachlan for several years. She even went so far as to write the beginning of a book with that concept in mind, but it wasn't until Edward introduced himself to her that things really got started.

MacLachlan, an only child who became a voracious reader and often acted out the stories she was reading with her parents, does not simply make up characters, they come to her. "When I was young, I had all these imaginary friends that I had conversations with," she recalls. In fact, her bond with these imaginary friends was so strong that she insisted her parents set a place for them at their dinner table. "They tolerated it with good humor," MacLachlan says, "but I'm sure it was trying."

As an adult, she draws from this wild imagination and meets characters everywhere in her car, in the shower, in bed or whenever she has a quiet moment to think. The inspiration for her characters' personalities or abilities is usually related to what she is experiencing or noticing at the time. "There is something magical about a child's mind," says the author, who is married to a clinical psychologist, "and I began noticing how some children are more tuned into the world around them than others." Thus Edward's character came with a special gift of sight. Although MacLachlan writes about the beauty this ability reveals, Edward's Eyes is not simply a story about magic or spirituality. Instead, it is a story about the relationships of siblings, the fragility of life and the ability to overcome tragedy. MacLachlan handles these difficult themes with empathy, optimism and a clear prose that speaks directly to the reader without being heavy-handed.

The storyline follows Edward, through the eyes of his older brother Jake, as he grows into a young boy and learns how to throw the ever-elusive knuckleball the poetry of which MacLachlan learned from her son. This eccentric young character goes on to predict his new sister's birth going so far as to name her long before her parents even know her sex and then, shockingly and tragically, dies in a bike accident. But this death is not the end of Edward or of the story. In effect, it is just the beginning of Edward's legacy. After the accident, his organs, including his beloved eyes (corneas), are donated to several patients awaiting these precious gifts of life.

"I thought the idea that someone's heart is beating in someone else's body was pretty powerful stuff," MacLachlan says. It is the journey of these eyes, and their effect on their recipient, a minor league baseball player, that brings the story to its heartwarming and poignant climax.

The author admits it is refreshing to get to know a new character after all the incredible years she spent working with Sarah of Sarah, Plain and Tall, including the sequels and the screenplays, for which MacLachlan received an Emmy nomination. "I felt like I took Sarah into menopause," she says. "It was sad, because I knew her so well, but it is a relief to be writing about another family."

MacLachlan plans to focus her next efforts on several picture books that she is writing with her daughter, Emily. The mother-daughter duo has already published one book, Once I Ate a Pie, and is working on their next collaboration. In the meantime, MacLachlan, a Wyoming native who splits her time between a home in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, and a cottage on Cape Cod, will be on a nationwide book tour for the release of Edward's Eyes, including a highly anticipated trip back to her hometown of Cheyenne. After that, it will be up to the characters she encounters in her back seat or in the bathroom to show her the signs to her next book and MacLachlan certainly knows how to read them.

Heidi Henneman writes from New York.

The signs are everywhere, if you know how to read them: fireworks, birds, poppies, music. Signs of joy, remembrance or of something yet to come or could they be merely figments of your imagination?

In award-winning author Patricia MacLachlan's new book for young readers,…

There is absolutely nothing about Chelsea Cain to remotely suggest that she had the year’s scariest novel inside her. The daughter of hippies who spent her formative years in an Iowa commune, Cain’s published work to date consists of an arch Nancy Drew parody (Confessions of a Teen Sleuth), a hippie-child anthology (Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture), a memoir of a road trip with her dying mother (Dharma Girl), a folk art how-to (Hippie Handbook) and a send-up of self-help for superheroes (Does This Cape Make Me Look Fat?). At 35, Cain is a seemingly well-adjusted Portland, Oregon, wife and new mother whose humorous weekly column in the Oregonian shows nary a hint of the chill factor behind her blue eyes.

How did a peace-and-love child come to unleash the full-on, visceral assault to be found in her new thriller, Heartsick?

Nightmares, gentle reader, nightmares.

But before we explore Cain’s psyche, you need to meet Gretchen Lowell, who, should this series take off as expected, may one day join Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter in our collective anxiety closet.

As Heartsick opens, the lovely Gretchen is strategically pounding nails into the chest of wide-awake-but-chemically-immobilized Portland Police Detective Archie Sheridan, whose task force has been on the trail of a serial killer for the past decade. He never expected his search would lead to the beautiful blond psychologist who only recently volunteered her services to the cause, only to abduct him. Then again, Gretchen is full of surprises, mostly of the excruciatingly painful sort. During their intimate week together, she uses a variety of tools to probe Archie’s pain threshold, ultimately bringing him to the brink of death before calling 911, saving his life but forfeiting her freedom. Someone please pull this girl’s Home Depot card!

Flash forward two years. The ordeal has left Archie a shell of a man with a raging Vicodin habit who visits Gretchen in prison weekly to learn the burial sites of her 200-plus victims. Only Archie knows the real reason for his visits: He can’t quit her. When teenage girls start disappearing, Archie and the task force are called in to hunt down the newly dubbed After-School Killer. The Portland Herald assigns pink-haired punk reporter Susan Ward to shadow Archie for a behind-the-scenes series. As the search continues, Susan’s own secret past places her in the killer’s path, and Archie, sensing a certain Gretchen-ness in the latest carnage, makes the kind of bone-chilling discovery that will have readers sleeping with the lights on.

Despite a quirky pace and a tendency to press the plausible, Heartsick may be the scariest psycho killer ride since Silence of the Lambs. The squeamish should definitely look elsewhere (perhaps a nice how-to book).

As a pre-teen growing up in Bellingham, Washington, Cain was terrified by news accounts of West Coast psycho killers. "We had Ted Bundy, the Hillside Strangler, the Green River Killer—it seemed like there were serial killers everywhere as a kid," she recalls.

Years later, Cain was pregnant with her first child and overindulging on rainy BBC America mysteries when she channel-surfed upon a Larry King segment with members of the Green River task force. She recognized the guests from newspaper accounts she’d read as a kid, and was fascinated by footage of them interacting with confessed Green River Killer Gary Ridgway.

"They would go on these weird field trips together, looking for bodies of his victims, and they had this very congenial relationship with him. They just seemed like friends; they had known him for so long because he had been a suspect for much of the life of the case," she says.

With prenatal time on her hands ("I couldn’t drink," she quips), Cain decided to explore her darkest fears as a child, and perhaps her fears for her daughter as well.

" Didn’t Mary Shelley write Frankenstein when she was pregnant?" she asks. "Maybe there is something to that, a fascination with death and life. Pregnancy is violent; in a way, it’s its own little torture. Maybe that’s where the fascination with the body in Heartsick comes from."

As luck would have it, Cain had recently joined a weekly writing workshop hosted by an author friend who is no stranger to graphic detail: Chuck Palahniuk. Did the best-selling author of Fight Club, Haunted and Rant help crank up the gore quotient of Heartsick?

"Oh, hugely," Cain admits. "Chuck is a big proponent of unpacking—really anything, but especially anything that’s visceral. I remember reading a passage aloud where they find the first girl’s body on the beach and Chuck was like, ‘No, no, no, no, no, I want to see what that girl looks like.’ And there’s something important in that, to understand the violence of that."

