All Interviews

Can you describe the moment you learned that The Imperfectionists sold to Dial?
My agent phoned from New York with the news. I stood there in my small apartment in Paris, shifting from leg to leg as she drew out the story. Finally, there it was: I had sold my novel. I put down the receiver, took a deep breath and began darting from one side of my living room to the other (not a great distance; about three strides each way), punching the air, shouting, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” until remembering that I had neighbors. Next, I ordered champagne to be sent to my agent, and popped a bottle myself, sending the cork flying from the living room, into the kitchen, out the open window.

Did you expect that you would draw from your career and write about journalists in your first novel?
I had intended to use my experiences abroad as inspiration for fiction—amassing interesting tales was the reason I entered international journalism. But I had never planned for journalists themselves to be the subject. However, the period I had witnessed was too fascinating not to write about: the press, after a history of reporting on collapse and chaos, was now the victim of collapse and chaos, as technology wiped out the foundations of traditional media.

Are you a full-time fiction writer now? If so, do you miss working in a newsroom? Do you have plans to contribute nonfiction pieces to newspapers or magazines in the future?
I do write fiction full-time now and don't particularly miss the newsroom. It's not always a congenial place to toil—often, its appeal depends on how far or near you are to headquarters. The nearer you are, the worse it typically is. Too many opinions, too many ambitions. I'm happier at a distance, reading the news rather than writing it. That said, I do intend to write nonfiction in the future—not breaking news anymore, but more deeply researched pieces. I hope that fiction remains my principal occupation, but that nonfiction makes intermittent appearances, too.

What news sources do you read every day? Do you still read print, or do you access everything online?
Most weeks, I read articles online from the New York Times/International Herald Tribune, Yahoo! News, Sporting Life, the Guardian, the Times of London, the Financial Times, the New Yorker. I still read a few print newspapers, depending on how the mood and circumstances strike me. And I always read the New York Review of Books on paper.

What’s up next? Are you working on another novel?
I'm making excellent progress on my new novel. I'm secretive about works in progress, so I apologize for not detailing its subject—even my closest companions have no idea what I'm writing until I have a finalized draft, and that is still a distance away. I can say, however, that this novel has nothing to do with journalists! 

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Review of The Imperfectionists.

Can you describe the moment you learned that The Imperfectionists sold to Dial?
My agent phoned from New York with the news. I stood there in my small apartment in Paris, shifting from leg to leg as she drew out the story. Finally,…

It seems New York Times best-selling author Elizabeth George can do it all. She’s written 23 books, many of them novels of psychological suspense featuring Scotland Yard and the now-iconic Inspector Lynley, and she’s won the Anthony Award, the Agatha Award and France’s Le Grand Prix de Literature Policiere for her first novel, The Great Deliverance. Her latest Lynley novel, This Body of Death, is on sale this month.

George took time out of her busy touring schedule to answer a few questions from BookPage.

Is there a specific writing exercise you find particularly helpful in getting your creative juices flowing?
For many years now, I have kept a Journal of a Novel for each book that I write. I do this in advance of my writing each day. Each day I also begin by reading a day in the novel’s Journal of a Novel to remind myself that anything I’m going through now is something I’ve gone through and survived before.

You’ve been publishing for well over 20 years now—how would you say your approach to writing has changed over the years?
After my third novel, I had developed an approach that really worked for me, involving an enormous amount of advance work prior to sitting down to begin the rough draft. This approach allowed me to turn in finished manuscripts that were close to perfect in the eyes of my editors, thus obviating the necessity for revisions. Because of this, I’ve not amended that approach since the creation of my third novel.

You’ve spoken about how you believe the division between crime/mystery fiction and literature is superfluous and superficial, but do you believe that there are specific talents that are called into play when creating a mystery series that is often overlooked by those who dismiss the genre?
My guess is that anyone who dismisses the genre hasn’t spent a lot of time reading within it. Anyone who’s read Mystic River by Dennis Lehane, Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, A Dark Adapted Eye by Ruth Rendell or any one of a number of authors on a list that could go on and on knows that crime writers call upon strengths in the area of characterization, plotting and narrative that are often unmatched by anyone else writing.

You teach a five-day writing seminar annually in California, yet you consider yourself to be self-taught. In your mind, is writing an art that can be taught? What do think are the ultimate goals of these types of courses?
Actually, to clarify your question, I have not taught my writing seminar in California for a number of years. However, a few years ago I put all of my lectures and all of the examples that I used in this course into a book on writing called Write Away, which is now actually used in creative writing classes in various programs in the United States. I’ve never claimed that any art form can be taught, nor do I make this claim in Write Away, nor did I ever attempt to teach an art form. What I taught was the craft of novel writing, which is entirely different from the art. Art is how the artist interprets the craft itself. If you have no foundation in craft, you have nothing to interpret.

Do you find that British fans of the Inspector Lynley series respond differently to your work than North American readers?
No. They respond identically.

Often times, mystery writers who have long-standing series wind up feeling tired and limited by their characters. For instance, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes out of frustration, and Dame Agatha Christie found Hercule Poirot insufferable near the end of his run. Do you ever feel this could happen for you with Lynley?
Both Conan Doyle and Christie froze their characters in time, place and circumstance, forcing themselves to deal continually with an unchanging character in unchanging times. I didn’t do that, and it was a deliberate choice on my part so that I would not tire of the characters.

Many authors claim that when they write, they start with few preconceived notions and just see where the characters take them. It seems that with mysteries, this would be problematic since precision and careful planning is critical to success. Do you ever find yourself writing yourself into a corner, or surprised by your characters, or do you view yourself as a puppet-master, always in control behind the scenes?
Writing a crime novel by letting oneself see where the characters will go is an exercise in creating a plot with holes through which a Mack truck could drive. What I know in advance is the arc of the main plot: the killer, the victim, the motive, the means and the opportunity. What I don’t know is what will constitute the subplots. What I also don’t know is how the detectives will solve the case. When I create the characters, I begin to learn from them what the subplots will be in that they tell me how they relate to each other and to the story as a whole. I don’t create a plot and force my characters through it. Characters who are well drawn and executed are going to be true to themselves and not necessarily true to what a writer “wants” them to be and to do.

For authors, books are like children and they’re not meant to have favorites, but which of your books are you proudest of? Least satisfied?
I’m proudest of Missing Joseph. As largely a meditation on motherhood set inside a crime novel, it was a huge stretch for me since I myself have no children. The book ended just as I wanted it to end, and numerous readers told me that they felt devastated by the ending, which was how I wanted them to feel since that was how Lynley felt. So I was quite pleased that my stretch paid off. I am least please with a short story I wrote called “The Evidence Exposed,” which was originally published in Volume II of Sisters in Crime. Even when I reworked it and rewrote it for my short story collection called I, Richard, I was not entirely happy with it.

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Interview with Elizabeth George about What Came Before He Shot Her

It seems New York Times best-selling author Elizabeth George can do it all. She’s written 23 books, many of them novels of psychological suspense featuring Scotland Yard and the now-iconic Inspector Lynley, and she’s won the Anthony Award, the Agatha Award and France’s Le Grand…

Knopf publisher and editor-in-chief Sonny Mehta, who introduced the works of Stieg Larsson to American readers, talks about the phenomenal success of the series.

How did you first hear about the Millennium trilogy?
I heard about the books at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2007. At that time, they were already creating quite a stir in Europe. I bought American rights soon after returning to New York.

What was it about the books that made you want to acquire rights for Knopf?
I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in one sitting. I thought it was remarkable for both its suspense and its portrait of society. Lisbeth Salander, “the girl,” is one of the most dynamic and original characters I’ve encountered in years. I believe we had only synopses of the second and third books, but one could tell from the ambition of Dragon Tattoo that the trilogy was going to be an impressive work in its entirety.

The publication of the trilogy was a unique situation—the author was dead, the books had to be translated from their original Swedish, and they were published at different times in different languages all around the world. What was it like working with such conditions?
It’s certainly an unusual situation, but not unprecedented. We had a similar experience when we published Suite Française a few years ago. The author, Irène Némirovsky, died during World War II, and her daughter had only just discovered and decided to publish the manuscript, which was in French. So the novel wasn’t as contemporary as Stieg Larsson’s, but it was another one of those rare works in translation—particularly without a living author—that found a wide audience in the United States and around the world. It’s tragic to realize that these authors didn’t get to experience the success of their own work, but it can also be reassuring to know that publishing their books may help their legacy to endure for generations. (Read our review of Suite Française)

Were you involved with re-titling the books for an English-speaking audience? (The first book’s original title was Men Who Hate Women.)
The British editor, Christopher MacLehose, from whom we bought the books, and who commissioned the English translation, came up with the title. I wasn’t involved in that process, but I knew we wanted the American edition to use this title rather than Men Who Hate Women. There was some concern that the original title might, in English, sound like a self-help book. Also, the title The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo emphasizes the character of “the girl,” Salander, who in my opinion is one of the main strengths of the trilogy.

Why do you think the books became so successful here?
I think it was a combination of factors. We had a terrific series of jackets, the look of which has now become iconic. We did advance reader’s editions, which went out to a wide group of fellow writers who were very supportive, [and] there was a large marketing campaign. But mainly it’s the strength of the books themselves. I think they really touched a chord with American readers.

