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A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl

A harrowing tale of sacrifice, survival and identity, Nanda Reddy’s A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl presents an unvarnished look at how the American Dream can morph into a nightmare for immigrants.
A harrowing tale of sacrifice, survival and identity, Nanda Reddy’s A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl presents an unvarnished look at how the American Dream can morph into a nightmare for immigrants.
FictionPopular FictionFamily Drama

I Leave It Up to You

You won’t forget Jinwoo Chong’s big-hearted, beautifully written I Leave It Up to You, about a son returning to his fractious but loving family following a two-year coma.
You won’t forget Jinwoo Chong’s big-hearted, beautifully written I Leave It Up to You, about a son returning to his fractious but loving family following a two-year coma.
FictionFamily DramaComing of Age

Red Dog Farm

A heartfelt coming-of-age story about a son leaving college to help on his father’s farm, Nathaniel Ian Miller’s Red Dog Farm is note-perfect in its evocative depiction of life in rural Iceland.
A heartfelt coming-of-age story about a son leaving college to help on his father’s farm, Nathaniel Ian Miller’s Red Dog Farm is note-perfect in its evocative depiction of life in rural Iceland.
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FictionHistorical Fiction

Behind the Book: Reviving the real Kleopatra

Behind the Book by Karen Essex

People always ask why I spell Kleopatra’s name with a K. In fact, it’s the original Greek spelling. Kleopatra was not Egyptian at all, but the last of a Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt for almost 300 years. The unusual spelling is entirely appropriate: I want people to rethink the very idea of Kleopatra right down to the spelling of her name.

In a recent speech, the esteemed writer Susan Sontag claimed that "the writer’s first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth . . . and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation." Not all writers not even those who chronicle history subscribe to Ms. Sontag’s sentiments. Mitigating factors bias, distort and color both history and its characters. Who was in power when the history was written? What was the political orientation of the historian? What were the prejudices of the age? Of all the women distorted by history and myth, Kleopatra is the most vivid example. Far from the seductive, treacherous archetype of feminine evil who lives in the popular imagination, Kleopatra was one of the ancient world’s most brilliant and powerful rulers. She survived blood-curdling family rivalries, single-handedly ruled a rich nation and kept Egypt independent while all its neighboring countries had been annexed to the Roman Empire. She spoke nine languages, patronized art, drama, athletics and the sciences, and had the loyalty of her subjects rare for the members of her dynasty.

The Kleopatra handed to us by history was the victim of a smear campaign by her rival and mortal enemy, Octavian (who became Caesar Augustus). Octavian feared with good reason not only Kleopatra’s power as the Queen of Egypt, but also her influence with Julius Caesar, and later, Mark Antony. But history is written by the winners, and Octavian, in his war against Antony and Kleopatra, won. After her death, he destroyed all written histories favorable to her, and her story was rewritten by his court historians. The more I found out about the historical Kleopatra, the more infuriated I became. Women have virtually no role models who have held Kleopatra’s great power, and I could not accept that the most powerful woman in history, with the possible exceptions of Queens Elizabeth I and Victoria, has been remembered only for the men with whom she slept. The more I learned about the real Kleopatra, the more I raged on to friends and anyone who would listen. Finally, a fellow writer—perhaps tired of hearing the diatribe—suggested that I turn my passion into a book.

I enrolled in an inter-disciplinary graduate program at Vanderbilt University where I could study with classicists, historians and women’s studies scholars. I traveled to Egypt, Greece, Turkey and Rome, walking in Kleopatra’s footsteps. I dragged my 60-something mother into the dizzying heat of the Egyptian desert, escorted by a tour guide and a truckload of men with machine guns! At the outset, I had no idea what it was going to take to write this book with integrity, but after nine years, two graduate programs and all my travels, a two-volume novel was born.

In Volume One, Kleopatra, I wanted to tell the becoming of Kleopatra, to chronicle the events and circumstances that went into the making of this towering and fascinating woman. Traditionally, her story begins as she rolls from the legendary carpet, landing at Caesar’s feet. But Kleopatra had an extremely exciting story before she came spinning into Caesar’s life. Volume Two, Pharaoh (due out in August 2002), begins when Kleopatra is thrust into the center of history’s great stage. It’s been both strange and illuminating to spend a decade of my life with someone who has been dead for 2,000 years. But I hope that I’ve contributed to the ongoing dialogue about the ways in which women have been ignored, misinterpreted or discredited by the telling of history. I felt it was time to set the record straight.

Karen Essex’ Kleopatra is being published this month by Warner Books. A journalist who wrote a well-received 1996 biography of pinup legend Bettie Page, Essex lives in California.

 

People always ask why I spell Kleopatra's name with a K. In fact, it's the original Greek spelling. Kleopatra was not Egyptian at all, but the last of a Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt for almost 300 years. The unusual spelling is entirely appropriate:…

Fiction

Turning a news story into a novel

Behind the Book by Ann Patchett

I have an erratic relationship with the news. I don't own a television and I don't subscribe to the local paper. I listen to NPR while I eat my breakfast or drive around in my car. About four days a week (depending on the circumstances of the week) I manage to read The New York Times. If something happens on a day when I skip breakfast and don't pick up a paper, it is completely possible that an event of major world importance could pass right by me.

Despite these lax practices, every now and then there's a news story that consumes me completely. The takeover of the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru in December 1996 drew me to the radio and held me there. I read everything about it that I could. I made it a point to drop in on friends during the evening news so that I could see the pictures on television. A terrorist group known as Tupac Amaru had commandeered a dinner party of 450 people at the Japanese embassy. By the end of the week, they had released all but 74 of the hostages. The terrorists, from what I could tell, were not especially terrifying, or at least they were nothing like the members of The Shining Path, the group with which they were so often confused. Their goal was to force the government into freeing some 400 political prisoners from Peru's notorious high altitude prisons. They seemed to have all the time in the world to wait.