Choosing a female serial killer vastly opened up the psychological possibilities of the series—watch for Sweetheart and Heartbreaker in the next two years.

"That automatically added this sexual tension on top of it," Cain admits. "When women kill, we always want an explanation. We usually want to blame it on a boyfriend or a husband or a father; there’s got to be a guy in her past that screwed her up enough. But when men kill, we don’t necessarily feel this need to explain it. Women generally kill their babies or they kill their family members and they use poison or suffocation. It’s very quiet, it’s premeditated and it’s very different from the way men kill. I was interested in exploring a woman who kills like a man."

Though Cain admits she’s "a little nervous" about attracting an unstable fan or two with her graphic content, she defends her decision to "unpack" her childhood baggage.

" I don’t think it’s gratuitous. I think it’s a violent book, but in order to understand Archie and Gretchen’s relationship, which drives the whole narrative, you have to understand what he went through. Society is filled with violence. To point at a book and start crying about how that is where the problem is, that’s pretty naïve."

Jay MacDonald always wears his safety goggles when operating machinery.

 

There is absolutely nothing about Chelsea Cain to remotely suggest that she had the year's scariest novel inside her. The daughter of hippies who spent her formative years in an Iowa commune, Cain's published work to date consists of an arch Nancy Drew parody (Confessions…

One day, award winning-author Christopher Paul Curtis, who makes his home in Windsor, Ontario, drove past a sign that read Buxton 5 kilometers. The name of Buxton rang a bell it was the site of a 19th-century settlement for freemen and escaped slaves. Curtis, who had long considered writing about slavery, realized that in Buxton he had discovered the setting for his new novel, Elijah of Buxton.

Curtis, who loves to do school visits and enjoys teasing the kids, burst onto the writing scene in 1995 with the Newbery Honor book, The Watsons Go to Birmingham 1963, which he describes as one of those last-ditch efforts where you close your eyes and put everything you have into the ultimate do-or-die effort. Before The Watsons was published, Curtis spent 13 years on the assembly line at the Fisher Body Flint Plant No. 1 in Flint, Michigan, where he grew up. Now a sought-after and powerful speaker, Curtis recalls, "I had just been turned down for a promotion to become a customer service representative at the company because I was told, ”We don't think you're quite ready to speak to the public.'"

Perhaps because The Watsons changed his life and enabled him to write full-time, it has always been this author's favorite book. "In my eyes it would take a very, very special book to displace The Watsons from the number one position on my list of favorites," he says. Enter Elijah of Buxton.

Curtis explains, "I had always wanted to write a book about slavery but the conditions were so horrible I couldn't imagine writing from that point of view. Setting it in Buxton allowed me to approach it from the periphery, through the eyes of Elijah Freeman, the first free child born in the settlement, who sees the community through his parents' eyes." While the characters in the novel are fictional, Buxton was and is a real place in Ontario, some 200 miles northeast of Detroit. The settlement was founded in 1849 by an abolitionist, the Rev. William King, and it became the most successful planned settlement for the fugitives of slavery in Canada, with a population of more than 1,000 in the 1850s. The community still exists today, peopled by descendants of those first fugitives, and was recognized as a National Historic Site by the government of Canada in 1999.

The hero of the book is Elijah, an endearing 11-year-old who loves to fish and much prefers riding the community's mule, Old Flapjack, to the horse, Jingle Boy. ("Most folks say it's wrong, but if I had my druthers, I'd ride a mule over a horse any day. Horses do too much shaking of your insides when you ride 'em and they're a long way up if you lose your grip and fall.")

Most of all, Elijah struggles to overcome being fragile. ("I try not to be fra-gile by sucking down the looseness and sloppiness in my nose when they come and by not screaming and running off at the littlest nonsense. . . .") He also works hard to understand the secret language of grown-ups. Bout the only thing I could say for sure is that being growned don't make a whole lot of sense, he muses. Elijah's struggle to sort through the mysterious labyrinth of what growned folks do and say is amusing and, ultimately, heartbreakingly poignant.

Through Elijah, readers get a glimpse of the tremendous burdens the members of the community carry with them from lives spent in slavery, and the heartbreak of being separated from loved ones still enslaved. When Mr. Leroy has the chance to try to buy freedom for his wife and children, Elijah comes face to face with the realities of slavery and the role that greed and fear play in the adult world that sometimes seems to swirl around him.

"I wrote the last chapter first," explains Curtis, who says he never outlines his novels but prefers to be surprised. In the end, Elijah does break through to understanding, or as he says, the meaning on the back side of words. While he cannot make everything right, Elijah finds the courage to act on his realization to save a life.

Curtis has many warm memories of his own childhood, playing with his siblings and just being a kid. And perhaps it is this strong connection with being a child that allows him to convey Elijah's struggles so vividly for young readers.

"I love Toni Morrison's Beloved," Curtis says. "She approaches a nearly impossible subject from the periphery." And like Morrison's masterpiece, Elijah of Buxton is sure to become a classic for readers of all ages.

 

Deborah Hopkinson is the author of Up Before Daybreak: Cotton and People in America, which was recently named a Carter G. Woodson Award Honor book.

One day, award winning-author Christopher Paul Curtis, who makes his home in Windsor, Ontario, drove past a sign that read Buxton 5 kilometers. The name of Buxton rang a bell it was the site of a 19th-century settlement for freemen and escaped slaves. Curtis, who…

Alice Sebold certainly knows how to grab her readers' attention. Consider this first sentence from her best-selling 1999 memoir, Lucky: "In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered."

And the opener from her first novel, 2002's The Lovely Bones: "My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973."

And here's how Sebold begins her latest, The Almost Moon: "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily."

It's as if she were practically daring you not to read compulsively until suddenly it's 2 a.m. and you realize, bleary-eyed, that you have to get up for work in four hours.

But Sebold demurs when asked about her trademark opening lines, claiming she doesn't spend much time or thought on them. Instead, she writes them quickly so she can get on to the business of storytelling.

"It takes me so long to find the character, by the time I find her, it feels like she's been waiting around tapping her foot for years. She's impatient and ready to tell her story," Sebold says during a phone interview from her home in San Francisco, which she shares with her husband, Carter Beats the Devil author Glen David Gold.

Sebold's first novel, The Lovely Bones, sold more than 1.8 million copies in its first year of release and went on to become on one of the top-selling novels of the decade. After that head-spinning success, she is probably prepared for most anything this new novel brings her way. Yet one thing made her nervous: having her own mother read a book about a daughter who is driven to murder.

Her mother's verdict? "She liked it," Sebold says. "I'm very lucky that my mom's a big reader. She's able to understand that fiction writers work with material that's there for a reason. She's a very sophisticated, intelligent reader.

"I was fearful," she continues. "But family relationships do continue to surprise you if you're open to being surprised."