Is it true that Larsson left a partial manuscript for book four when he died?
I’ve also heard those rumors, but I don’t have any concrete information about a fourth book. I understand that as long as Stieg Larsson’s estate is in dispute, it probably won’t be possible to get hold of the manuscript, if it even exists.

RELATED CONTENT
Read our reviews of all three books in the Millennium Trilogy

Photo of Sonny Mehta © Michael Lionstar.

Knopf publisher and editor-in-chief Sonny Mehta, who introduced the works of Stieg Larsson to American readers, talks about the phenomenal success of the series.

How did you first hear about the Millennium trilogy?
I heard about the books at the Frankfurt…

The vampire craze sweeping literature is not unlike the virus that decimates the world in Justin Cronin’s The Passage. Sure, there are isolated enclaves of holdouts, defending literature as they know it from the onslaught of supernatural beings, but most of the reading public seems to have developed an insatiable thirst for stories featuring the undead, from writers like Charlaine Harris and Stephenie Meyer.

A note to those who thought they were immune: I dare you to crack open The Passage and read page one. From the first sentence, Cronin’s epic establishes itself as something both equal to and greater than the supernatural suspense novels that have been eating up more and more bookshelf real estate since Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian became a surprise bestseller in 2005. As Cronin says during a call to his home on the outskirts of Houston, “these are not your teenage daughter’s vampires.”

He’s right. Cronin’s vampires—which are more often called “virals,” “flyers,” “slims” or “smokes”—inspire fear, hate and confusion, but never love. Spawned from a virus in a failed government effort to engineer a supersoldier, these undead share a hive-mind mentality, an aversion to sunlight and a hunger for human blood. The virus is tested on 12 felons—and one abandoned 6-year-old girl, Amy Harper Bellafonte. She alone survives the testing with her humanity intact (albeit with added strength, healing ability and longevity); the others escape and alternately hunt and infect the rest of the world.

“Most vampire stories are essentially stories of magic. The magic of my lifetime is science. So I decided to ground it in a scientific reality and see what would follow from that,” Cronin says. “The experiment that produces the great viral cataclysm is essentially an act of human greed—it’s trying to steal the future from your kids. The scientists who are seeking to engineer a virus that makes human beings so long-lived that they are essentially immortal have missed the true immortality that we possess, which is that the future we will not live to see is the future our children will live in.”

This act of hubris, and its devastating consequences, are meticulously detailed. The Passage takes its time setting up the characters and story to create a solid foundation for the strange future readers enter when, 93 years later, Amy—who now looks about 16—stumbles into one of the last human settlements after a viral attack. Her arrival comes at a bad time. Vampires are getting bolder, coming near the settlement’s walls even during the daylight hours. The aging batteries powering the city’s 24-hour lights—their best defense—have little juice left. Some of the citizens are having violent nightmares and coming down with a strange illness that causes them to go insane. A silent, mysterious girl makes a convenient scapegoat.

But Peter senses that Amy’s otherness is a good thing. When they discover a transmitter in her neck with GPS coordinates for a place in Colorado that is broadcasting the message “If you find her, bring her here,” Peter and a group of loyal friends set off on an incredible journey.

Suspenseful and surprising, The Passage is something of a departure for Cronin, a Harvard grad and English professor at Rice University whose previous works—The Summer Guest and Mary and O’Neil—were quiet literary successes.

The reception of The Passage, however, has been anything but quiet. Cronin’s agent submitted the partial manuscript and an outline for auction in 2007 under the pen name Jordan Ainsley, an intentionally gender-neutral name. “I didn’t want anybody to read this book and categorize it in any way in advance. And indeed what happened is people came to it with an open mind, which I think every book deserves,” Cronin says.

He got more than open minds: Ballantine bought the trilogy for a reported $3.75 million, and a movie deal with Ridley Scott followed. Pre-publication buzz has been tremendous, and Cronin has already met with booksellers and librarians like Nancy Pearl, something the “extremely social” author has enjoyed, though he says his life has not otherwise changed. “You write any book with the hope that it will do well enough that you are able to write more, and The Passage has done that for me—spectacularly. Still, you’ve got to write for love, and I wrote this book for love.”

He also wrote it for his daughter, Iris, now 13. When she was about to turn 9, she asked if she could ride her bike along with her dad when he went on his evening runs. Cronin agreed, but “it’s hot in Texas and you’ve gotta do something to pass the time.” So he suggested they come up with an idea for a novel, “with no expectations whatsoever. Maybe I was sort of introducing my kid to the family business.”

Iris had a stipulation: She wanted to plot a story about a girl who saves the world, “which seemed a little ambitious,” Cronin says with a laugh, “but OK. So for a period of weeks we went through the streets of my suburban Houston neighborhood tossing ideas back and forth, building a story, building characters. It was really just for fun, and it was tremendous fun.”

But it soon became more than that. “By the time the cold weather came and the bike went into the garage, I thought maybe I was on to something. I wrote an outline and was amazed at how much was there. And so I thought, OK, what the hell, let’s write the first chapter, give the book a voice, see how it feels. And it felt terrific.”

Which brings us back to the book’s incredible opening, which was the first part of The Passage that Cronin wrote. “That sentence told me it was going to have this global overview, this very large canvas, which is what I wanted, but it was always going to be an intimate story of people. Once I hammered that one into place, my fate was sealed: I was going to write it.”

Though Iris’ participation ended in 2006, she has now read the book. “It took her a day and a half, that’s the kind of kid she is—she probably read it faster than anyone in America. And she blessed it, which is what I wanted. Everything a man does in his life he does in some ways to impress a girl, and she was the girl I wanted to impress.”

Brimming with memorable characters, action and adventure, the book brings to mind classics like The Stand and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and shows the deep understanding of humanity and literary skill that is also present in Cronin’s earlier works. Cronin says he dared himself to write “a book that rules out no reader,” and The Passage is definitely that.

“One of the things I wanted to do with this book, and the two that will follow, is to write every kind of story I ever loved,” he says. In addition to the post-apocalyptic setting and vampire element, The Passage is a road novel, a coming-of-age story, a thriller and even something of a romance. Last but not least, “it has a runaway train! Everything I think is great in a story, that nails me to my chair, it’s going to find its way into these three books,” promises Cronin, who has plotted out the entire series and is already deep into writing Volume Two, to be published in 2012.

What also finds its way into the story, and what perhaps draws readers to post-apocalyptic fiction, is the hope that humanity can survive even the worst trials. As Cronin explains, the characters in The Passage “live in constant and overwhelming danger, but they have a job, they have families, they form relationships, they have a sense of clan and kin. So the world as we know it has in some way continued. It’s at the brink, and there’s not much left, but it’s there.

“I wanted the reader to know that not all is lost. And then show, within the story, what was worth saving.”

Author photo © Gasper Tringale

___________________

An excerpt from The Passage:
___________________

Before she became The Girl from Nowhere—the One Who Walked In, The First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years—she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.

The day Amy was born, her mother, Jeanette, was nineteen years old. Jeanette named her baby Amy for her own mother, who’d died when Jeanette was little, and gave her the middle name Harper for Harper Lee, the lady who’d written To Kill a Mockingbird, Jeanette’s favorite book—truth be told, the only book she’d made it all the way through in high school. She might have named her Scout, after the little girl in the story, because she wanted her little girl to grow up like that, tough and funny and wise, in a way that she, Jeannette, had never managed to be. But Scout was a name for a boy, and she didn’t want her daughter to have to go around her whole life explaining something like that.

Amy’s father was a man who came in one day to the restaurant where Jeanette had waited tables since she turned sixteen, a diner that everyone called the Box, because it looked like one: like a big chrome shoe-box sitting off the county road, backed by fields of corn and beans, nothing else around for miles except a self-serve car wash, the kind where you had to put coins into the machine and do all the work yourself. The man, whose name was Bill Reynolds, sold combines and harvesters, big things like that, and he was a sweet talker who told Jeanette as she poured his coffee and then later, again and again, how pretty she was, how he liked her coal-black hair and hazel eyes and slender wrists, said it all in a way that sounded like he meant it, not the way boys in school had, as if the words were just something that needed to get said along the way to her letting them do as they liked. He had a big car, a new Pontiac, with a dashboard that glowed like a spaceship and leather seats creamy as butter. She could have loved that man, she thought, really and truly loved him. But he stayed in town only a few days, and then went on his way.

Excerpted from The Passage by Justin Cronin
Copyright © 2010 by Justin Cronin. Excerpted by ­permission of Ballantine Group, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

The vampire craze sweeping literature is not unlike the virus that decimates the world in Justin Cronin’s The Passage. Sure, there are isolated enclaves of holdouts, defending literature as they know it from the onslaught of supernatural beings, but most of the reading public seems to have developed an insatiable thirst for stories featuring the undead.

A boy with keys for fingers. A woman who gives birth to her own mother. Imps and mermaids falling in love. If all of this sounds too strange—even for fiction—then you’ve obviously never read anything by Aimee Bender. 

But now, with the publication of her second novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, it’s clearly time that you should.