Very few disasters happen in slow motion: plane crashes, school shootings, earthquake — by the time we hear about them, they're usually over. But the story in Lima stretched on, one month, two, three. The media could not sustain its interest. The story fell off the first page, and later off the fifth. Many days the news didn't mention the hostages at all. It seemed that the world had gotten used to them being there. An embassy wasn't such a bad place to be stuck and, after all, no one was getting shot.

But I couldn't stop thinking about these people. There is no such thing as a good kidnapping, but I heard the hostages played chess with their captors. I heard they played soccer. There were rumors of large pizza orders. Many of the terrorists were young and they liked to watch soap operas on television. I don't know how far things had gone when I realized that I was reading about the novel I was going to write next. The story had all the elements I was interested in: the construction of family, the displacement from home, a life that was at once dangerous and completely benign. I started to put together my list of characters. I gave the hostages an opera singer, one woman kept, though in real life all the women had been released. They needed an opera singer, I thought, the story was so operatic. The plot taking place in my imagination moved forward while the one on the news seemed to stagnate.

And then a friend called me. "Come quick," she said. "It's over." The military had tunneled up into the compound and then shot all the terrorists, saving all the hostages. That was that. The story was over. There were many things I wanted to write about when I started Bel Canto, music and language and people's ability to communicate with one another. I wanted to explore the idea that if we were forced out of our normal lives for a time, taken away from everything we know, we might be given the opportunity to see the world in a new way. But more than anything, I wanted to find a way to grieve for something I had read about in the paper. The disasters I find there make me dizzy. They reel by me in a state of constant abstraction. Seven children shot in a school, 258 people killed in a plane crash, 10,000 lost in an earthquake. These are numbers I can't understand, and I find myself thinking that these are things that happen someplace far away, to people I don't know. How could I begin to separate out every life, to acknowledge it, grieve for it, and learn from it? I couldn't do it every time, but with this story I thought, just once I wanted to try.

Bel Canto, being published this month by HarperCollins, is the fourth novel by Ann Patchett, author of The Patron Saint of Liars and The Magician's Assistant.

I have an erratic relationship with the news. I don't own a television and I don't subscribe to the local paper. I listen to NPR while I eat my breakfast or drive around in my car. About four days a week (depending on the circumstances…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Behind the Book: The fine line between fiction and memoir

Behind the Book by Margaret Dilloway

How to Be an American Housewife is a work of fiction, but includes incidents that were told to me by my mother. So why did I write a novel and not a memoir? Wouldn’t it have been easier to compile the stories my mother told me?
 
Most every writer and reader has seen Truman Capote’s quote: “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.” In writing this book, my truth came from fiction, as strange as that may sound.
 
A memoir, culled strictly from real life, would have taken place only from my very limited perspective, not my mother’s. A memoir would have had its ending in my mother’s hospital bed, with her telling me, “You can do what you want. I am proud of you,” and me standing there, trying to reconcile years of rockiness with these fond words.
 
In a memoir, I would not have been free to imagine a whole other life, to see through another’s eyes. In fiction, I created characters that are like me and my mother, but not. They don’t exactly act like we did, and they certainly lead different lives. I felt it was important to have the book take place in Japan, to have the character Sueexperience viscerally what it was like to discover a whole existing family where before there had been a void.
 
Creating characters also allowed me the distance to carefully consider my relationship with my mother. To pull out what was important. To make up a plot with themes I wanted to emphasize, rather than the actual events, which might have been rather lackluster and lacking in insight.
 
Anyway, in many ways memories turn into fiction. Everyone remembers things differently. People leave out important details because they forget, or it’s not important to them. For example, even today, my father tells me additional stories of my mother and Japan that I never knew: that her family was a shogun (samurai) family, that many Japanese women who married Americans were of the untouchable class and had no prospects in the country. (And sometimes I say, Why didn’t you tell me earlier? I could have included that in the book!)
 
Nonetheless, I did choose to include some actual events in the novel. My mother told me stories of what it was like coming of age in wartime Japan, and of living among former enemies in the U.S. She told me how she worked for Americans, how her father wanted her to marry an American and actually did have her take photos of all her prospects so she could choose my father. Like the mother in the book, she told me these stories beginning in my childhood. I never liked to hear of her hardships.
 
And of course, there was the inspiration book: The American Way of Housekeeping. My mother had a copy of the book, written in Japanese and in English, telling housekeepers how to keep a proper house for the military occupying the country. Yes, housekeepers. The book was made for housekeepers, but was also a handy guide, apparently, for new Japanese brides marrying Americans. It was popular enough to go through several printings and editions and be sold at the PX, or military base store; one book I found online had the PX stamp and an inscription to a wife.
 
I used the nonfiction book as the basis for my fictional How to Be an American Housewife, which turned into a nice structure for the novel, the skeleton, so to speak. But the real stories are in some ways secondary to the meat of the book.
 
What the book is really about is how a mother and daughter overcome years of miscommunication, gaps real and imagined in both language and culture. It’s about how to come to terms with wanting what you have, not what you wanted to have. And it’s about living with hope and finding redemption, both themes that perhaps would have been less possible to have in a memoir.
 
How to Be an American Housewife is Margaret Dilloway’s first novel. For more on Dilloway, who lives with her husband and three children in Hawaii, visit her website.
 
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How to Be an American Housewife is a work of fiction, but includes incidents that were told to me by my mother. So why did I write a novel and not a memoir? Wouldn’t it have been easier to compile the stories my…

Fiction

To love or not to love: the eternal question

Behind the Book by Richard Paul Evans

“Some stories are crafted as if by blueprint, built line by line and brick by brick. There are stories born of angst, wrung painfully from an author’s mind onto pages that, in the end, are more of bandage than paper. Then there are those stories that seek the writer, drifting through time and space like thistle seed until they find fertile ground on which to land and take root. This is one such story. It found me during my second week in Italy.” Excerpt from The Last Promise We went to Italy because my wife, Keri, and I had reached a point in our lives where comfort and predictability had become suffocating to our souls. At the same time, our family was growing up, and it was time for an experience that we could all share before breaking off into our own lives. At these times it’s best to take our lives by the corners and shake them. Leaving America was not easy. Italy was a big shake.