Certainly the family dynamic in The Almost Moon is anything but predictable. Helen Knightly has spent her life coping with her mother's mental illness. Often cruel and distant, her mother suffers agoraphobia so severe she can't leave the house without being wrapped head to toe in blankets. When Helen gets her first period, her mother—who can't bear not to be a part of this rite of passage—accompanies her to the drugstore fully cloaked in blankets.

After her father's death, Helen spends years taking care of her aging mother, driven by a toxic mix of duty, guilt and resentment.

"For years I had done my penance for blaming someone who was essentially helpless," says Helen. "I had warmed baby food and fed it to her with long pink spoons pilfered from Baskin-Robbins. I had carted her to doctors' appointments, first with blankets and then with towels to hide the world from her."

Finally, Helen snaps. During the next 24 hours, she grapples with what she's done, and what she should do next. Her still-devoted ex-husband flies in from across country to help her cover her tracks, but ultimately, Helen has to decide whether to face up to her mother's death.

Remarkably, although the book unfolds within a 24-hour period, the story never feels claustrophobic. The Almost Moon is incredibly fast-paced; it's the jittery, forceful story of a woman who sifts through her past to discover what brought her to such desperation. Readers, in turn, are compelled to acknowledge some of their own darkest thoughts. It may not be an easy read, but it's supremely rewarding.

Writing an entire book set in a single day is the kind of challenge Sebold savors, much like telling The Lovely Bones in the voice of a dead teenager.

"I like to break rules," she says. Telling a story in 24 hours allowed her to explore "pressures and limitations and what they can inspire. I am drawn to things that are going to force me into a corner."

After The Lovely Bones, Sebold found a certain freedom to break any rules she wanted. Her success brought financial security, to be sure, but she also no longer felt compelled to explain her writing choices.

"I decided I was just going to do my work," she recalls. "I realized if I concerned myself worrying in a micromanaging way about being judged, literally my head was going to explode."

The only opinion she seeks is her husband's. Sebold met Gold in the 1990s while both were attending the University of California-Irvine's writing program. They are successful novelists with very different approaches to their work. Gold, she says, is "Mr. Research," and shares regular progress reports on his work. Sebold, meanwhile, is a more solitary writer, allowing Gold to edit her but not talking much about plotting and characters.

"He only knows what's going on in my book when he reads the pages," she said.

While The Lovely Bones was Sebold's breakthrough book, she believes her memoir Lucky has also had a major impact. The searingly honest portrayal of the aftermath of being raped as an undergraduate has, she hopes, opened up the national conversation about rape.

"I think it helped make it an easier conversation," she says. "It familiarizes strangers with the experience in a way that decreases the isolation."

With just three books to her name, Sebold already has created an enduring body of work that is both wise and thought-provoking. Even so, she acknowledges she has a lot more to say.

"The luxury of being a writer," she said, "is that you don't retire."

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

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Read a review of The Lovely Bones.

Alice Sebold certainly knows how to grab her readers' attention. Consider this first sentence from her best-selling 1999 memoir, Lucky: "In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from…

At first blush it is a surprise to hear Ann Patchett say, "I do think of myself as a social and political novelist." Her previous novel, Bel Canto, which won her the Orange Prize and became an enduring favorite of book groups, is widely regarded as one of the best love stories of recent decades. And her scintillating new novel, Run, will surely be considered by many of its most avid readers the very thing she seems to fear most:" a heartwarming family drama."

But to Patchett's point, the romance in Bel Canto blooms amid the political and emotional turmoil of a terrorist takeover at a tony international gathering in South America. And Run, which concerns the family of a former Boston mayor, often rings with the hopeful political oratory of the 1960s, '70s and '80s, while raising large questions about our responsibilities for people beyond our immediate bloodlines.

"I come from a very complicated family, with tons of stepbrothers and stepsisters," Patchett says, with a characteristic mix of good humor and passion. "That is so much at the core of my imagination. You know? Who is your family? Who do you love? Who do you have responsibility to? My mother was married to my stepfather from the time I was five until I was 25. He had four children. My mother is married to someone else now who I love very much, and he has three children. Where are my levels of love and responsibility to all these people? I come from the school that if you spend a night in my house, you're my family. And you're my family forever."

The family in the novel Run is less extended but no less complicated than Patchett's own. As the book opens, Bernard Doyle, a widower and former mayor of Boston, is alienated from his oldest son Sullivan and now hopes to see his own thwarted political ambitions realized through his adopted African-American sons Tip and Teddy. Neither of these boys is particularly interested in a political life. Tip, the more brilliant of the two, studies ichthyology at Harvard; Teddy considers becoming a Catholic priest, like the elderly uncle he is devoted to. The story begins with Bernard dragging the two boys to a speech by Jesse Jackson as a blizzard descends upon Boston.

Patchett says her characters developed as she imagined a father who wants to raise one of his children to save the world. "When I first started the book I thought if you were really going to save the world in this present day, really help people, you would do it through science. Then I thought about religion. Then ultimately, over a period of a very long time, I came to politics. I decided you have the best chance of effecting real change through politics. So I thought a lot about Joe Kennedy and a lot about the three brothers in The Brothers Karamazov. So for me the book comes from trying to think deeply about the world, from a place of intellect and problem-solving."

According to Patchett, problem-solving and intellect also characterize her usual approach to writing fiction. During a call to her home in Nashville, where she has lived much of her life and where two-and-a-half years ago she married a local doctor after an 11-year courtship, Patchett says, "My standard line is that writing is like taking a car trip. If I don't know where I'm going and I don't have a map, I don't get there. I understand a lot of writers say if they knew where they were going, there would be no point in writing, that a book is the process of figuring out where it is going. But I need to know how it's going to end before I start."

Still, the composition of Run presented Patchett with a number of surprises. "I imagined the story would take place over about four months . . . and then I realized I was on page 140 and I was only two or three hours into the story. The level of intensity in which everything is called into question is so enormous that none of the characters can turn away from the action, so I had to stay with them and write a book that takes place over the course of 24 hours."

Nor did Patchett's original road map include the marvelous Kenya, a talented 11-year-old girl whose mother is seriously injured when she saves Tip from an oncoming car and whose quiet assertion that she is the adopted brothers' sister sets off the intense moral and emotional quest of the novel. "I hadn't planned for that, Patchett says, but then Kenya moved forward and I thought, well, I'm going to let her rise into that role."

Patchett, who spent 12 years in Catholic school (and jokes that as a result when her writing is stuck she "runs the vacuum, or dusts, or cooks, or I iron my husband's handkerchiefs. I'm a great wife. And I enjoy it!") adds: "In the same way that I like writing a book that has religion in it but is in no way about religion, I like a book that has people of different races in it without it being about race. Somehow, whenever I see a book that has white people and black people in it, it's a book about race, and that seems wrongheaded and untrue to the experience of life. The stakes are higher when you imagine people farther from your own experience, but the farther your characters are from your experience, the more likely you are to work to make sure they are fully realized characters."