In her latest literary confection, Bender introduces readers to perhaps her most dazzling creation to date: a girl named Rose who can taste the deepest feelings of others, just by taking a single bite of the food they prepare. As the flavors of the food flow over her tongue, Rose is inundated with the underlying emotions of the person who cooked the meal, even if it’s something as simple as a peanut butter sandwich. All of a sudden, Rose is privy to an onslaught of sensations that aren’t her own, and she realizes that nothing will ever be truly simple again.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake focuses on Rose’s formative years, from the age of nine through her early 20s, as she struggles to form meaningful connections with her family and her peers. Intimidated by her austere and deeply intellectual brother, Joseph, Rose tries to understand what makes him tick. It is only with George, Joseph’s best friend, that Rose feels she can truly express herself without fear of misunderstanding or judgment: the two share great tenderness, their relationship tinged with the poignant melancholy that pervades most of the novel.

Unable to stop the feelings that stem from the food she eats, it is up to Rose to discover a means of coping with her unwanted ability. Through much trial and error, Rose discovers there are alternatives to simply cutting herself off from others. With time she comes to see that her “curse” might actually have the potential to set her free, but first she must make peace with herself.

Speaking from her home in Los Angeles, Bender recalls where the ingenious idea for the story originated. “I think I was primarily interested in the food at first,” she says. “I kept going back to the idea of ‘what if food was carrying more than just food?’ [So] the idea was sort of floating in my mind for years, and then when I hit on that character [Rose] it was all about developing her.”

Although Rose’s story plays center stage, if readers dig deeper, they will see that her brother Joseph’s extreme reclusiveness, her father’s intense aversion to hospitals and her mother’s newfound obsession with carpentry all tell their own stories, each filled with pain and longing. The family is like a concert of tops, spinning together, but each ultimately orbiting its own axis. And yet, Bender balks at the idea that she has depicted a dysfunctional family. “I can see how some would think about this as a dysfunctional family,” she allows, “but it’s not a term I would pick because it can be a kind of catchall. My hope is that the family is experiencing a unique unhappiness.”

When it comes to the author’s own family, however, nary a storm cloud is in sight. Bender credits her mother, a modern dance instructor, as a critical influence on her willingness to defy convention. She recalls, “[My mother] would always take me to these concerts, and modern dance can be so bizarre! She also pointed me toward theater of the absurd writers when I was in junior high and high school; I loved that they were funny and weird and this was literature, and there was some feeling of permission in all of it that felt very good to me.”

Perhaps her mother’s gift of promoting the bizarre is something Bender is passing on to her readers. The wild and fanciful worlds of her imagination have been showcased in two short story collections, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures, and in her acclaimed first novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own. Asked about her ability to ground the outlandish in a place that is real, Bender says that writing this way is the only way she knows how. “My impulse is always to take an idea that is a little off-center, which means I can kind of get my hands in it, and then I can use that to climb into the character,” she says.

Although The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is liberally frosted with the foreign and the fantastic, the emotions at its center are undeniably real. Readers who like to give their imaginations a workout are in for a satisfying treat that is both bitter and sweet.
 

A boy with keys for fingers. A woman who gives birth to her own mother. Imps and mermaids falling in love. If all of this sounds too strange—even for fiction—then you’ve obviously never read anything by Aimee Bender. 

But now, with…

The first book in The Books of Elsewhere series has a tall order to fill: publicity materials compare author Jacqueline West to Roald Dahl and Neil Gaiman. Luckily for readers, The Shadows does not disappoint. In her first book for young readers, West—who is also a poet—introduces a spooky, magical world that will captivate middle schoolers.

Olive Dunwoody, a shy and curious child, moves with her “dippy” mathematician parents into a Victorian mansion. Olive soon learns that they’re not alone in the dusty, antique-filled house. With talking cats as her guides, Olive discovers that she can travel through paintings on the walls, as long as she’s wearing a certain pair of glasses. But the paintings hold a dangerous, life-or-death secret, and it’s up to Olive to figure out the mystery.

In an interview with BookPage, West elaborates on why she likes writing for kids, her preferred type of superpower and what to expect in the second book of the series.

You have mentioned your interest in magic—talking cats, paintings as portals to another world. What sort of magical adventure would you like to go on; is there a power you’d like to have?
Back when I thought I might be a superhero when I grew up, I wanted to be a shape-shifter. Actually, I’d still like to be one. I know this is sort of like wishing for more wishes, because it’s one power that would come with all kinds of other powers: flying, breathing underwater, running at incredible speeds. But I’m greedy that way. I’d like to see the world from all different points of view, to experience life as a whole slew of people and animals and objects. Of course, this is the same reason I wanted to be a writer.

Do you believe that houses can really be haunted? Would you be delighted—or terrified—if you discovered your house was built on a graveyard (or came with a talking cat)?
Sadly, I’ve never had a personal experience with ghosts or haunted places. I’ve lived in several old houses and even in rooms where people had died, and I remember wishing that their ghosts would show up and keep me company and be my quirky roommates. But it never happened. That’s not to say it couldn’t happen . . .

The Books of Elsewhere: The Shadows is your first book for young readers, although you are an accomplished poet. Have you always wanted to write novels for kids?
When I started writing The Shadows, I was experimenting with all kinds of genres and forms—poetry, short fiction, scripts for a series of graphic novels (which no one ever needs to see), an adult novel (no one ever needs to see this, either)—and I’ll try to keep challenging myself this way. Focusing on writing for kids has been a huge pleasure, in part because I’m writing for my inner child rather than for my inner critic, but I know I’ll continue to write poetry, I’ve got drafts and notes for several middle grade and young adult books underway and maybe someday I’ll baffle myself by waking up with the plan for a three-act melodrama in my head.

Your book has been compared to works by Roald Dahl and Neil Gaiman, and there are scenes reminiscent of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. What are your favorite books for children? Do any authors inspire your writing?
As a child, I read A.A. Milne, Lewis Carroll, J.M. Barrie, Roald Dahl and Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes collections over and over so intently that I think they became part of my genetic makeup. I can still remember finishing Matilda for the first of many times. I was in the backseat of the family car, it was dark outside the windows and I felt as though my whole body was full of lit fireworks . . . It was that exhilarating. My favorite books for kids haven’t changed much—I still love Milne and Dahl and Shel Silverstein (I also deeply admire some writers who are currently working, like Gaiman and Rowling and Kate DiCamillo)—and I suppose it was the joy I got from reading these books that indirectly influenced me to write for kids myself.

The Shadows is filled with descriptions of paintings and antiques—do you have a particular interest in art? Did you do any research on art and architecture when writing the book?
This was drawn more from memory and imagination than from research. I’ve worked as an arts writer, and I’ve spent considerable time wandering in a happy daze through museums, so I had quite a lot of material stored up.

Throughout the book, Olive’s only companions are Morton, a boy from a painting, and three talking cats. Why does Olive have trouble making friends her own age, when she’s clearly funny and spunky?
The qualities that appeal to grown-ups aren’t necessarily the qualities that appeal to kids when making friends. Among kids, fitting in is generally more important than standing out, and even standing out in a good way can be a liability. Olive is shy and awkward, she has moved from place to place a lot and she’s the only child of parents who are more than a bit out of touch with the real world. She certainly hasn’t been prepared to fit in.

Although The Shadows is magical (and often creepy), it also includes themes that are timeless and very real: trusting others, taking chances, being lonely. Are there any lessons (or types of encouragement) you hope kids take from the book?
I certainly didn’t write this with any type of lesson in mind, but I suppose any book in which a child protagonist has to solve her own problems lets the reader learn from her mistakes and her growth. I hope kids will identify with Olive and that getting to know her might make them feel a bit less alone or misunderstood or out of place. Aside from that, I just hope kids will be entertained.

How many books to you intend to write in the Books of Elsewhere series? Can you give us a hint about Olive and Morton’s next adventure?
The total number of books is still up in the air at this point, but I’d estimate four or five volumes in total. Volume Two is already written, so I can tell you that the house has some more big secrets waiting to be revealed, including an object that begins to take over Olive’s life. Olive also makes a friend who isn’t from a painting or covered in fur, and someone else—someone Olive thought she knew—turns out to have been fooling everyone all along.  

 

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Watch the book trailer:

The first book in The Books of Elsewhere series has a tall order to fill: publicity materials compare author Jacqueline West to Roald Dahl and Neil Gaiman. Luckily for readers, The Shadows does not disappoint. In her first book for young readers, West—who is also…

In her new memoir, Spent, fashion journalist Avis Cardella shares her struggle with compulsive shopping—and how she eventually beat the habit. We asked her a few questions about why we shop, why she shopped and why we should all be more conscious about our spending.

There have been many compulsive shoppers throughout history, from Mary Todd Lincoln to Princess Di. Which do you most identify with, and why?
I can relate to many compulsive shoppers in different ways, but the shopper I feel I most identify with is Andy Warhol. Warhol was a compulsive shopper and something of a hoarder. Upon his death, his apartment was discovered to be over run with “stuff” including many unopened shopping bags. However, this isn’t why I relate to Warhol. I relate to Warhol because his art is based on desire and therefore on commerce. He understood commerce in this way—and he understood consuming.

This to me is thoroughly modern. Even though there have been reports of compulsive shoppers in the past, I think of this addiction as being modern. The scaffolds of social and economic supports that exist for a shopping addict to thrive are fascinating: easy credit, status chasing, shopping as entertainment, mall culture, are a few examples.