My wife and I found a cottage in the Chianti countryside a few kilometers outside of Italy’s cultural heart the city of Florence and I began considering ideas for my next book. It seems peculiar to me now, but I had no intention of writing anything set in Italy. In fact, after the first several months in the country, I was even less inclined to do so since it seemed to me that every American in Florence wanted to write about Italy. Then something happened.

I was near the grounds of the Roman Forum when I came upon the ruins of the temple of Vesta. I learned from my guidebook that Vesta was the goddess of hearth and home and an important deity to the ancient Romans. The keepers of the temple were the Vestal Virgins, a small group of women chosen to be priestesses to Vesta. The Vestal Virgins were considered holy and given great wealth, power and honor, but there was a price. The Vestals were required to take three vows; the first was allegiance to the Goddess Vesta, the second was to keep the Temple’s flame (symbolic of Rome’s families) burning at all times. The third and last promise was that they would, for the sake of Rome’s families, forsake love, taking vows of chastity. If a Vestal was to break this final vow, punishment was severe. First, the Vestal’s lover would be whipped to death. Then the Vestal would be bound in burial linens, given a loaf of bread and an oil lamp, and taken to the field of the damned where she was buried alive.

Eighteen of the Vestals suffered this fate. In spite of the threat of losing honor, power, wealth and even their lives, these women still chose to risk love. This dramatic illustration of the powerful conflict between the human need for love and the commitment to God and family intrigued me. I wanted to write about it.

With the premise for the novel in mind, the setting for my story presented itself a few weeks later when I met a young American woman lounging by the pool at a Chianti country club. I learned that she had, in America, married a wealthy, handsome Italian man, had a child, then, after several years, followed him from her home in the States back to his family’s beautiful villa in Tuscany. While in America, he had been romantic and caring and had treated her as an equal, but once back in Italy he seemed to change. As time passed she saw less of him. Then his attitude toward women seemed to change, as well. One day he announced, “It is not right that I help with the child or the home. It is your job. You need to serve me. That is how it is here.” Hoping to keep their marriage alive, for their child’s sake, she tried fitting into the new paradigm, but found herself desperately unhappy. When she told her husband that she wanted a divorce so she could go back home to America, her husband told her that he would not allow her to take their child with her. Italian law prevented her from taking her child out of the country without her husband’s permission. She had a choice, live a loveless life with her child or find love and break her family apart. Thousands of years later here was a modern woman facing the same dilemma that the Vestal Virgins faced in ancient Rome. Using her real life dilemma as my story’s setting, I wondered what would happen if she, deprived of love, fell in love with somebody else. What would she do? When I began to write my novel, The Last Promise, I set out to answer that question.

Richard Paul Evans was an advertising executive in Utah when he wrote his first book, The Christmas Box, which went on to become a number one bestseller. The Last Promise (Dutton, $22.95, 320 pages, ISBN 0525946969), which goes on sale November 11, is his seventh novel.

"Some stories are crafted as if by blueprint, built line by line and brick by brick. There are stories born of angst, wrung painfully from an author's mind onto pages that, in the end, are more of bandage than paper. Then there are those stories…
FictionWomen's Fiction

Behind the Book: A recipe gives rise to a novel

Behind the Book by Darien Gee

In 2009, my then-eight-year-old daughter brought home a few slices of Amish Friendship Bread on a paper plate. “It’s so good,” she insisted. Then she pulled out a Ziploc bag of starter and a page (a page!) of instructions. Now if you’ve never seen (or smelled) a bag of fermenting batter, well, let’s just say that it’s something you don’t ever forget.

 It didn’t take long for me to figure out that this was essentially a culinary chain letter, a “bake and share” routine that grew exponentially as you passed the starter on to not one, but three more people. I could see people running in the opposite direction, a bit like I wanted to do at that moment.

Still, my daughter held the plate in front of me, patient. I broke off a corner of the bread and chewed it slowly. It was good, moist and sweet with a sugar-cinnamon crunch. Maybe I was having a sugar rush of my own, or maybe it was because I had a few minutes of peace and quiet, but a vision of a woman came into my mind, reluctantly holding up a bag of starter and regarding it with a frown.

She was lovely, and she was sad. I didn’t know what had happened, just that she was stuck in the day-to-day motions that mimicked life when in fact she hadn’t felt alive in years. I saw her own young daughter, her husband, the home they shared together.

I knew right then that I wanted to find out more. I put the bag of starter in a mixing bowl, the instructions tucked inside, and placed it on the counter. I called to my daughter and told her we would be baking Amish Friendship Bread in 10 days.

 
That night I sat down at my computer, the image of the woman still fresh in my mind. I started writing, and the story of Julia Evarts started unfolding, but still I didn’t know what was going on. Later that night, I saw a quarter flying through the air and landing in the palm of someone’s hand. That hand belonged to Julia’s sister. I liked Livvy instantly—her optimism, her bubbly personality. But I sensed that something had happened between her and Julia, that they were no longer talking though they had once been very, very close. I continued to write, and more central characters started to show up, all with stories of their own—Madeline, a lonely widow who opens a tea salon on a whim; Hannah, a former cello prodigy whose marriage is ending; and Edie, an ambitious journalist who is desperate to make her mark.
 
I started to see all the connections, saw how the bread was linking people together in ways that surprised me. Characters appeared for only a moment but left an indelible impression.

I filled any available moment, day or night, writing. My husband had read the first few pages and agreed that there was something there. We came up with a schedule that let us juggle the kids, work and writing. I figured the story was either there or it wasn’t, and it was my job to write until it became clear either way.