"The value of literary fiction," Patchett says near the end of our conversation, "is that the writer brings half and the reader brings half. You have to leave enough space to let the book become something different with each reading. To me Run is about social responsibility. But I don't want it to be a polemic. I can't devalue what it becomes in anyone else's hands. I have left it open for readers to make it their own book. And if they make it into a heartwarming family drama, and that works for them and it teaches them something, then the book is a success."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

At first blush it is a surprise to hear Ann Patchett say, "I do think of myself as a social and political novelist." Her previous novel, Bel Canto, which won her the Orange Prize and became an enduring favorite of book groups, is…

In conversation, Ha Jin displays a remarkably playful sense of humor about the smallish absurdities of life. " It’s crazy!" he exclaims, laughing, after describing how novelist Allegra Goodman, Nobel prize-winning poet Derek Walcott and he all share a single office in the English department at Boston University, making it impossible for any of them to actually write there. He laughs again, almost gleefully, as he relates how, after getting a doctorate in modern American poetry and after developing a reputation as a poet himself, he taught poetry writing at Emory, but at BU, where he has been for five years, "there are so many good poets that I only teach fiction writing and literature."

This ebullience is, frankly, surprising, coming from the author of the highly, and deservedly, praised novels War Trash, which offers a deeply affecting portrait of the grim fate of Chinese prisoners of war during the Korean conflict, and Waiting, which won a National Book Award for its suggestive look at the emotional and political paralysis of life in the People’s Republic of China.

On the other hand, a stylistic and thematic playfulness bubbles enticingly beneath the surface of Ha Jin’s marvelous new novel, A Free Life, a book that offers a notably fresh look at the Chinese immigrant experience in America.

"Every book is a kind of departure; every book is a step forward, a move away from the past," Ha Jin says of the new novel during a call to his home in Foxboro, Massachusetts, where he and his wife live in a quiet neighborhood on the edge of a state forest. The couple’s son recently graduated from Princeton in American history and is now in graduate school at Brown. "The style in this book is different from my earlier books," he continues. "The linguistic playfulness in this book cannot be translated anymore."

Ha Jin came to the United States as a graduate student in 1985. Like Nan Wu, the central character in A Free Life, he decided to remain here after the Tiananmen massacre of June 1989. Unlike his main character, however, he has never returned to China, even for a brief visit. His novels, composed in English and translated into many languages including Chinese are banned in China. "I used to believe a good book should be translatable, meaning if it is translated back into Chinese it will be meaningful to the Chinese as well. But this book will be hard to translate into Chinese. Somehow it will be hard for Chinese to understand the meaning, the style, the playfulness. That is a kind of sacrifice, but I don’t care much about how the Chinese read this book anymore, mainly because I think of this as an American novel. Stylistically, I really wanted to do as much with English as I could."

A Free Life is a sweeping narrative that tells the story of Nan Wu, his wife Pingping, and their son Taotao as they struggle to establish a life in America over the course of about a decade. Nan moves from being one of the favored youth of China who was sent to be educated in the U.S., to a waiter and cook in a Chinese restaurant in New York after he rejects life in post-Tiananmen China, to a restaurant owner in Georgia, struggling to sustain his family while nurturing a desire to become a poet.

Throughout his absorbing story, Ha Jin offers an extraordinarily nuanced view of the complexity of immigrant communities and the individual human beings who inhabit them. The members of the Chinese community near Nan’s Georgia restaurant, for example, are divided over their conflicted loyalties to their homeland. Nan’s writer friend Danning is spiritually and morally at odds with himself about his artistic integrity versus his need to succeed in the restrictive social and political environment of China. Nan and his family face long, difficult periods of separation. They also encounter the subtle and not so subtle bigotry of some of the American inhabitants in the communities where they live. All of this is a forceful, moving reminder of the depth and range of human experience that unfolds, often below our awareness, in the seemingly monolithic communities of recent immigrants.

But Nan’s struggle is not merely about finding a way to fit into his new social environment, it is also about a more difficult effort within himself to seize the freedom that America offers him to become the person he chooses to be. "Nan’s struggle for freedom is not just about whether he has the right to be free," says Ha Jin, "it is about achieving a state of mind. A Free Life is about a person from a kind of totalitarian society, where freedom is alien, arriving here and being overwhelmed, because freedom involves a lot of uncertainty, risks, sacrifice and a lot of other things he simply couldn’t imagine."

That freedom, Ha Jin says, also involves more than just the ability to achieve financial success. "A lot of people come to the United States not just for material benefits. There is a kind of spiritual, even metaphysical aspect to this journey. It’s another part of the contemporary immigrant experience. In Nan’s case, he’s never really materialistic, so the general notion of the American dream doesn’t make much sense to him. For him the dream is much more than that."

In recent years, Ha Jin has spoken more and more frequently of his desire to become a truly American writer. To do that, he says, he has "to write more books about the American experience. I do believe the national experience is very important. It’s not just in the language but in really writing about the experience in a way that is somehow resonant with the audience." Later, near the end of the conversation, he observes, "I’ve been teaching immigrant literature recently, and I’ve realized that immigration is not a universal theme in literature, because it’s basically an American phenomenon."

So is A Free Life a book that allows Ha Jin to feel he’s become an American writer?

"It is a step toward the goal," Ha Jin says.

Indeed it is.

Alden Mudge, of Oakland, is a juror for the California Book Awards.

 

In conversation, Ha Jin displays a remarkably playful sense of humor about the smallish absurdities of life. " It's crazy!" he exclaims, laughing, after describing how novelist Allegra Goodman, Nobel prize-winning poet Derek Walcott and he all share a single office in the English…

What happens when a family of five is unleashed on two unsuspecting grandparents? (No, this is not the premise of the latest reality TV show.) If one of those grandparents happens to be best-selling author and columnist Judith Viorst, the answer is that chaos and hilarity ensue. When we caught up with Viorst, who first immortalized her youngest son in the children’s classic Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, she had just returned from a week in Maine with her middle son, Nick, and his family. She sounds rested and relaxed, not what you’d expect from someone who has recently conducted her own experiment in multigenerational living. Alexander, his wife and their three young children (ages five, two and four months) needed a place to live while remodeling their house, and the grandparents Viorst graciously offered to accommodate them.

Viorst and her husband of 47 years, Milton, also a noted writer and columnist, welcomed "the Alexander Five," as she lovingly refers to them, into their home with open arms (or, at least, with one arm open and the other deflecting the tidal wave of equipment and miscellany that came in their wake). She knew at the outset that there would be trying moments among the joyful ones and approached the whole undertaking as, she says wryly, "a personal growth experience."

"Anybody who comes in your house with a bunch of little kids is going to change the routine," says Viorst from her rambling three-story house in Washington, D.C., Alexander’s childhood home. For the organized author, embracing the chaos required some effort, as she recounts in her new book, Alexander and the Wonderful, Marvelous, Excellent, Terrific Ninety Days. When "the Five" would leave for the day, and order was briefly restored, she had the chance to reflect on her priorities—and get them straight. How important was it to keep her beloved velvet furniture in pristine condition? OK, well, that was pretty important, but the rest, she realized, fell under the rubric of "letting it go."