You mention the buying habits of celebrities, who conspicuously consume items like purses and shoes. Is this compulsive shopping, or someone who has the means simply indulging in collecting luxury items? Where do you draw the line between collection and compulsion?
Certainly, anyone who enjoys to shop and does so without any negative impact to his or her life is not a compulsive shopper. I do mention some celebrities in Spent, and their shopping habits, because I think we often look to celebrities for setting a standard. We want to see what they are buying and how much they are spending in order to emulate or approximate their style.

In terms of drawing a line, the thing mental health professionals say to look out for is when the shopping impinges on normal aspects of your life. If you obsess about shopping, if you are shopping when you should be working or taking care of other responsibilities, if you continually use shopping to avoid life and certainly if you are going into unmanageable debt, there is a problem.

Many Americans struggle to pay bills and afford basic necessities—were you worried that a shopping addiction might come across as frivolous to readers, or do you think the need to consume will resonate with everyone?
I wrote Spent because I wanted to understand why I had been consumed by the desire to consume. Why are we all consumed by desires to consume? I think many people today, not just shopping addicts, are questioning their relationship to spending and what fuels their desire to buy.

I was very conscious of the fact that shopping addiction has been depicted as being silly and frivolous in the media, and I wrote my story with honesty and seriousness because I know that it wasn’t frivolous at all. I believe this will resonate with a large part of the population.

How big a role do fashion and women’s magazines play in the growing number of women with a shopping addiction? In your own story?
There is very interesting research and theory on this subject and I’ve only read a fraction of it. I think there’s so much to question and observe on this subject. For the sake of brevity, here I’ll just respond to my own situation. There was a point when I was shopping compulsively and my self-esteem was low, and I may have placed too much emphasis on the pursuit of the perfected images I saw in fashion magazines. I know from my own experience how easy it was to fall into this pattern. I realize that we are bombarded with perfected images today and mostly from advertising that relates obtaining a product to obtaining the perfected self.

Lately, magazines seem to be trying to address concerns about unrealistic images and their impact. One thing I’ve learned though, is that it is possible to simply read fashion magazines to instruct and inform about new things or something that may be relevant to your life and understand that those perfected images are not real.

Do you still write freelance articles for fashion magazines, or is researching and writing about the industry a “trigger”?
I do still work as a freelance writer but write about fashion infrequently. But writing about fashion is not a trigger for any compulsive shopping today. When I’ve analyzed my own shopping addiction I realized that the event that precipitated excessive shopping was my mother’s death. I couldn’t cope with that tragedy and shopping came to the rescue. It was an activity in which I could hide. Part of my hiding meant hiding behind a mask of perfection. Therefore, clothing, accessories, and cosmetics became the tools of creating that perfect me.

Today, I no longer feel that need to hide or desire to escape and this leaves me to relate to fashion in a healthier way. I love clothing and dressing up but not in order to avoid my feelings or my self. Sometimes I’m in a store and do worry if one purchase will set off an avalanche and I’ll want to buy the entire place. However, that has never happened. I think it’s just a residual feeling. I do wonder, at times, if an emotional trauma, could trigger shopping again. But I’m guessing that I’ve traveled far from where I was 20 years ago and it probably wouldn’t be the case.

Of the 1990s, you say "fashion had replaced drugs as the defining cultural pulse point of the decade." How do you think that changed (or did it) in the 2000s? What do you see fashion’s role in society being during the 2010s?
There seem to be more ways to shop than ever! Online, on television, on your smart phone! 2010 looks like the year of exploding shopping opportunities. I think fashion and shopping is still a big cultural pulse point. I’ve noticed many things that indicate this is not going away anytime soon: hauling videos, reality shows about the fashion industry, websites such as polyvore.com where you can log on and be your own fashion editor.

That said, I do find more people talking about reevaluating their shopping. A consciousness about what acquiring all this “stuff” means, to us as a culture is creeping into more conversations. I’m hoping to open a dialogue on this: What is the difference between wanting and needing? When do we have enough? What are we searching for? I do still enjoy fashion and shopping and have found a healthier relationship to both. So, I know it is possible to rethink our relationship to consuming.

Describe the moment when you realized the depth of your problem with shopping.
I think the moment in the beginning of my book when I’m buying all that lingerie was when I realized I was in trouble. I wanted to believe that shopping was normal and that the way I related to it was perfectly normal. But that day, as I walked out of Barneys with my 20 pairs of underwear, and various other items, in my black glossy bag, it struck me that that kind of shopping was anything but normal.

At the end of Spent, you write about your shopping habits now—you allow yourself to “truly desire” something before making a purchase. Are there any items you currently have your heart set on? What designers or types of clothing/accessories are you drawn to today?
I’ve been so immersed in my book promotion and tour that I really have not had too much time to think about wanting anything! Regarding what I’m drawn to, I find myself drawn to things that have longevity. For example, a classic handbag that I’ll wear for years as opposed to the latest “it.” item. So my mandate now is craftsmanship, good materials and good design. I’m not as interested in a particular label as I am in things being well designed and well made.

You often talk about the way you used clothes to try on different personas and figure out who you were. What do you think your clothes say about you now?
I wear more color now and I think that’s a reflection of my being a happier person.

In her new memoir, Spent, fashion journalist Avis Cardella shares her struggle with compulsive shopping—and how she eventually beat the habit. We asked her a few questions about why we shop, why she shopped and why we should all be more conscious…

Twelve-year-old Lucy, the heroine of  Valerie Hobbs’ lyrical new novel for young readers, treasures her summer visits with Grams, an artist and “a hippie before hippies were invented.”

But this summer turns out to be different. For one thing, Lucy’s longed-for, precious time at the lake with her beloved grandmother is disrupted by a surprise visitor, one who’s not altogether welcome. And then there are the disturbing incidents: Grams forgetting the day of the week, a dish towel left too close to the burner, an ill-advised canoe trip in threatening weather.

As the days pass, Lucy wants to cling to the way things have always been. She doesn’t want Grams to change. Yet she can’t forget what her mother told her as she said goodbye: “This might be the last time, you know.”

The last summer. Lucy wants it to be the best.

The Last Best Days of Summer was inspired by a film on Alz-heimer’s disease, which prompted Hobbs to think about family members, like Lucy, who get left behind. This can be extremely painful for children, especially those being raised by their grandparents, or those who have close ties to a grandparent or relative.

Now a grandmother herself, Hobbs believes her own experience has helped her appreciate in a new way the special bond that can exist between grandparents and grandchildren. “I wanted to speak to that connection,” she says in an interview from her home in Santa Barbara, California.

In writing her latest novel, Hobbs also drew on her experiences with throwing pots, a skill Grams is teaching Lucy in their time together. “I did pottery for a couple of years. I got to the point where I could center a pot. It’s a really strange and profound feeling—a feeling of being centered on the Earth, and centered within yourself.”

The author of 12 novels for young readers and one for adults (Call It a Gift), Hobbs writes for both middle grade and young adult age groups. She says it’s really the story and characters that shape whether a book is for middle grade readers or an older audience.

“It really depends on what story hits me,” she notes. Though she adds with a laugh, “I think I got stuck at about age 14 so I can go either way.”

Hobbs, who likes to visit schools and talk with students, believes that writing can help young people find themselves. She works with young writers to enable them to recognize that their own lives and stories are important.

“I start out with a banner that reads, ‘Only You Can Tell Your Story.’ I want them to know that they have the power to write from their hearts and their experiences. To get those real stories out is important,” the author says.

Hobbs practices this in her own work. Her novels have sometimes drawn from her personal experiences, including the tragic death of a boyfriend when she was a teenager. But while she has found that writing some of her books has been challenging emotionally, others have turned out to be pure fun, especially her 2006 novel Sheep, about the adventures of a border collie.

Despite its bittersweet story, The Last Best Days of Summer is never dark. Instead, it seems infused with joy and an affirmation of family. Part of the reason may be that Hobbs, who lived in New Jersey before moving to California at the age of 15, has wonderful memories of her own summers as a golden, carefree time. “We were gone all day. We ran. We made forts. We only came home when we were hungry.”

Lucy’s summer with Grams may not be what she was expecting, but by the end it has been touched by love and a kind of magic. Lucy has come to feel that sense of being centered, in spite of the changes and emotions that envelop her.

“I hope kids get that,” says Hobbs, “that feeling of knowing who you are, and knowing ‘this is right.’ ”

And really, isn’t finding out who you are exactly what summer reading is all about?

Twelve-year-old Lucy, the heroine of  Valerie Hobbs’ lyrical new novel for young readers, treasures her summer visits with Grams, an artist and “a hippie before hippies were invented.”

But this summer turns out to be different. For one thing, Lucy’s longed-for, precious time at the lake…

Readers who have already met some of the indelible characters in Irish author Tana French’s earlier thrillers, In the Woods and The Likeness, greeted the news of her third novel with excitement, perhaps hoping to see some familiar faces.

Although neither Rob Ryan nor Cassie Maddox—protagonists of the first two books—appears in Faithful Place, the story does revolve around a character introduced in the previous novel: Frank Mackey, a cop on Dublin’s Undercover Squad, who turned up as Cassie’s former boss in The Likeness.