All this time, my daughter and I were following the instructions that came with the starter. For 10 days it was the same thing—mash the bag—a task her brothers were more than happy to help with. We added flour, milk and sugar on the sixth and 10th days, and watched the starter bubble up happily. I still have that same starter, almost two years later.

I’ll admit that I was looking forward to baking the bread that first time. There’s something about squeezing the bag for 10 days that has you counting the days until it’s time to bake. When I realized that we wouldn’t have any starter left once we divided the batter and shared it among our friends, I kept a bag for myself. Ten days later, we were baking again.

It continued like this as I wrote the book, sharing the starter with friends and neighbors. I experimented with new Amish Friendship Bread recipes, all the time fortifying myself with the bread that was at the heart of Friendship Bread, my novel.

Amish Friendship Bread is so much more than a simple recipe; it’s about friendship and community, about sharing what you have with others and expressing gratitude for the good things in your life. I’m reminded of this every time I gather with my family in the kitchen, the bowl of Amish Friendship Bread starter on the counter, waiting for our next baking day.

Darien Gee is the author of Friendship Bread and founder of the Friendship Bread Kitchen. Click here to download a PDF of the recipe for Amish Friendship Bread.

 

In 2009, my then-eight-year-old daughter brought home a few slices of Amish Friendship Bread on a paper plate. “It’s so good,” she insisted. Then she pulled out a Ziploc bag of starter and a page (a page!) of instructions. Now if you’ve never seen (or…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Cruelty and courage in the 60s South

Behind the Book by Sena Jeter Naslund

The publication of my novel Four Spirits this month is the fulfillment of a promise I made to myself long ago. Back in the 1960s, witnessing the civil rights struggle in my home city of Birmingham, Alabama, I promised myself that if I ever did become a successful fiction writer I would write about the courage and pain, the unspeakable cruelty and abiding love of those transformative times.

It took nearly 40 years and the publication of five earlier books for me to have the confidence to try to tell the civil rights story as I had lived it, observed it, heard stories and read about it. In a number of ways, the character of Stella Silver in Four Spirits replicates some of my own experiences. My own idealistic family were educated, liberal, loving people. For a long time, I was sheltered from the racial fear and hatred in my city and the South, but, while I was a freshman at Phillips High School, the Rev. Mr. Fred Shuttlesworth, while attempting to enroll his children in an all-white school, was beaten with chains and brass knuckles in front of the building and his wife was stabbed.

Like Stella, the scales fell from my eyes as an impassioned high school teacher from the North spoke to my class of racial prejudice as a mark of ignorance. Soon, I was hearing and reading with horror of beatings, of castration, and of more than 40 homes and businesses of blacks destroyed by dynamite in Birmingham. However, like many citizens of Birmingham and of the nation, it was when I learned that four young girls of the bombed Sixteenth Street Baptist Church had been killed that I made a new commitment to work to overcome racial prejudice in my city and in America.

Joined by a disabled friend in a wheelchair, I began teaching on the campus of all-black Miles College. I began to know personal fear. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, I witnessed widespread joy in the populace of Birmingham because a rising champion of integration was dead. As I worked the switchboard of a major department store that Friday night, my own isolation and alienation from a city I truly loved increased my resolve to some day tell the truth, through fiction. I believe triumph can be wrung out of tragedy. Largely through nonviolent political action rooted in love, the South has been transformed, if not utterly changed, and the whole of America has made a greater legal and moral commitment to racial justice.

While my novel Four Spirits truthfully suggests something of the violence, sacrifice and heartbreak of those times, it is a positive book and celebrates courage, friendship, family and community.

Sena Jeter Naslund lives with her husband in Louisville, Kentucky. Her new novel, Four Spirits dedicated to the victims of the Birmingham church bombing is being published by William Morrow.

 

 

 

The publication of my novel Four Spirits this month is the fulfillment of a promise I made to myself long ago. Back in the 1960s, witnessing the civil rights struggle in my home city of Birmingham, Alabama, I promised myself that if I ever…

FictionHistorical Fiction

The top-secret battles that threatened America’s shores

Behind the Book by Homer Hickam

<B>The top-secret battles that threatened America’s shores</B> I am a lucky man and I know it. I’ve managed to have two interesting careers, one as a NASA engineer and another as an author of memoirs and novels. Most of my fans assume I transitioned from NASA to writing but the truth is I’ve been a writer nearly all of my life. Mrs. Laird, my third grade teacher, told me someday I’d make my living as an author and was mightily disappointed when I decided some years later to become an engineer. My training in the sciences, however, never stopped my love of the written word. I first broke in as a freelance writer for a variety of scuba diving magazines during the 1970s. After being certified as a diver in 1972 and then as an instructor in 1973, I began to write for <I>Skin Diver, Sport Diver, Aquarius</I> and other magazines dedicated to the sport. My specialty was stories about diving on sunken wrecks. This would lead to a most remarkable adventure and, to my surprise (and Mrs. Laird’s joy), my first book.

My adventure began in 1975 when a fisherman off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, saw something long and narrow on his depth recorder. Curious, he invited some local divers to dive on the thing, whatever it was. At a depth of 110 feet, the divers found what they believed to be a submarine. Before long, I got a call from one of them. Would I come up and perhaps write an article about it? I jumped at the chance.

When I dived on the wreck, I recognized it immediately as not only a submarine but a World War II German U-boat that had been sunk in battle. There were torpedoes and 88-millimeter shells strewn about, and its deck gun was blown away. In its conning tower I found a human skeleton. What had sunk this submarine and when? Whose body was in the conning tower? And what in heaven’s name was a German <I>Unterseeboot</I> doing in American waters, anyway? The answers to those questions and so many others would not come easy. After digging, I discovered that nearly all the records of World War II German U-boat activity off the American east coast were still classified. Fortunately, being the lucky guy I am, the Freedom of Information Act was passed shortly afterwards. This allowed me to be one of the first researchers to look at a treasure trove of documentation. I was astonished to learn of a battle within sight of our shores that had not only sunk this particular U-boat (the U-352) but six others along with over 400 American and allied ships in a nine-month period. It was, in fact, one of the greatest and longest battles of the war, yet was virtually unknown. Soon, I tracked down American, British and German sailors who had fought in the bitter contest. After writing a number of articles about my findings, I realized I had enough for a book. My military history best-seller <I>Torpedo Junction</I> (Naval Institute Press, 1989; Dell, 1991) was the result.