"My husband and I were very aware that this moment would not come again, that we had this very precious opportunity with these five quite wonderful people and why muck it up with too much fussing over crumbs or diapers or general mess? You know, I said to myself, get over it! It’ll be back the way you want it soon enough. And the fact was that we really missed them when they left." Sure she enjoyed returning to her less hectic life, but admits that now it’s "too damn peaceful!"

When asked what other challenges she met with along this journey of self-discovery, Viorst says restraining herself from offering too much unsolicited advice was one of the biggest. As she once expressed in her poem, "They may be middle-aged but they’re still my children," Viorst believes in the "state of permanent parenthood." In other words, once a mother, always a mother. "When my kids come to visit for Thanksgiving, you know we’re talking about people in their 40s, and I still want to say, don’t take the car tonight, it’s too icy," she says self-mockingly. "I have the keep-your-mouth-shut conversation with myself, and sometimes I listen and sometimes I don’t."

Also difficult was making sure her son and his wife were adequately stressed out about potential hazards their children might encounter during their stay, whether they be choking, falling or otherwise. She laughs, "The running joke is that I’m always trying to introduce them to new things to worry about. They’re insufficiently anxious."

It should come as no surprise to fans of the quick-witted Viorst that she’s a firm believer in the importance of laughter. "Fortunately everybody is saved from irritation by the fact that we all have senses of humor and are able to laugh about a lot of stuff. I mean, I don’t know how anybody is a member of a family or raises children without being able to laugh," she says.

The young Alexander, however, was not all smiles when he first learned of his eponymous book those many years ago. Viorst read it to him in manuscript form when he was four, and he was furious. "Why you giving me that bad day?" he exclaimed to his mother. "How come Nick doesn’t have a bad day? How come Anthony doesn’t have a bad day? Why you giving me this bad day?" Viorst recalls telling him, "Honey, it isn’t published yet, and we can change the name to Stanley or Walter, but then your name wouldn’t be in great big letters on the front of the book." After a long silence, he responded, "Keep it Alexander."

In one of life’s wonderful continuities, Viorst now loves reading the book to Alexander’s daughter Olivia. "She’s a dream," Viorst says of her undeniably precocious granddaughter. At present, Viorst is steadily working on another children’s book. Though she’s not prepared to say what it’s about, she does allow that it is very much inspired by Olivia, and dedicated to her. In the meantime, readers will be able to enjoy the fall 2008 release of Viorst’s next offering, Nobody Here But Me, a children’s book about a little boy who can’t get anyone’s attention.

As she did with the first book that bears his name, Viorst conferred with Alexander prior to the publication of Alexander and the Wonderful, Marvelous, Excellent, Terrific Ninety Days and made a deal with him and his wife that she wouldn’t release it without their approval. Fortunately for readers, Alexander once again answered in the affirmative, and the result is, as Viorst so aptly and tenderly describes it, "a love song to the family."

What happens when a family of five is unleashed on two unsuspecting grandparents? (No, this is not the premise of the latest reality TV show.) If one of those grandparents happens to be best-selling author and columnist Judith Viorst, the answer is that chaos and…

What would the holidays be without food and family? These elements are at the very heart of our celebrations, and no one does a better job of blending the two than Savannah's own Paula Deen. This holiday season, Deen's millions of fans can sample Christmas traditions, Southern style, in a beautifully designed gift book, Christmas with Paula Deen. This collection of recipes, family photos, gift ideas and Christmas stories would put even the Grinch in the mood for a holiday party. Deen took a few minutes from her whirlwind of media appearances to tell BookPage about the new book and her family's plans for the holidays.

You say in the book that when it comes to Christmas, anticipatin' is the best part. What are you most excited about this holiday season?
One word: Jack. He's my grandson who's now walkin', just gettin into a run actually. Just to watch him this Christmas, opening presents, will be the most fabulous gift I could ever have.

What's your favorite Christmas memory from your childhood?
My favorite memory from childhood would have to been when I was five years old. My brother Bubba wasn't born yet, so I was all alone, didn't have to share my parents or Christmas with anybody. Santa was at the top of his game, bringing all the toys I asked for including a baby doll that was just exquisite.

What holiday traditions did your husband Michael bring into the family? Has it been fun to blend your traditions with his?
To tell you the truth, Michael didn't have a lot of holiday traditions before we met. The poor fella was working so much, being off on a ship he just wasn't at home. But he sure gave me my favorite Christmas memory as an adult when he asked me to marry him. The way he surprised me, with the whole family around us, was perfect in the most romantic way.

Why is being home for the holidays so important to you?
I don't know if my Daddy once spent a Christmas away from us, but I remember very clearly that he would never allow us to be away from home at the holidays. And I'm sure that's why it's so very important to me.

Who will do the Christmas cooking for your family this year you or the boys?
I will. And the kids will probably help. But I'll be doing most of it.

What is the one thing you most enjoy cooking for the holidays?
Probably candies, because it's something I don't ordinarily make throughout the rest of the year. I make lots of cakes, pies and cookies throughout the year . . . but Christmas means candy!

Give us your real opinion on turducken: a crazy fad or worth the effort?
You know, actually a turducken is not hard! It would be impossible without a good butcher. The butcher does all the work. You just have to lay one on top of the other, fold it all back and it's ready to go. Now, it does take a long time to cook. But the flavors you get are delicious. My absolute favorite though, is still a fried turkey.

Does anyone in your family actually eat fruitcake?
No. Not a traditional fruitcake. My mama used to make a delicious Japanese fruitcake though. And I have an icebox fruitcake that is very good and the family enjoys.

What's the easiest Christmas cookie for a novice cook to attempt?
Slice and bake cookies from the grocery store (laughs)! Actually, traditional cookies like oatmeal or chocolate chip or peanut butter are all fairly easy to make. I wouldn't suggest a Magnolia Lace Trumpet cookie the first time, but the traditional cookies are easy and just great.

What do you want Santa to bring you this year?
Nothing. Unless maybe another grandchild (laughs). Michael and I enjoy our blended family so much. They've all come together, it's like we've always been together. So if I wished for something it would be another addition to this beautiful family.

When you count your blessings, what's at the top of the list?
My family and the fact that we're healthy and all able to work. God granted us good health and we're thankful for that.

What would the holidays be without food and family? These elements are at the very heart of our celebrations, and no one does a better job of blending the two than Savannah's own Paula Deen. This holiday season, Deen's millions of fans can sample Christmas…

One could hardly hope for a more scintillating guide through late 20th-century America than historian Arthur W. Schlesinger Jr. He mingled with almost tactile relish among Washington political insiders, the East Coast intelligentsia and Broadway and Hollywood glitterati and he had cogent (and sometimes scorching) opinions about all of them.

Schlesinger, who died in February at the age of 89, tapped his sons Andrew and Stephen to edit the diaries he had compiled in his various roles as university professor, advisor to actual and would-be presidents, political anthropologist and public intellectual. The resulting volume, Journals: 1952-2000, pares 6,000 typewritten pages down to less than 1,000. Andrew Schlesinger, a writer and documentary filmmaker, tells BookPage that despite its wealth of details and insights, the manuscript held no real surprises for him or his brother.