“I have this feeling that mystery fiction, almost more than any other genre, is really rooted in the society where it is set.”

French didn’t always intend to write about Frank next, but while working on The Likeness, she found herself becoming interested in him. “He had a very odd moral sense,” she says during a phone call to her home in Dublin. “And I was kind of interested in how you would turn into that kind of person, and then what would happen if you really got pushed to the far edge of that question: Will you do anything to yourself and to the people you love best to get your man?”

Frank is certainly pushed to the edge of reason in Faithful Place when, against his better judgment, he returns to the family he left more than 20 years earlier. In December 1985, he was 19 years old, desperate to escape his miserable home life and madly in love with Rosie Daly. He and Rosie made plans to run away to Britain together, but on the night that they were supposed to meet at Number 16, Faithful Place—the abandoned building at the top of their street—Rosie never showed up. Frank left anyway, heartbroken but determined never to go home again. He eventually joined the Dublin police force and married smart, sharp Olivia, with whom he now has a daughter, Holly, and an uneasy post-divorce relationship.

But when Rosie’s suitcase turns up 22 years later, hidden behind a wall at Number 16, Frank has no choice but to wade back into the mess of his family and his old neighborhood if he wants to find out what happened to her. Complicating matters is the fact that there’s no love lost between the neighborhood—the Liberties, one of the oldest parts of Dublin—and the police. Frank’s family sees no reason why they should trust him, and the neighbors would rather keep their secrets than expose them to the light of an official investigation.

French isn’t from the Liberties, but her husband is, which helped her to feel that she could write about it with some degree of accuracy. “I don’t pretend that I understand it from outside,” she says. “I think you would probably have to be born and brought up there and come from four generations there to really get the hang of the Liberties. But I had good insight, and I had a real insider vetting it for me to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid.”

The Liberties is an area rich with its own culture and history, French explains. “The same families have lived there for hundreds of years. Now recently it has started changing—it got kind of yuppified over the last 20 years. But you still get families who show up in the 1911 census, who have been there for hundreds and hundreds of years. It was never a rich area—right up into my husband’s day, it was tenement flats with outside toilets, but with a very strong community ethic which it still has, and with the nosiness that comes with people being very jammed together.”

The close, almost suffocating atmosphere of the Liberties is mirrored in Frank’s family, who still exert the same pressure on him as on the day he left. “Families are fascinating, the way they interact, and the way your family can get to you with a speed and an efficiency that no one else in the world can quite do,” French says. “That’s what I was interested in: the huge intense power of family, and what would happen if you came back into the zone of that power after having resisted it for so long. Because I think even if you do leave your family for 20 years, like Frank does, it’s not that the pull of that magnet ever goes away. It’s just that you get far enough that it weakens. And when you come back within its reach, it’s going to snap you straight back in.”

Frank’s family is full of the memorable characters that French writes so well, from naïve and upwardly mobile Kevin to “dark and wiry and restless” Shay, who still lives upstairs from their parents and has never forgiven Frank for escaping his fair share of their alcoholic father’s abuse. Frank’s younger sister Jackie is the only one he’s kept in contact with over the years—but it turns out she’s been keeping a secret from him.

Trained as an actress at Trinity College, French has had years of experience on the stage, which helps her to create these fully fleshed-out characters and to inhabit so completely the mind of her narrator. “I write like an actor,” she says of her first-person narrative style. “If you write third person, you have to be able to see things from everybody’s viewpoint equally and simultaneously, whereas writing first person, it’s a lot more like playing one character in a play, in that you see all the action through the filter of this character’s perceptions and preconceptions and needs and biases.

“I think the fact that I start from character, not from plot, is also a very actor thing. I start out with a premise and the narrator, and I just hope to God there’s a plot in there somewhere that I’ll figure out as I go along.”

Clearly French has done well in that regard. Her first novel, In the Woods, debuted to tremendous acclaim in 2007, winning such major awards as the Edgar, Anthony and Macavity, and both that book and 2008’s The Likeness landed on the New York Times bestseller list.

Faithful Place, with its haunting plot and gorgeous prose, should be poised for similar success. Some of the book’s best passages are flashbacks to 1985, when Ireland was in the grip of a major recession. French vividly brings the period to life, contrasting it with Ireland’s later economic boom, which was nearing its end in December 2007. She very deliberately set the book in this time just before the crash, which has hit Ireland particularly hard. “We were riding so high on the wave of the economic boom that it shaped the entire national consciousness, and this crash is doing the same thing,” she says.

In one memorable scene, Frank must explain to nine-year-old Holly that his family is poor—an idea she finds shameful, having grown up thinking of poor people as stupid and lazy. One of French’s goals in

Faithful Place is to set the record straight: “I think that a big part of what happened in the economic boom was that it began to be seen as somehow irresponsible to be poor, no matter why; you were not contributing to the economy, you were a lesser person for not having a lot of money. And conversely, having a load of status symbols somehow implied that you were a more worthy person. And I thought that was something that Frank would probably feel very passionately about; in this very fraught relationship between his past and his present, that would be one of the things that he’d want to salvage from the past, the idea that your bank account isn’t necessarily a measure of your moral worth.”

Although French’s family was living abroad during much of the 1980s recession, she still remembers what it was like to spend those summers in Ireland. “Anybody who’s old enough to remember it is shaped by it, by the kind of thing that Frank describes. There’s a generation who [grew up] during the economic boom times [to whom] ‘broke’ meant you could only go on one holiday this year, whereas ‘broke,’ when we were teenagers, meant I can’t meet up for coffee because I don’t have the bus fare to get into town.”

French’s deftness with both character and setting make the world of Faithful Place pulse with life. It’s no accident that her novels all take place in Dublin, where—despite an itinerant childhood—she has lived since she was 17. “Dublin is the only place I really know, the only place I can call home, where I know the little things, like what connotations a certain accent has, and what’s a shortcut from A to B. I have this feeling that mystery fiction, almost more than any other genre, is really rooted in the society where it’s set, because crimes are shaped by the society they come out of. You have to have a strong sense of the underlying tensions within a society in order to set the kind of stuff I’m interested in writing there.”

As for her characters, readers of Faithful Place will enjoy guessing which one will become the protagonist of French’s fourth book, which she is writing now. “The reason I skip from narrator to narrator is usually because it’s hard to come up with more than one story that’s that crucial to any one person’s life. There aren’t that many turning points in any given person’s life, and I kind of don’t want to write about anything that’s less than crucial.”

Though she has yet to repeat a narrator, she says she would like to write about Frank and his family again: “I hope there’s a book there someday! It’s funny, I still haven’t reached the point where I can take this for granted. A part of me is still going, oh God, I hope I don’t just drop everything and smash it.” With Faithful Place, which may be French’s best novel yet, she has nothing to fear. 

Readers who have already met some of the indelible characters in Irish author Tana French’s earlier thrillers, In the Woods and The Likeness, greeted the news of her third novel with excitement, perhaps hoping to see some familiar faces.

Although neither Rob Ryan nor Cassie…

Guerilla warfare, child soldiers and landmines: What do these ripped-from-the-headlines terms have to do with a coming-of-age story for young readers? As it turns out, quite a bit.

While displacement camps and military maneuvers are not the trappings of your standard touchy-feely “do the right thing” tale, they bring a sense of hard-edged reality to Mitali Perkins’ Bamboo People, an intriguing and insightful story about two boys learning how to become men in the midst of chaos.

The award-winning author of such internationally diverse books as Monsoon Summer, The Not-So-Star-Spangled Life of Sunita Sen, Secret Keeper and Rickshaw Girl takes us, this time, to the border between Burma and Thailand—and into the eye-opening lives of children in the midst of a war zone. Bamboo People follows two boys caught in the crossfire of the ongoing border fight—a cultural and land battle that has been waged for decades, but in recent years has escalated dramatically through the forced enlistment of child soldiers.

Chiko, a scholarly and quiet Burmese teen whose father has been imprisoned for having anti-government sympathies, longs to be a teacher and avoids conflict at all costs. In an unexpected turn of events, Chiko is forced to enlist in the Burmese army, where he learns that education is more than the stuff of books. On the other side of the lines is Tu Reh, a member of the Karenni ethnic group displaced by the fighting, who would give anything to prove he is man enough to carry a gun. Tu Reh and his family have lost their homes, their loved ones and much of their sense of community during the many years of fighting, and his prejudice against everything Burmese runs deep. When Chiko is injured behind enemy lines, it is up to Tu Reh to decide whether this boy, his supposed mortal enemy, lives or dies. It’s a decision that changes both their lives.

Perkins was inspired to write the story during the three years she and her husband, a Presbyterian minister, spent on a missionary assignment near the Burmese border in northern Thailand. Here, Perkins witnessed firsthand the hardships, tenacity and hope of those affected by war. “These people are in conditions that seem nearly unbearable: They have been hunted, forced into labor, lost their homes, and many are hiding in the jungle,” Perkins explains. “You see them trying to perpetuate nationhood, trying to teach civility to a younger generation, trying to keep a hold on their culture and language. It’s fascinating and sad, but amazing to hear their stories.”