After <I>Torpedo Junction</I> was published, I began to receive many letters from folks who had lived on the North Carolina Outer Banks during the war. They thanked me for writing about the battle and then continued with their own eyewitness accounts. One man wrote to tell me about his mother who was living at the time on Hatteras Island. One day, she’d been hanging out the laundry when what should motor by but a U-boat with its crew sunbathing on deck? They had waved at her and she’d waved back before recalling they were the enemy. She retrieved her husband’s rifle and began shooting! Wildly ducking, the Germans had immediately scrambled inside their U-boat and submerged. Other letters I received were more ominous in nature, stories of saboteurs off U-boats who had been met by the local citizenry with shotguns. Although these accounts were not verifiable, I came to believe there was more than a kernel of truth to them. Eventually, I knew I had to write a novel that would encompass not only the research I’d done for <I>Torpedo Junction</I> but the unique people of the Outer Banks. <B>The Keeper’s Son</B> is the result.

Nearly all of my books have been about small towns, and so I was pleased to write about another, this one set on the fictitious island of “Killakeet, south of Hatteras, north of Lookout,” a place of “fishermen, clam-stompers, oyster-rakers, Coastguardsmen, and lighthouse keepers.” The Keeper’s Son is a novel of the Thurlow family, keepers of the Killakeet lighthouse. The Thurlows must endure a great tragedy when Jacob Thurlow, only 2 years old, is lost at sea due to an error of judgment by Josh, his older brother. Seventeen years later, after a self-imposed exile, Josh returns to the island as a Coast Guard officer. When the marauding U-boats arrive, Josh and the crew of his tiny patrol boat are all that can stop the destruction of the people of Killakeet. What Josh cannot imagine, however, is that one of the U-boats is harboring a secret that might tell him the fate of his baby brother.

Although there are more than a few stirring battle scenes in my novel and also the mystery of the lost son to unravel, there are also several romantic subplots, one of which includes Dosie Crossan, a lusty young horsewoman who sets her sights on Josh. It’s always been my belief that it isn’t plot that makes for the good story but, perhaps more importantly, the people in it. It was a lot of fun to create Dosie and all the colorful characters who populate Killakeet and the U-boats offshore. I hope my fans will enjoy reading <B>The Keeper’s Son</B>, a novel of high-spirited adventure and love in a time of war. The Keeper’s Son <I>is the first work of fiction by Homer Hickam, a former</I> NASA <I>engineer who first won a wide audience with</I> Rocket Boys<I>, a memoir of his West Virginia boyhood that was made into the movie</I> October Sky. <I>Hickam, who has also written two other volumes about his small-town upbringing, lives in Huntsville, Alabama.</I>

<B>The top-secret battles that threatened America's shores</B> I am a lucky man and I know it. I've managed to have two interesting careers, one as a NASA engineer and another as an author of memoirs and novels. Most of my fans assume I transitioned from…
FictionWomen's Fiction

Behind the Book: Debut goes beyond the veil

Behind the Book by Darynda Jones

When I decided to make my grim reaper female in First Grave on the Right, I really didn’t want a being made of death and darkness and skeletal remains, so I decided to challenge lore. I mean, what if grim reapers were just misunderstood? Represented in legends and mythology erroneously? And what it they were really bright, shiny beacons of light that lured those departed who were stuck on Earth toward them to cross to the other side? Of course, my heroine would attract all kinds of trouble in the process, everything from demons who try to kill her to ghosts who try to kill her to, well, humans who try to kill her.

That is Charlotte “Charley” Davidson in a nutshell. And while she’d like to believe she’s a complete badass, she’s really more of an accident-prone, slightly schizophrenic girl from Albuquerque who takes the complications of ADD to a whole new level. And being the only grim reaper this side of forever doesn’t help.

Okay, but why the grim reaper, you might ask. That one is simple. As an aspiring author, I wanted to get noticed. I wanted something different that would pique the interest of agents and editors alike. Fortunately for me, Charley did just that. First, she won the 2009 RWA® Golden Heart© for Best Paranormal Romance, then she landed me an amazing agent. Not long after that, she secured a three-book deal for the rights to her story with St. Martin’s Press. Her journey has been an incredible one and the fun is just beginning.

For me, that Golden Heart final changed everything. Admittedly, I’d been entering the contest for several years, and while I never finaled despite some pretty good scores, every year I really thought I had a chance. Until 2009. I signed up to enter First Grave on the Right for one reason and one reason only: I wanted to force myself to finish the manuscript. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt it would not final. No way. No how. And then I was mad that I’d wasted the entry fee. That money could have been used for something worthwhile, like chocolate! But I grudgingly sent it in and dismissed it from my mind entirely.

So when March 25 rolled around and I received the call that I was a finalist, to say that I was in a state of shock would be an understatement. I honestly could not believe it. And when I won? Forget about it. I was so shocked, I forgot my shoes and walked to the stage in a daze barefoot.

In First Grave on the Right, Charley Davidson uses her reaper abilities to help her succeed as a private investigator. It’s a natural progression from her childhood. Since she was five, she’s been helping her detective father solve crimes. In First Grave, three lawyers from the same law firm are murdered, and they come to Charley to find their killer. At the same time, she's dealing with a being she calls the Big Bad. He’s more powerful, and definitely sexier, than any specter she's ever come across. With the help of some living and some not-so-living associates, Charley sets out to solve the highest profile case of the year and discovers that dodging bullets isn't nearly as dangerous as falling in love.