"[My father] had freely shared his opinions around the dining table except for all the details, of course, and all the conversations and interactions. The general story was familiar to us . . . . We knew who he liked and disliked and who he respected and didn't respect." This proud and steadfast liberal adored President Kennedy, had a grudging and diminishing admiration for Johnson, despised Nixon and showed a patrician disgust toward Carter. Readers will search Journals in vain for any overarching political theory, but they will find themselves awash in discussions of political strategy.

Schlesinger had ample disrespect for two people currently in the news: presidential advisor Norman Podhoretz and hawkish Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman. He dismissed the former as odious and despicable and the latter as a sanctimonious prick (to which Hillary Clinton demurred, "Well, he is certainly sanctimonious.") His assessments of people for whom he had some affection could be just as withering. Of his Harvard classmate, Caspar Weinberger, he observed, "Cap was as usual amiable and unruffled, explaining everything with the placid certitude and quiet lucidity of a madman."

During his years with Adlai Stevenson and JFK, Schlesinger barely mentions his finances as he flies about the country, lodging at the best hotels and dining at the most fashionable restaurants. But after his divorce and remarriage and his move from Cambridge to New York, money or the lack of it begins to loom large in his diaries. "The financial pressure is acute," he moans in 1975. In 1982, he rejoices that he has received an exceedingly generous sum for acting as a consultant to ABC on a Franklin D. Roosevelt special. Two years later, he has to sell his vacation house in Florida, noting that Alimony consumes my CUNY salary. In 1986, he flatly declares, "We are broke."

"Living in New York City was much more expensive than living in Cambridge," says his son. "He had to be a professional writer to stay in his lifestyle. There was no margin for error there. Maybe this motivated him. Who knows? He was extremely productive." Indeed, Schlesinger turned out a stream of books and magazine articles and supplemented his writing income with lucrative speaking engagements. According to the younger Schlesinger, "there was very, very little in the journals that was too personal to publish because [t]his stuff had already been filtered through my father's mind." His father makes no mention of falling in love with the woman who would become his second wife, but he does write that "the marriage is one of the [t]wo events of more than routine importance in recent weeks." The other event was the release of the Pentagon Papers.

Schlesinger takes note of his birthdays by writing down matter-of-fact inventories of how he feels and what he's done: At 68, he reflects, "What in the world has happened to all those years? My achievement is so much less than so many writers who were dead before they were 68. I guess they concentrated their energies, while I have dissipated mine." As age wears him down, he faces the additional indignity of seeing his beloved liberal label falling into disrepute. "He couldn't believe it how so many people could be so misinformed and misguided," Andrew says. "But he didn't change his mind that he was correct."

Social butterfly that he was, Schlesinger surely would have reveled in the list of luminaries who spoke at his memorial service. Among these were former President Clinton, Sen. Ted Kennedy, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, actress Lauren Bacall and Norman Mailer. Hardly the usual sendoff for an academic.

If this excerpt from the historian's journals is well received," his son says, more may be published. In any event, they all will eventually be available to scholars. Schlesinger's papers, including the complete journals, have been sold to the New York Public Library.

Edward Morris is a Nashville-based writer.

 

One could hardly hope for a more scintillating guide through late 20th-century America than historian Arthur W. Schlesinger Jr. He mingled with almost tactile relish among Washington political insiders, the East Coast intelligentsia and Broadway and Hollywood glitterati and he had cogent (and sometimes…

Donna Jo Napoli tried hard to avoid becoming a writer. After growing up in a poor family, she resolved to enter a practical, financially secure profession. So, when she matriculated at Harvard, she majored in math and reluctantly took an English class, thanks to the university's writing requirement.

In an interview from her home outside Philadelphia, Napoli recalls what happened next: I handed in my fiction assignment and got a phone call from the professor, who said I really ought to be a novelist. Rather than savoring such praise, she says, I decided never to take another English course. I wanted nothing to do with that unstable life. Instead, she discovered and pursued linguistics: She has been a professor since 1973, and recently stepped down after 15 years as department chair at Swarthmore, where she teaches today.

Fortunately for readers, Napoli eventually overcame her anti-author sentiments. She has written nearly 30 books for children, from playful picture books to complex young adult novels, several of which offer retellings of folk tales from around the world. Her new YA novel, <b>Hush: An Irish Princess' Tale</b>, re-imagines an Icelandic folk tale about an Irish princess who is kidnapped by Vikings.

In Hush, teenaged Melkorka endures great suffering before she finds peace in a version of her life she never anticipated or desired. For Napoli, too, suffering eventually led to an unexpected form of fulfillment. After she received her doctorate, married and had a baby, she suffered a miscarriage. Her emotional pain compelled her to write letters to a friend, and those letters gradually became stories. I was writing, really, for myself, and then I realized I really like to write. I started writing story-stories, not just my pains and joys, Napoli says.

Skillfully rendered pain and joy certainly are to be found in the pages of Hush. Melkorka and her wealthy, happy, royal family take a trip to Dublin (which counts many fearsome Vikings among its residents). An encounter gone wrong throws the family's village into battle mode, and the king and queen send Melkorka and her sister, eight-year-old Brigid, on a trip to another, safer town. On the way, they are kidnapped by slave-traders, and the girls' privilege and security are replaced with danger and uncertainty.

Hush is a dramatic tale, and the characters' emotions are palpable. Whether the author is conjuring up the smells of the slave ship, conveying the whispered agony of the captives, or eavesdropping on the Viking captors, readers will feel immersed in the story. I so enjoy giving my readers something to taste and hear and feel, Napoli says. I pay a lot of attention to the senses. She's also respectful of the tales that inspire some of her books. I'm very reverential toward the traditions handed to me, she says. The reason these things last through time is that they're good. I don't want to lose the power they have. The Icelandic saga that inspired Hush didn't have a lot of detail about the princess, which makes the many characteristics Napoli incorporates into Melkorka's personality her fondness for her family, her tendency to chatter, her ultimate strength all the more fascinating. So, too, is Melkorka's decision to hush, to stay silent.

Because of my interest in languages, I'm always interested in how we get ourselves understood and understand others, Napoli says. Silence accidentally becomes [Melkorka's] source of power. . . . What binds us to each other is language in general, and her refusal [to speak] is so harsh, and so hard on her. Just as the author doesn't gloss over what life was like on Viking slave ships, she doesn't neatly tie up the ending of Hush, in keeping with the arc of the ancient story from which she drew. One of the jobs of life is learning how to give up on some things and move on, Napoli says. As readers, we should not have to be satisfied, to have every question answered. If a book does that, it's leaving you unprepared, leaving you undefended.

Donna Jo Napoli tried hard to avoid becoming a writer. After growing up in a poor family, she resolved to enter a practical, financially secure profession. So, when she matriculated at Harvard, she majored in math and reluctantly took an English class, thanks to…

Karen Armstrong takes an active approach to Scripture I see Scripture more as an activity than a text, says Karen Armstrong, the foremost historian of religion in our time, whose new book The Bible: A Biography is being published this month. It’s a bit like using weights in the gym to enhance your physique. You work with Scripture to enhance your spirit. This vision of how to read the Bible how to activate Scripture in our lives exemplifies the dynamic character of Armstrong’s work as a whole, which ranges across the entire world of comparative religion. Armstrong spoke with BookPage from her London home, frankly acknowledging her urgent sense of purpose in composing this richly interwoven and often surprising history of Biblical interpretation for the Atlantic Monthly Press series, Books That Changed the World.