She also learned that war is never black and white. “When you think about the Burmese army from the Karenni point of view, it’s easy to think about them as evil. But Burma used to have one of the highest literacy rates in the world, and now it has the most child soldiers. So you have all of these soldiers who are really young and uneducated. They are trying to send money back to their families, trying to make ends meet, and they are desperate. It’s not always clear who are the good guys or the bad guys.”

Having traveled the world from an early age, Perkins knows a little about how diverse the world can be. Her father, a civil engineer who developed shipping ports, took the family from their home in India to live in such places as Cameroon, Ghana, Mexico and London. But it wasn’t until she landed in America that she felt a culture shock. “I was often between cultures,” Perkins recalls. To find refuge, she would sneak onto her family’s New York City fire escape—and there she also found her passion for writing. “I used to take my Sweet Tart candies, a pen and my journal and go out there to write,” she remembers. “It was in between the world of home and the world outside, and even today the fire escape metaphor really works for me.” Indeed, Perkins has a blog called Fire Escape where she invites her readers to join her for chats, discussions and a place to “explore hopes, dreams, and fears.”

Her own sense of being in between cultures is also why she is so interested in sharing stories from around the world with her readers.

“I like opening the eyes of children,” Perkins says. “They are much more open-hearted and aware than many adults believe them to be.”

“I think there is a lack of respect for what children do and want to know,” the author says. “They understand the human experience much more than they are sometimes given credit for.”

Guerilla warfare, child soldiers and landmines: What do these ripped-from-the-headlines terms have to do with a coming-of-age story for young readers? As it turns out, quite a bit.

While displacement camps and military maneuvers are not the trappings of your standard touchy-feely…

Self-published in 2003, Hilary Thayer Hamann’s re-released Anthropology of an American Girl is a coming-of-age story rich with visual descriptions and commentary on life in the 1980s. Through high school in East Hampton and early adulthood in New York City, protagonist Eveline Auerbach confronts the cultural expectations of an “American girl”—along with death, love and the nature of friendship.

Readers have compared Hamann to Henry James and J.D. Salinger, and those evocations are fitting. But ultimately, Anthropology of an American Girl feels entirely fresh, as Hamann addresses—with lovely, intimate language—the contradictions we all face: obsessive love versus a desire for independence, or skepticism of an institution alongside pleasure in our daily participation.

At more than 600 pages, Hamann’s debut is no quick read, but it’s well worth the investment of time. To give you an idea of the themes and plot of the novel, BookPage asked the author to elaborate on her writing, from the choice to include song lyrics in the text, to whether her narrator is a feminist.

Anthropology of an American Girl was self-published in 2003, then sold to Spiegel & Grau in 2007 and “significantly re-edited.” How did the novel change from the original version? Are there significant differences in plot? New characters? A different tone?
There were no changes to the characters or to the plot, but it feels like a different book. It feels lighter, cleaner, and as a result, stronger. Since Anthropology has a legacy—the self-published version got strong reviews and it developed a significant fan base—there was an effort to preserve the essence of the original. Cindy Spiegel, my editor, combed through the novel carefully and cleared away the extraneous material so that the characters and their motivations became more vivid. The revised edition has a freshness and a vitality that the former lacked.

Music and song lyrics factor prominently in the story. How did you choose which songs to excerpt? Is your musical taste the same as Evie’s?
The music that figures into the book doesn’t refer to Evie’s taste or mine, though there are songs in there that I loveand ones that she loves, too! Since the premise of the book is an “anthropology,” I tried to document the music of the time, noting the songs she might have heard or been influenced by. You know, if Evie walks into a deli, for instance, what might have been playing on the radio? Or, if she is standing on the streets in Brooklyn, what might have been playing on someone’s car stereo? There are selections from funk, pop, rock, R&B, classic blues, bossa nova and even opera in there. I realize that some of the songs might be obscure to readers of different generations, which is why simply naming them was not an option. The inclusion of the lyrics allows readers to get a sense of the songwriters’ poetry. And it’s interesting, because even if you are familiar with the music, it looks entirely new to see it written out in the midst of text like that.

In one scene in the novelduring a eulogya priest speaks about the necessity and struggle of seeing “the essence of what we admire.” Of all your characters, whom do you most admire? How would you describe the “essence” of that character?
In the eulogy, the speaker is referring predominantly to the problem of viewing friendship as an all or nothing state of affairs. Between wholesale acceptance and wholesale rejection of a friend there should be a sustainable place of responsible engagement. Friendships with high standards and long-term commitments demand more work than the casual, disposal kind, but the rewards are great. When we forsake a friend in need, or when we are forsaken, it’s a terrible thing. There may be nothing worse.

There are some people who would never, who could never forsake a friend. Many of the characters in Anthropology possess this quality to varying degrees, but no one so much as Rob Cirillo. Rob is loving, but beyond that, his love is authentic. As he himself might say, it gets through. It reads as honest because he is fearless, and by that I mean, transparent in expressing affection. He is not secretive or self-protective; he doesn’t hide anything or have anything over on anyone. He is unafraid of being hurt by rejection, because in his mind, his love is enough. It’s a matter of confidence.

What is the essence of a character? There are myriad ways to reply, but to continue on this theme, let’s say confidence. I don’t just mean confidence as a character living out his or her life in the text, but as he or she relates to the writer outside the text. The characters I like best are the ones I have confidence in, the reliable ones, the ones that can help me do my job of conveying meaning, moving the story. Ironically, if they can remain true to the convictions you have assigned, they become less predictable, more interesting. They write themselves. In my novel, I would say Evie, Jack and Rob wrote themselves.

Are you skeptical of the American high school experience? Evie describes how school spirit, sports spirit and America spirit “got totally mixed up.” While participating in high school programs, she sometimes feels like “part of a giant out-of-control science experiment.” Was this true for you in high school? Is it the same for kids in high school today?
High school is a necessity for individuals, families and the nation, and receiving an education is a right and a privilege that American citizens deserve. But at the same time, these constructs I just named—individual, family, nation, education, right, privilege, America and citizenship—are not hollow. They need to be as meaningful in practice as in theory. The “out-of-control science experiment” phrase relates in part to the institutional lip service that gets paid to these concepts, whereas very little of it trickles down to the kids. It’s no secret to say that high school experiences are mixed at best. Many young people feel desperation, shame, anxiety, etc. while attending school. One main reason for this is that definitions of “success” in high school are too narrow. Typically, they relate to academics, sports or beauty. I was very fortunate to have had serious and meaningful experiences in the arts while in high school. Through the arts, my friends and I were able to cultivate, maintain and share the dignity, pride, faith, hope and political mindfulness that came naturally to us, and that come naturally to most teenagers. Unfortunately, such alternatives are not always available.

Who do you see as the audience for your book? Is it overwhelmingly female? Do you think men will be interested in this story?
I see Anthropology as a literary novel, and as such, accessible to both men and women. However, I am aware of the fact that more women will read it than men. Having said that, many of the book’s strongest fans have been men, so I believe that if they give it a try, they’ll love it. It contains an examination of men in this culture as well as one of women, and I tried to be sensitive in my approach to the social pressures placed upon men. The male characters in the book—Jack, Denny, Rob, Rourke, even Mark—are not two-dimensional devices. They are fully-realized. Of course male readers might feel self-conscious about carrying around a book with the title Anthropology of an American Girl, but I think it’s a great way to impress women!

Evie frequently considers the unique experience of being female. For example, “Every woman knows the feeling of being a stack of roving flesh.” Or, an “American girl” should possess “independence and blind courage.” Is Evie’s love foreven obsession withcertain men at odds with her social commentary? Is Evie a feminist?
Well, the book is not so polemical as that, and Evie is a very democratic protagonist. Through her, I was able to write around issues, more or less, rather than travel from one position to another. Perhaps I’d say she is a “feminist in training,” or to be more accurate, a “good citizen in training”—which incorporates feminism. She matures from that “stack of roving flesh” competing with the girls around her to a young woman who is genuinely concerned with others, and with women in particular. As the story progresses, Evie becomes mindful of the abuses women sometimes suffer, but she also comes to understand the abuses they level against themselves. She does this by living, observing, asking questions. She uses her internal time well. Thinking things through is a skill, I believe, that many of the best people cultivate.

And I think her love for men is accurate. I think the number and range of men she connects with is accurate. I think the vacillating negligence, absence, allegiance, cruelty, adoration, etc. of the men, and her willingness to love them despite it all, is accurate. There would have been no way for me to comment on the slippery slope women experience without demanding that Evie pass through it. Many girls waste their time on men. I certainly did!

In Anthropology of an American Girl, I was struck by your frequent use of italics to give certain phrases emphasis. What do italics add to the tone of your book? When you were writing, were you conscious of this technique?
This is very much a story about voice. It felt right to me that the words would be “heard” by the reader in a certain way. How Eveline hears, processes and speaks, are expressive of intention, direction and state of mind. It aided authenticity.

A notable characteristic of your writing is the use of simile: “The sun set . . . returning to us slow, like honey from an overturned jar.” “Some people exist quite well in injury. It’s like having gills to breathe underwater.” “The first time I saw you . . . it was like seeing a river.” How do these analogies serve your descriptions? Why do you so often describe what something is like?
First of all, I was writing from the point of view of a 17-year-old artist. I wrote as I thought she would see. If, instead, I’d written, “We watched the sunset,” or “Some people refuse to get over their own pain,” the words would have been stripped of her softness. They would have seemed too absolute. She does not know things so absolutely. Also, the similes make for a scenic space inside her head. I feel Eveline comes across as self-contained—unusual and content with that. Her inner vision is her defense. It’s like whistling or singing or breathing deeply when you are upset. She “paints” a place. At times, her interior image is at odds with her surroundings, and that interests me.