Darynda Jones lives in New Mexico, where she is currently hard at work on the third Charley Davidson mystery.

When I decided to make my grim reaper female in First Grave on the Right, I really didn’t want a being made of death and darkness and skeletal remains, so I decided to challenge lore. I mean, what if grim reapers were just misunderstood? Represented…

Fiction

Threads of a mother’s memories weave the fabric of a debut novel

Behind the Book by Brett Ellen Block

Some writers have always known they wanted be writers. Others have felt a calling to the profession. I, however, fell into fiction writing literally. After slipping and twisting my ankle my second year at college, I needed to find a class I could get to easily on crutches. It was late in the registration period, and I was left with a choice between only two courses: Descartesian Theory and Creative Writing. I might have been clumsy, but I wasn't stupid. I chose the writing class.

Years later, with two master's degrees in the subject behind me, I found myself at an impasse. I'd finished my first book, a collection of short stories called Destination Known, and was ready to write a novel, but needed funding to make that possible. Uncoordinated or not, I wasn't likely to trip into any mounds of cash on the street. Then a classmate of mine from the Iowa Writers' Workshop told me about a fellowship offered to alumni and suggested I apply. It seemed like I had fallen into some luck without actually having to fall. My decision to apply only started to feel like a misstep once I faced the task of beginning the book. Up until that point, I'd only written short fiction, and the prospect of embarking on a novel, even a portion of one to submit for the fellowship, was daunting. In spite of all my writing experience, I genuinely had no clue where to begin.

I tried hitting up friends for family stories, plumbing my own past, even chatting up strangers, but nothing piqued my interest. One night, while complaining to my mother about the glare from my blank computer screen, I happened to ask if she remembered any striking or odd stories from her youth. She mulled it over for a bit, then told me that she recalled the rumor of a priest who'd been buried in a potter's field, but no one would ever say why. The forbidden quality of the secret surrounding the priest intrigued me. I tried to imagine what he could have done that would prohibit him from being buried in consecrated ground, and that was where the root of the story took hold.

The setting for my novel, The Grave of God's Daughter, is based on the place where my mother was raised. All throughout my childhood, we had made trips to her hometown in Western Pennsylvania, and to a young girl, it was like a foreign land that was just a car ride away. I remembered eavesdropping on people as they spoke in Polish, and attending mass at Saint Joseph's Church, the foundation of which my great-grandmother had actually helped dig. Some of the streets were still cobblestone, and there was an enormous neon cross perched on the mountain on the other side of the river that glowed through the night. I'd grown up hearing the tales my mother told about collecting glass bottles to make change, the strict nuns who were her teachers in school and how she'd never seen a mosquito while growing up because of the chemical plant on the other side of town.

While thinking out the novel, those stories began to blend with my own memories. One in particular was the time I visited my great-uncle's house, where he raised pit bulls. The sound of more than two dozen dogs barking was as frightening for me as a child as it became for the narrator of the novel. Though the fabric of The Grave of God's Daughter has many threads of fact, they are only the framework for a story about the unwavering bond between mother and child. Given the source of the story, the theme couldn't be more apt.

If I had a dime for all of the times I'd heard the phrase "write what you know" in creative writing classes, I might not have needed the fellowship grant, but I also might not have written this book. I couldn't have predicted that when I injured my ankle I would stumble onto a career that I love, nor could I have planned that the inspiration for this novel would be a strange scrap of memory from my mother's childhood, but like any good story, even the one behind the novel has plenty of twists and turns.

Brett Ellen Block's debut novel, The Grave of God's Daughter, explores a young girl's coming-of-age in an isolated small town that is keeping a terrible secret. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Block now lives in Los Angeles.

 

Some writers have always known they wanted be writers. Others have felt a calling to the profession. I, however, fell into fiction writing literally. After slipping and twisting my ankle my second year at college, I needed to find a class I could get to…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Behind the Book: Pyramid scheme

Behind the Book by Arthur Phillips

Arthur Phillips' critically acclaimed debut, Prague, was a bestseller in 2002. His inventive second novel, The Egyptologist, takes readers into the competitive world of post-World War I Egyptology, where a glory-seeking young archeologist bets his career and his fiancée's fortune on the discovery of the tomb of an apocryphal pharaoh. Phillips, who studied at Harvard and is a five-time "Jeopardy!" champion, explains here what prompted his interest in this unusual subject. We'll leave it to readers to decide just how much to believe.

Readers often challenge authors to identify the myriad streamlets that flowed together to form the river of a novel: How did you think of that? How much is true? How did you research it? To the best of my recollection, here are the tributary events that led to The Egyptologist.

Several years ago, I was at a Kinko's in Sink, Oklahoma, bored, photocopying my remarks for The Sink Literary Festival's panel on The Self in Flight from Itself: Understanding the Author as Pathological Liar when, in the blue recycling bin at my feet, I noticed the distinct first page of a handwritten letter. Despite the poor toner quality, I could make out a date from 1952 and a series of lovelorn complaints. The writer accused Beloved, hated Doris of any number of violations of his love. Oddly, among the other crimes, the writer's wrath was most righteous over a betrayal of some obscure academic debate: But, Doris, your decision to side with the know-nothings of Egyptology in denying the historical veracity of King Atum-hadu has wounded me more than all your petty cruelty, your crude tauntings, your low-cut End of page, and none beneath it. I didn't know anything about Egyptology (I still don't) but the idea of a lover enraged over such a dusty topic caught me.