Scripture is now being used not just by Jews and Christians, but by many others in a very unhelpful spirit, a belligerent spirit, Armstrong says. There’s a growing dogmatism in our world: One must be right at all costs. Each party believes that it alone has the truth, often citing religious truths’ as an archetype for absolute, diehard certainty. All of this is pure misreading, Armstrong explains, and a breach of faith with the long life of biblical interpretation (i.e., its biography). Not until the modern period did people start looking at Scripture in a literal-minded way. People had been originally far more inventive with the truth. The Bible was not meant to endorse your prejudices but to lead you out of them to something greater. Among the historical strands of ingenious biblical interpretation, Armstrong is particularly keen to celebrate the interpretive inventiveness of the rabbis and the church fathers. The rabbis have a great deal to tell us about the importance of truth, but not in any literal sense. They make the Bible speak to our condition, always stressing the primacy of charity, compassion, loving-kindness. Rabbi Akiva says that love of neighbor is the only principle of Torah. Similarly, Augustine, the founder of Western Christianity, says that religion teaches nothing but charity. Armstrong swiftly turns to the potential usefulness of these ancient insights for us, here and now. This effort of finding charity in the Biblical text is a training for us to find a charitable interpretation of events in our own world, she says. But in order to grasp this radical rabbinical and Augustinian outlook, we must relinquish our misguided and historically aberrant preoccupation with the Bible as a record of actual events.

I don’t think the Bible is writing history in the modern sense. Once you examine the history of Palestine in the 18th century B.C.

E., for instance, Abraham becomes an impossibility. The archaeologists have found nothing to support the biblical narrative. In a way, that’s reassuring, because it’s wonderful to think that those horrible massacres described in the book of Joshua probably never happened. For Armstrong, the Bible gives us something much more far-reaching than historical fact, which it was never meant to provide. She reflects generously on what it has given her: Here I am in my study, day by day, hour by hour, immersing myself in these great texts and being inspired and nourished by them all. I see my study as a form of prayer and contemplation. I write about that in the last chapter of my memoir, The Spiral Staircase. It’s part of a quest for me, a quest for spiritual rehabilitation. You can see me, if you like, as spiritually convalescent after a bad experience in my youth, and these texts are healing me. Furthermore, I would say, very strongly, that studying these other traditions Judaism, Islam and more recently those of China and India, has helped me to see my own original Christian tradition in a fuller light. This global perspective serves as the foundation for Armstrong’s previous book, The Great Transformation, a vast and thrilling account of the spiritual breakthroughs which took place concurrently and independently in Greece, Israel, India and China two-and-a-half millennia ago. This is a great spiritual opportunity for us, unparalleled in previous world history, because we now have the linguistic and communicative skills to find out the great similarity that lies at the heart of all these major traditions. And we have the ability to learn from each other, Armstrong says. All of these traditions have their own particular and distinctive genius, and all of them have their own peculiar failings or limitations. We can learn from other people how to do things better. For example, we can learn from the Buddhists, from their reticence about describing the Ultimate. Too often, we in the West degrade God to the status of idol made in our own image and likeness. When asked about certain characterizations of her work from the religious right as being anti-traditional, she strongly demurs. I’m not trying to undermine anybody’s commitment to their own tradition. In our global world, it is imperative that we learn to live together, to learn about the highest and deepest aspirations of our neighbors in our drastically shrunk world. Comparative religion can really help us in that. Other people may express these truths differently, but they have so much in common with us. With characteristic clarity and drama, Armstrong closes the interview with an anecdote. I was with the Dalai Lama two years ago on September 11, moderating an interfaith session he was giving on that day. He told a young girl who had converted from Christianity to Buddhism that there was no need for her to have done so. You needn’t have bothered to convert, he said, because all religions teach the same thing. They all teach compassion. And so you learn that your own faith isn’t a lonely little idiosyncratic quest for truth, but part of a giant quest for meaning, part of who we are as human beings. Michael Alec Rose is composer and a professor at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.

Karen Armstrong takes an active approach to Scripture I see Scripture more as an activity than a text, says Karen Armstrong, the foremost historian of religion in our time, whose new book The Bible: A Biography is being published this month. It's a bit like…

When the long-awaited collapse of apartheid in South Africa ushered in democratic elections in 1994, some readers feared that Nadine Gordimer’s fiction would lose its inventive energy and moral force. But Gordimer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, remained a vocal human rights activist and almost serenely continued to produce novels and stories, at least a few of which rank among her best. With Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, her 11th collection of stories (and 25th work of fiction), Gordimer, 84, continues to perturb and delight readers with her mastery of the short story form.

"I love to write stories. It’s such a wonderful form, like poetry, because it’s so distilled," Gordimer says during a call to her home in Johannesburg. Gordimer has lived in her " big old house" and written on an electric typewriter "in a very small room downstairs" for most of her adult life. She chose to remain in South Africa even after the government banned three of her books. Her husband, to whom the new collection is dedicated, died six years ago, after 47 years of marriage.

Gordimer says that the remarkably tight construction she achieves in her stories is a subconscious process. "I’m not conscious of compressing it while I’m doing it. If there’s something that captures my imagination or that I begin to ponder, I know right away whether it’s going to be a short story or whether it’s the germ of a novel. To me a short story is like an egg: When the beginning comes to me, I have the end. It’s complete. It’s got its white and it’s got its yolk and it’s got its shell containing it. I have it there complete, as if in the palm of my hand."

The textures and resonances of the stories in Gordimer’s Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black are as varied as an omelet, a soufflŽ and a hard-boiled egg. In the title story, for example, Gordimer continues to explore the scars left on the souls of South Africans by apartheid. Her protagonist, an intellectual and former anti-apartheid activist, goes in search of evidence of his own racial identity, after pondering the likely history of his great-grandfather’s time in the diamond mines.

"I got the idea from an announcement [about Beethoven] I heard on the radio," Gordimer says. " I thought, what does this poking back into the personal life, the DNA really, of a very, very great composer matter. But of course in some circumstances it could matter very much, and that’s where my story comes from. There’s a longing among many white South Africans to find what was denied before. You know, tucked away in a cupboard somewhere there was a black grandfather, or great-grandmother. I think it’s a natural impulse for people to want to explore that. And an honest one. That honesty was missing before."

In a story called "Gregor," Gordimer shows a playful side, writing with light and shadow about a cockroach stuck under the small viewing screen of her electric Olivetti, summoning also the spirit of Franz Kafka.

"I’ve resisted over many years any reference to Kafka or any kind of Kafka pastiche because everybody drags Kafka in," Gordimer explains. "But this is the only story in the book that is about something that really happened. That beetle or cockroach was there in my typewriter. Writing is a solitary business and having this unwanted partner or overseer was a very strange experience. I couldn’t resist. I named him Gregor. How could I possibly do anything else?"