Secondly, I do happen to think and write visually, and I often see things before I can say them. So, I see the sunset like spilling honey. I see people existing well in injury as having special survival tools for their own special environment. Just this morning I was thinking of people who are oppressively cheerful as being secretly depressed. You know, those sorts who are happy to the point of evading the practical and emotional reality of others, themselves, the world at large. But before being able to articulate what I meant, I could see a sheer drinking glass full to the brim, lapping over its own edge. My impression was of something fragile, fluid and full to its own capacity. Something that had no room to let anything else in.

Why did you set Anthropology of an American Girl in the 1970s and 1980s? I couldn’t help but think of placing blame for our current financial crisis when Evie thinks: “blaming groups shows that you yourself are not involved but that you are intellectually connected.” Do you think your book has contemporary relevance?
I set it in the time I came of age because it felt more authentic to follow my own path. But I also believe the transformations of that time require exploration, and that they hold lessons for the present. One underlying question was: What happened to the idealism of the 1960s? Obviously, it was replaced by neo-conservatism, but why? I wanted to look at both the left and the right and try to understand the ways in which individual Americans are manipulated.

As teenagers who had been children in the 1960s, we were all too aware in the early and mid 1970s of corporate, political and environmental inequities. We were outspoken, and our conversations were deep and free. We were concerned about excessive deregulation of corporations (of the sort that has almost certainly led to the oil spill in the Gulf), environmental destruction, human rights. We had lived through the gas crisis. We were ready for solar power. It would have been a good time for increased sacrifice. But instead, the opposite happened. By the early 1980s, personal pleasure became the mode. Topics of consequence vanished; it became unpopular to be anti-establishment. It got to the point where you were mocked for thinking or speaking too seriously. Remember the old television show “Family Ties” with Michael J. Fox? The liberal, hippie parents were nice but irrelevant fodder for jokes, and the conservative son was the lead, the center, the star, the protagonist. It was a strange and depressing transition, and certainly, the “art” of the time bears this out. It reflects the pervasive selfishness, inwardness, markets—television, film, popular music. It all dated badly. It didn’t think beyond itself.

What is your next book about? Will you continue to work with a major publishing house?
I am currently writing a story about an extended family set in the Bronx in the 1960s. My idea is to write about a Vietnam veteran who returns home emotionally and physically ruined by his experience, but is eventually reconstituted through his relationship with a strange and extraordinary woman. It’s going to be another romance set over another cultural exploration. I think it will have something for everyone. And, I would love to continue working with Speigel & Grau. I feel as though I have found home.

Author photo by Doug Young.

Self-published in 2003, Hilary Thayer Hamann’s re-released Anthropology of an American Girl is a coming-of-age story rich with visual descriptions and commentary on life in the 1980s. Through high school in East Hampton and early adulthood in New York City, protagonist Eveline Auerbach confronts the…

These days it seems there’s a club for everything and everyone, but perhaps the coolest association you’ve never heard about is the International Thriller Writers (ITW). First founded in 2004, ITW is now made up of the best writers whose main aim is to get the pulses of their readers thumping. BookPage spoke with David Morrell and Hank Wagner, the co-editors of Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads, a compendium of essays by today’s top thriller authors on the books every fan of the genre needs to read. Together, Morrell and Wagner discuss the origin of their book, sexism in the genre and how thrillers have changed over time.

How did the book come into being? Did you approach each author who contributed essays with a particular title, or did each author bring their own favorites to the table?
Hank Wagner: The book came out of David asking several [ITW] members for their “Top Twenty” thrillers of all time. When he called me, I suggested expanding the list, because 20 titles wouldn’t cover the topic properly. When we decided on 100, it occurred to me we should do a book similar to others I had enjoyed over the years, namely Horror: 100 Best Books, and similar tomes on the science fiction, mystery and fantasy genres. David liked the idea, and presented it to the ITW board, who embraced it.

Armed with suggestions from ITW members and friends, we crafted the final list, which we then presented to members of the ITW, suggesting to those interested that they submit their top three choices to write about. We then tried to accommodate everyone as best we could in handing out assignments. Of course, some essays screamed to be written by a particular author—the essay on From Russia, With Love written by Raymond Benson, for instance. Raymond is an expert on the character, and has written several Bond novels himself.

Your book covers thrillers from 1500 B.C. to present-day novels—how would you say thrillers have changed (or stayed the same) over this huge period of time?
Wagner: Thrillers have stayed the same in that their basic goal—to give readers a thrill, to create a feeling or sensation of excitement—has remained constant. How individual thrillers accomplish that goal has evolved over the decades. In former times, the appearance of a monster, or a ghost, or a man being stranded on an island was enough to do that. Now the stakes have risen; it’s usually about a race against time or, literally, about the impending end of the world. The amazing thing is that ITW members keep coming up with new ways to engage increasingly demanding audiences.

Were there any titles you would have liked to see included that didn’t make the cut?
Wagner: This is precisely why we called the book 100 Must-Reads, rather than 100 Best Books. Of course there are books we, or some of the other contributors, would have liked to have squeezed in; we all love the genre, and we’re all passionate about books. There were several long, sometimes heated discussions about this book or that: Is it really a thriller? Did we cover that ground through another title? Was a particular book truly unique or groundbreaking? Right to the end, we’d often slap our foreheads in disgust, lamenting, “How could we have forgotten such and such a book?” In the end, we think we came up with a list that’s truly representative of the genre, demonstrating its breadth and potential. Still, it only presents the keys to a vast kingdom; we’re confident that readers can use this tome as a springboard to further reading in the genre. Think about it: We list 100 great books and stories right off the bat; many of the authors who penned the essays are successful novelists, with numerous works to their credit; and finally, the essays themselves mention dozens of titles as reference. All we can say is, “Bon appetit!”

Often there can be a kind of snobbism in the literary world, with certain readers turning their noses up at particular genres. Do you think this affects the thriller genre?
Wagner: Certainly not in terms of sales, based on recent scans of the bookracks and the bestseller lists. Most of the alleged snobbism turns up in reviews, but readers are a bright bunch—they can and do make up their own minds about what they want to read. Personally, David and I are always on the prowl for a good and interesting read, and find things to like about each book we pick up, whether it be the use of language or a creative plot, clever cultural references or just well constructed set pieces/scenes. If you are lucky, the book you are currently reading does all these things well.

Do you think thrillers are easily translated to film, or is there something special about the thriller in book form that gets lost in the conversion?
Wagner: It depends on the property, and the individual creators, whether a book translates well into film. It’s the eternal debate: What’s better, the book or the movie? Both forms try to accomplish different things; both have their own advantages and limitations.

What makes a great thriller?
David Morrell: The genre’s name is self-defining. A thriller must be thrilling. A mystery may or may not be a thriller depending on how much breathless emotion it has, as opposed to cerebral calculation. Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None is on our list because it’s as breathless and scary as it is puzzling. Of course, what’s thrilling to one generation might not be thrilling to the next. Similarly, one generation’s idea of fast pace might be different from a later generation’s. In fact, that’s one of the points in Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads—that this type of fiction evolved, and that it’s entertaining to chart the evolution. In 1860, Wilkie Collins was credited with inventing ”the novel of sensation” in The Woman in White. Contemporary readers found the book shocking, but today we appreciate it more for its place in literary history. Once we pretend we’re in 1860, the book becomes shocking again. So much depends on perspective.

On another level, a thriller becomes great when it carries a feeling of reality and truth. That’s one reason John le Carré’s work is admired. He not only delivers intrigue, but he also teaches us about our world.

Do you think that male and female thriller authors approach the genre differently?
Morrell: Twelve of the books on our list are by women. They include Mary Shelley, Baroness Orczy, Marie Belloc Lowndes, Daphne Du Maurier, Agatha Christie, Helen MacInnes, Very Caspary, Patricia Highsmith, Katherine Neville, Sandra Brown and Gayle Lynds. Why isn’t the ratio more balanced? Because, until recently, publishers didn’t encourage (or sometimes even allow) female authors to work in the genre. Frankenstein was published anonymously and was well-received. As soon as it became known that the author was a woman, critics found fault. Writing Frankenstein wasn’t a ladylike thing to do. Fortunately, things have changed. A lot of that is due to Gayle Lynds, co-founder of International Thriller Writers. Gayle used to be a newspaper reporter and had a security clearance when she later worked for a think tank. But when she submitted her early espionage novels, editors and critics stupidly complained that a female author couldn’t possibly know about the world of espionage. Gayle’s career helped to change these attitudes and opened the way for a lot of current women thriller authors.

With hundreds of years of thrillers behind us, how can thrillers continue to be relevant and fresh?
Morrell: At their best, thrillers not only entertain. Ideally they also reflect the society in which they are set, analyzing our fears and how we perceive the world. Author/law enforcement officer James O. Born wrote an essay about Joseph Wambaugh’s The Choirboys (1975) in which he points out that Wambaugh’s novels were the first honest insider dramatizations of police work. They were set against the major social changes of the 1970s. Wambaugh made a huge difference in how we look at law enforcement personnel. As long as thriller authors teach us about our world, they’ll be relevant.