I certainly didn't have a novel, just a sniff of something, and I didn't smell it again for two years until, at a museum in Thailand, battling the heat and jet lag while walking through an exhibit on the 18th-century Siamese Queen Shlipralithpur, I was bored again. I noticed four young women speaking a Slavic language, maybe Polish. I recognized only two accented words: Shlipralithpur and Atum-hadu. The coincidence awoke me, and I recalled Doris' love-shattering controversial position. What possible relationship could that ancient king have to this opium-gobbling girl-queen of Siam or to these sun-burnt Slavic beauties (who spoke not one word in common with any language I could sputter, but one of whom, when I repeated Atum-hadu, smiled broadly and slowly drew in my notebook a series of the most exquisitely vulgar hieroglyphs)? I was hooked; I smelled the simmering stock of a novel. The process of inspiration is impenetrable, at least at the time, but I remember that I was fiercely determined (in a way I rarely am, as laziness is my ruling humor) to learn about Atum-hadu.

My research took a year. The only public documents even mentioning Atum-hadu were located in the People's Library of Ancient Cultures, a squat 1970s concrete lump in a Beijing neighborhood split between lesser university disciplines and adult-video importers. It took some finagling, but I was permitted a scant 90 minutes of supervised access to the archives. I didn't know what I was looking for, but I found it at minute 86: the same series of obscene hieroglyphs I had last seen 13 months earlier in Bangkok. I began feverishly copying everything, though of course I couldn't understand the symbols. I managed to scribble only one paragraph in my four minutes. And then the document was snatched away.

Home a week later, I went in search of an Egyptologist to translate the paragraph for me. A cosmic sigh: the very first Egypt scholar I found at my local community college was a young, sun-burnt Russian emigre named Doris. Her translation:

 

The invaders cut through Atum-hadu's defenders. Their faces spattered with the blood of a decade's slaughter, their howls ringing out as they reached at last for their prize, maddened by their strict diet of war, promised blinding plunder and terrified victims, they poured into Atum-hadu's court. There they gaped at the defiantly exuberant courtiers of Atum-hadu: feasting, dancing to the intricate music of their king's composition, riding trained camels and, along the defenses, on the floors, and on tables engaging one another in combinations and postures the invaders could never have conceived of, even after a decade of desert isolation where their thoughts had nowhere to turn but upon the faraway pleasures of the flesh.

 

Doris read the translation to me in her lilting accent as a dusty sunbeam alit on her face, and soon after I began work on the novel which is now The Egyptologist.

 

Arthur Phillips' critically acclaimed debut, Prague, was a bestseller in 2002. His inventive second novel, The Egyptologist, takes readers into the competitive world of post-World War I Egyptology, where a glory-seeking young archeologist bets his career and his fiancée's fortune on the discovery of the…

FictionShort Stories

The seeds of one writer’s inspiration

Behind the Book by Owen King

Writer Owen King makes his fiction debut this summer with the publication of We're All in This Together, a collection that includes the novella of the title and four short stories. Ranging from serious to hilarious, from blunt to delicate, the volume showcases King's accomplished storytelling style. Here, he reflects on the people and places that have inspired his writing.

I sometimes worry that living in New York City will eventually jade me to eccentricity after all, everyone who lives here, who sleeps behind paper-thin walls, and who packs into the subway and rides ass-to-ass for an hour on a daily basis, has at least contemplated the possibility of descending into some florid, screaming insanity. As a New Yorker, when you see a man with a tie knotted around his head, goose-stepping around and around the statue of Gandhi in Union Square Park, cackling to himself and rapping Havah Nagilah, your best instinct is to keep right on going straight ahead and never look back. If you live in this city long enough, proximity teaches you to cut as wide a berth as possible. One realizes that another refrigerator leak, a few more sleepless nights on account of the stud operation next door, another evaluation without a raise, and that could very easily be you doing the Gandhi circuit.

For better or worse, however, I'm sure that it's no anomaly that as a writer I tend to be inspired by exactly that kind of self-displacement: What was that man doing two years ago? Does someone love him? How long will he keep going? Where does he go when he's finished? Why Gandhi, for God's sake? That is to say, I tend to start with a situation, or even just an image, and then use the story to try to figure it out: how did this happen, who was involved, in what ways did it change them.

For instance, in my new book, the story Wonders germinated from a (possibly apocryphal) anecdote about the great Red Sox outfielder Jim Rice: one game, as a pop fly took Rice to the edge of the stands, a fan reached out, took the hat right off Rice's head and went running. Then, the story went, the entire Red Sox team barreled into the stands to get the hat back. I had no idea if the story was true, but I wanted it to be, and although the scene it inspired turned out to be the end of Wonders, that was how I began.

I like to think that the bucolic hometown of my youth, Bangor, Maine, was rich in the peculiar episodes and individuals that make for promising fiction. (In the interest of full disclosure, I have to concede that by bucolic Maine town standards, my own family is as peculiar as any. My parents, Stephen and Tabitha King, are both authors, and during daylight hours, my father actually dozes in a large, leathery cocoon suspended from the rafters of the barn.*)

We're All In This Together, the novella that accounts for the bulk of my collection, was primarily inspired by my own feelings about the results of the 2000 election—I wasn't happy but the motor of the narrative belongs to the owner of Bangor's only billboard, a roughly 10×10 piece of miter board. This monument near the corner of Union Street and West Broadway stands angled on a brief, privately owned patch of grass in order to, somewhat charmingly and somewhat inexplicably, remind passersby of the seasons.

In the spring, the billboard will usually be covered with something like a rendering of frolicking puppies, along with the legend, SPRING. In the fall, we might get a tow-headed boy chasing a kite through a couple of swirling leaves, and in case that didn't fully explain it, the title FALL. While I've never learned the identity of the seasonal billboard artist, or if he or she means to convey some larger point about the dangers of forgetting the seasons, at some point in 2002, I had a daydream about getting my own billboard and writing down my feelings about the current administration in BIG BLACK LETTERS for everyone in the neighborhood to see. Of course, that was just a daydream; it wasn't something I would actually do. . . . But who would put up a sign that said all the angry things that I and so many people I knew were feeling about the direction of our country? Why would he do it? How would it change him?

The story I wrote ballooned to touch upon subjects ranging from organized labor to softcore television to fathers and stepfathers, but the seed was in that eccentric little billboard near the corner of Union and West Broadway.