Among Gordimer’s own favorites is a story called " Dreaming of the Dead" in which the author summons three departed friends Susan Sontag, Edward Said and Anthony Sampson to a dinner at a Chinese restaurant in New York. It is a story about friendship, vivid conversation, writing and political commitment, at once both sorrowful and funny. "It’s the only story I’ve ever written that way," Gordimer says. "It’s a kind of homage to people that I loved who have gone. But I also, of course, amused myself as I know they would do to me by making fun of them."

Turning reflective, Gordimer says, "I began to write very, very young in the small gold-mining town in South Africa where I was born. I didn’t come from a family with any literary tradition, but my mother read a lot, [and] she encouraged reading. Indeed the most formative thing for me was that she made me a member of the children’s library in this little town. And every Saturday, we would go to the library and select three books each for the week. And then when there were birthdays and Christmas and so on, the presents for me were always books. That was what I wanted and what I got. By the time I was 12, the librarian at this local library, who was also a friend of my mother’s, allowed me the freedom of the library. I wasn’t confined to the children’s section. I read everything from D.H. Lawrence to Thucydides. Nobody was guiding me. I was like a pig in clover and I found what I wanted and what was nourishing to me. The local library was unbelievably important to me. It was my real education."

Gordimer says that even in her 80s, she maintains the same writing routine she developed in her 20s. " My writing routine was constricted because I had a small child and was divorced and was living alone with her. My writing time was when she was at nursery school in the morning. I think it was good that it was constricted because when you’re a writer, you’re your own boss and unless you’re disciplined, you’re never going to get down to it. Later on my circumstances changed but I still kept to my routine."

"Indeed," Gordimer adds with a laugh, " I just finished a new story last week. A weird little story. I have no idea what will happen to it."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

When the long-awaited collapse of apartheid in South Africa ushered in democratic elections in 1994, some readers feared that Nadine Gordimer's fiction would lose its inventive energy and moral force. But Gordimer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, remained a vocal…

With The Greatest Generation, veteran NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw shined a spotlight on the courageous and determined men and women who lifted America out of the Great Depression and defeated Hitler in World War II. The 1998 bestseller was embraced as a long-overdue tribute to the sacrifices of ordinary people beset by extraordinary circumstances.

By contrast, Boom! Voices of the Sixties, Brokaw’s omnibus of personal observations interspersed with dozens of contemporary interviews with the baby boom children of the Greatest Generation, is a kaleidoscopic collection of reflection, reassessment and occasional regret for a decade that will forever be defined by the changes it produced.

Like a lightshow worthy of a Grateful Dead concert, Boom! is both dazzling and dizzying as it plays off the sparks, fires and misfires of the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, political dissent, feminism, rock ‘n’ roll, the rise of the counterculture and the race to the moon. Little wonder that no Greatest Generation-style consensus emerges from these pages. One would hardly expect such diverse voices as Andrew Young, Joan Baez, Karl Rove, Gloria Steinem, Bill Clinton, Dick Gregory and astronaut Jim Lovell to agree on much of anything, and they don’t.

"Oh no, there’s no consensus in this one," Brokaw chuckles. "The Greatest Generation was a much more linear generation. The swings in the boomer generation are much greater. The prism through which they see the world is fractured compared to the Greatest Generation."

Brokaw divides Boom! into two parts. The first surveys the turbulent years between the JFK assassination and Richard Nixon’s resignation; the second traces the " aftershocks: consequences, intended or otherwise" that followed.

"My intention was not to write the defining history of the ’60s because a) I don’t think you can do that yet, and b) the books that have been written about the ’60s were primarily books about what was going on only at that time; they don’t have any carryover. My intention was to go back and say, what do we think now?"

The title evokes both the generation that brought about sweeping cultural changes and the suddenness with which those changes occurred. "Crew-cut veterans of World War II looked up at the dinner table—and—boom! they saw a daughter wearing no bra, talking about moving in with her boyfriend, and a son with hair down to his shoulders," Brokaw writes.

Born in 1940, six years before the official start of the baby boom, Brokaw straddles the two generations, but admits the heartland values he grew up with in South Dakota owed more to the Greatest Generation. By the time the Summer of Love arrived in 1967, he was a reporter and anchor with the NBC affiliate in Los Angeles, a husband and father entrenched in the American dream, and, like most Americans, struggling to understand the revolution around him.

"The swings were wild. Anybody who was living during that time was either absolutely repelled by what was going on, utterly charmed by it, or confused and somewhere in the middle. I was in the middle," he says. "They were saying America sucks, but I was thinking well, it doesn’t suck for me."

Brokaw dabbled in the zeitgeist, smoked a little pot, grew his hair to a fashionable length, even donned a peasant shirt on weekends, but it was never a good fit. He aspired to join the ranks of Walter Cronkite and Huntley&Brinkley, and knew that evenhanded reportage on the swiftly changing home front was his ticket to the big chair.

"The major networks and the big newspapers in the country were run by white, middle-aged men who were mostly members of the Greatest Generation," he says. "So it was this startling upheaval in life as we had known it, and the trick was to try to get it right—not to just mock it, not to let the pendulum swing too far, not to become too infatuated with it, which was easy to do."

Loss hangs heavy over this reunion of ’60s voices; gone too soon were such influential figures as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and John Belushi. Gone too is Brokaw’s college buddy Gene Kimmel, a Marine captain whose 1968 death in Vietnam fueled Brokaw’s anger at the war. "I honestly believe he would have been governor of the state of South Dakota," he says. God, what a loss. "I feel it to this day."

Two observers launched the earliest attempts to try to make sense of the ’60s. Director Lawrence Kasdan’s film The Big Chill used a reunion of college friends to explore the aftermath of the decade, while Lorne Michaels "rearranged the television landscape" by harnessing counterculture humor to produce a hit TV show at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday nights with "Saturday Night Live!"

"One of the great lessons of the ’60s that people have not focused on enough is that it was very entrepreneurial," Brokaw says. "Loren was a perfect example of that; he was a very young man when he did that and it was his idea, his concept. [Apple’s] Steve Jobs grew out of the ’60s zeitgeist. Len Riggio said Barnes&Noble is a product of the ’60s, and it truly is."

Why didn’t more of the seeds of flower power take root?

"What a lot of the younger activists like Sam Brown and Carl Pope said was that they didn’t have any adult supervision. We were great at organization, we were great at tactics; we had no strategy," says Brokaw. "Gary Hart said we could organize a circus in the middle of the Sahara Desert but we didn’t have an economic policy."

Brokaw says that for all its sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, the ’60s will likely remain a Camelot-like era whose very evanescence belies its true impact. As Arlo Guthrie puts it, "Thank God the ’60s are still controversial. It means nobody’s lost yet."

Jay MacDonald still tunes in, turns left and drops stuff.

With The Greatest Generation, veteran NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw shined a spotlight on the courageous and determined men and women who lifted America out of the Great Depression and defeated Hitler in World War II. The 1998 bestseller was embraced as a long-overdue…

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