Do you remember the first thriller you ever read?
Morrell: It seems tame now, but Nancy Drew and The Hidden Staircase really made an impression on me when I was a boy. By comparison, I don’t think the Hardy Boys novels were as exciting. After that came several Tarzan novels and The Lone Wolf and The Saint. But as an adult and an apprentice writer looking for a direction, I was most impressed by Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, a 1939 novel about a British big-game hunter who stalks Hitler on the eve of WWII. Household’s outdoor action scenes, with their mystical evocation of nature and the primordial relationship between hunter and hunted, showed me a path that I continue to explore more than 50 years later.

Wagner: The first thriller I ever read (also the first novel I ever read, also the first novel I ever bought with my own money) was Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The fifth-grade me couldn’t put it down; I read it obsessively during class, hiding it in my lap, near the opening of my desk. That was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with books. I quickly moved on to Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, The Shadow and Doc Savage, and countless comic books.

If you had to choose, who are your favorite thriller writers? All-time favorites.
Morrell: Geoffrey Household will always be important to me. Rogue Male is on the list, and I was delighted to write the essay about it. My Penn State master’s thesis was on Hemingway’s style, and parts of his work—sections of To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls, for example—demonstrate a high caliber of action writing that continue to influence my writing. I also learned a lot from James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, which is on our list. And Dracula. People who know various movie versions don’t really know the story. Stoker displays a remarkably sophisticated technique, and his chase scenes are exemplary. Take away the vampire element, and you have one of the first novels about a serial killer.

Wagner: If I had to choose one, I’d go with William Goldman. I was lucky enough to do an essay on his classic novel Marathon Man for 100 Must-Reads. It was a joy to reread that book; he really caught lightning in a bottle there, and it still holds up. Magic is another classic. Other top choices would include Stephen King, Peter Straub, John D. MacDonald and a fellow named . . . David Morrell!

These days it seems there’s a club for everything and everyone, but perhaps the coolest association you’ve never heard about is the International Thriller Writers (ITW). First founded in 2004, ITW is now made up of the best writers whose main aim is to get…

Born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Adam Ross was a child actor who appeared in the 1979 film The Seduction of Joe Tynan with Alan Alda and Meryl Streep. After graduating from Vassar College with a degree in English, he completed an M.A. in creative writing at Hollins University, followed by an M.F.A. in creative writing at Washington University.

From 1999 to 2003, he was special projects editor and staff writer at Nashville’s alternative weekly newspaper, the Nashville Scene, and after his stint there, he taught English at the Harpeth Hall School, a private Nashville girls school.

Ross spent 13 years writing his first novel, Mr. Peanut, in which an apparently loving husband fantasizes about the death of his wife, only to see his horrific dreams come true. With its layered storyline and allusions that range from Hitchcock to Escher, Mr. Peanut is being hailed as one of the season’s best debuts. BookPage asked Ross to elaborate on the novel’s inspirations and themes.

The premise behind the book—a woman’s death at the hands of a peanut—is both absurdly comic and extremely tragic. Where did the idea come from?
In 1995, my father told me about the suspicious death of my second cousin, who was morbidly obese, struggled epically with depression, and also suffered from lethal nut allergies. According to her husband—who was, conveniently, the only witness to her “suicide”—he came home from work to find her sitting at the kitchen table with a plate of peanuts before her. They had an argument, which she interrupted by taking a fistful of nuts in her hand and eating them. She’d also hidden her Epi-pens, and died before his eyes from anaphylactic shock. I was stunned when I heard this story—I was sure she’d been murdered—and immediately afterward wrote three chapters in one sitting that closely resemble those that begin the novel now. But then I pulled up because I’d written myself into something I didn’t fully understand yet. Looking back, I think what’s so compelling about the situation is that it’s a moment of terrible privacy between a husband and wife. Maybe she was sick to death of her life, both on earth and with him; maybe he rammed the nuts down her throat. We’ll never know.

Readers often say they need likeable characters in order to connect with literature. Few, if any, of your characters are objectively likeable, yet Mr. Peanut is almost compulsively readable. Do you find your characters likeable and, if not, how do you at least bring enough humanity to them to make them real?
I find them terribly and, at times, hysterically recognizable, and I’d like to think that’s what makes the novel so readable. Numerous couples have told me that they’ve thought the very things these characters have about their spouses but were afraid to admit; that, and their marriages have been through versions of the same situations, both the ruts and redemptions. I think that part of what we’re drawn to when we read fiction is whether or not the characters bring us news about our world—spiritual, emotional, literal, or otherwise. Humbert Humbert, Nabokov’s famous pedophile, isn’t “likeable,” but the story he tells is enchanting and we’re certainly happy to follow him anywhere, no matter how perverse a place he takes us, because he writes so powerfully and believably about obsession. So it’s not, I think, a question of bringing enough humanity to make them real as much as what Keats demands: beauty and truth, no matter how dark.

Mr. Peanut incorporates a real story—the Sam Sheppard murder case of the 1950s—into its narrative. Was it always your intent to fictionalize this event and how did you negotiate the ‘cold facts’ with your imagining of what occurred?
No, he appeared several years into drafting, again a gift from my father. Initially, the book’s two detectives were allegorical constructs, one assuming all suspects guilty from the get-go, the other the opposite, and after a while I realized I needed a grey-area figure. After my dad and I watched The Fugitive and he told me a brief history of the case, so I read about it and, bingo, there’s my guy: I wanted to rescue the true story from the Hollywood version, because in the remake, Harrison Ford is the paladin knight of marriage, its redeemer in a struggle to regain his good name, whereas what I found so captivating about the Dr. Sam Sheppard murder case was its mystery and muck, what with Sheppard’s serial womanizing, his narcissism, and the way his relationship with his wife anticipated so many moral hazards of the sexual revolution, not to mention the fact that his guilt or innocence remains in question. It’s just a juicy, albeit tragic, mystery, and it required extensive research because I wanted to take Sheppard’s testimony and imagine it from the point of view of the primary suspects—Sheppard, Dr. Lester Hoversten, and window-washer Dick Eberling—as well as Marilyn, the victim. The cold facts are directly incorporated into the novel because you can’t get around them. They’re out there, and so I used them as the plot’s scaffolding.

Hitchcock figures heavily into both your plot and themes. So does Escher and, of course, the iconic wrong man detective story. What other writers and artists inspire you?
The writers who had the biggest impact on me while I was drafting were first Milan Kundera, whose novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being also has overlapping chronologies and is told from different points of view that, taken together, deliver a huge emotional charge at the story’s end. Italo Calvino, the great Italian fabulist, writes formally complex and wildly inventive narratives, like The Castle of Crossed Destinies, which he generated using tarot cards. When it comes to dark tales, I regularly returned to John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig, which is about very bad men and women doing very, very bad things, and you can’t put it down. As for artists, music-wise give me Beethoven’s heavy metal any day along with Miles Davis’s lightness; throw in Calder’s subtraction of weight from giant structures, Rothko’s emotionally super-charged color combinations, and the purity of Brancusi’s abstract sculptures.

In many ways,  Mr. Peanut resists traditional chronology and narrative arc. Was this a conscious choice, or something that emerged naturally as you wrote?
It emerged naturally though I wish it were otherwise since it might not have taken so long to write, about 13 years of off-and-on work. I’ve got nothing against classic Aristotelian structure, though I believe you can achieve Aristotelian catharsis by countless other means, but the truth is this: the games the novel plays with chronology, arc, Hitchcock allusions, and names demand the reader be the detective, which I think we all have to be when it comes to identifying both the good and evil that lurk in our hearts.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
Husbands and wives of America: do good housekeeping! Take care of your spouse! Nurture your marriage and be very careful what you wish for when it comes to things like, oh, freedom from it: you might just get it, and the attendant tragedy, loneliness, and guilt that come with it—see Dr. Sheppard above or your neighbor’s recent divorce—are potentially horrible.

We have to ask: what does your wife think of all of this? 
She read it for the first time last year and hasn’t spoken to me since. No, seriously, she was very moved by it because she hung tough while I labored to finish and recognizes moments in it from our marriage that make us both happy: like David and Alice in the novel, we met in a Hitchcock seminar at Hollins University and spent our first months together falling in love with his films and each other. Years into our marriage, we went to Kauai, again just like the main characters, but whereas that trip marks the beginning of the end of their relationship for us it was where we learned we were pregnant with our first daughter. Our life is the Escher-obverse of the book. Plus the Detective Hastroll section cracks her up. And sometimes she wants to kill me too.

What’s up next for you?
I’m adding several new stories to my collection entitled Ladies & Gentlemen, due out next summer, and they’re dark and comic too, but nearly all of them are traditionally chronological with classic narrative arcs. No more crazy outlines for me.

Related content:
Review of Mr. Peanut.

Born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Adam Ross was a child actor who appeared in the 1979 film The Seduction of Joe Tynan with Alan Alda and Meryl Streep. After graduating from Vassar College with a degree in English, he completed…

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