* Kidding.

Writer Owen King makes his fiction debut this summer with the publication of We're All in This Together, a collection that includes the novella of the title and four short stories. Ranging from serious to hilarious, from blunt to delicate, the volume showcases King's accomplished…

FictionHistorical Fiction

BEHIND THE BOOK: Novelist imagines her ancestors’ westward journey

Behind the Book by Karen Fisher

When I started my first novel, A Sudden Country, in 1990, I thought it would take a year. Through my ancestry, I'd always felt linked to the story of westward migration. But when I was growing up in the 60s, the story of Oregon emigration had faded into a hazy foundational myth: corny or romantic or shameful, depending on your demographic. I knew it had been none of those. It had been a real event in which real people had taken an incredible leap of faith. What had made them leave safe homes for the unknown? What had they found? I could only guess. But just knowing their stories had given me a willingness to take risks and to endure life's inconveniences, to value survival skills.
As a teacher, I took teenagers into the wilderness and saw how many had no idea what humans were capable of. I told stories of explorers and emigrants and Native Americans how they'd lived and what they'd done. These stories had the power to change their outlooks, too. This history seemed too important to forget, to laugh at or dismiss. That's not to say I wasn't uncomfortable with my colonial legacy. My college years had been informed by the new environmental movement, by AIM, by the rage of historical revisionism that cast Americans not as victims or heroes but as monstrous aggressors. But I knew, again, that the people in conflict at the time had seen a much more complex picture, different from any historical recasting.

I never expected to exorcise my conqueror's guilt, but it did seem necessary to understand this story from the ground from inside those who'd been there. So I wrote, and when the year was out, I realized my presumption. Grand intentions had done nothing but produce a fiction, as absurd as any other, and I was expecting a first child. I put the project away, resolved to make better use of my time. Then, with no less presumption, my husband and I quit our jobs and moved to an Idaho farm. With no money or work to fall back on, driving a trailer full of goats and horses, cats and hens, we arrived on 50 acres and soon had to fix tractors, build barns, dig cellars, grow food. What had we been thinking? Six years passed. I had a girl, then a boy. Each winter I tried to write. By then I'd ridden country once mapped by Hudson's Bay fur traders, snowshoed through winters so long and bleak that I'd come to see how color vermilion or a string of beads could become currency. Now a mother, I'd wondered how one eloquent trader had endured a winter in which his whole family died of smallpox. I'd stood on old village sites, pondered churches built by rival missionaries, learned to butcher deer and split cordwood from a Nez Perce neighbor. Summer days of hoeing and diapering had taught me things I'd never guessed about poverty. Each month brought some new lesson, and for a writer, the most important one was this: that facts and ideas were not enough to write from. Only by feeling a life could I understand it. Only by living could I feel it. Then I was given an account handed down by a true ancestor. Emma Mitchell was 11 when she crossed to Oregon in 1847. Desperate toward the journey's end, her family won permission to winter at the Whitman mission. A month later, the Cayuse massacred the mission's American men, took the women and children hostage. From my farm I could almost see that place, but never imagined my connection. Or guessed that but for a pair of stolen stockings, I might well not exist.

To take up those dry husks of words and know a woman who once woke from dreams, pressed her lips to an infant's hair, found her courage, kept a secret; to know a man who had split wood, built barns, lost love to know these things was to know my new ability to speak for those whose lives had been reduced to names in the backs of Bibles, a saved lock of hair, old pages lit to fire kindling. I abandoned years of drafts, everything I'd done, and began again, hoping (with less presumption now), to honor them.

 

Karen Fisher now lives with her husband and three children on an island in Puget Sound.

When I started my first novel, A Sudden Country, in 1990, I thought it would take a year. Through my ancestry, I'd always felt linked to the story of westward migration. But when I was growing up in the 60s, the story of Oregon…

Fiction

BEHIND THE BOOK: A survivor’s story, retold for 90 years

Behind the Book by Katharine Weber

What would it be like to be famous all your life — famous until you are 107! — for not having died on a certain day in 1911? When Rose Freedman, the oldest living survivor of the notorious Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, died in February of 2001, her obituaries fascinated me. She was the last survivor. I was working on my third novel, The Little Women, and I already knew by then that I wanted to write a novel about the Triangle fire next, but I didn't have a clear pathway.

The Triangle fire has always felt like part of my personal family history, because my paternal grandmother worked at the Triangle Waist Company for less than a year, finishing buttonholes. She left at the end of 1909 because she was pregnant with my father, and so she was safely out of harm's way more than a year before nearly 150 workers died in 15 minutes on March 25, 1911, when the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of the Asch Building, east of Washington Square, went up in flames. The fire, probably ignited by a cigarette butt, spread swiftly through the crowded sweatshop, accelerated by the machine oil-soaked floors and tables, fed by bundles of shirtwaists and scrap materials that littered the work areas.

The firemen's ladders reached only as high as the sixth floor. Some 60 workers, most of them young women, jumped to their deaths. Most of the nearly 600 workers on the premises that afternoon survived by fleeing down the stairs or crowding into the elevators which made a few trips before the smoke and heat rendered them inoperative.

How did Rose Freedman escape the fire? Instead of trying to go down from the ninth floor where she was working, she thought about the bosses who worked upstairs, and she followed the office staff up to the roof of the building. The owners, who had a call from the eighth floor where the fire broke out, had saved only themselves, with no thought about warning the workers beneath them on the ninth floor. Firemen helped her climb across to the roof of the adjacent building, and so Rose Freedman lived to tell her story.

She told her story countless times. What would that be like, telling your story again and again, for 90 years, the story of the day you didn't die? I listened to several interviews with her and read transcripts of other interviews over the years. The more I read about the fire, and the more eyewitness interviews I read or heard, the more discrepancies I began to note. Discrepancies are inevitable. Memory is faulty; memory changes over time, perceptions are affected by many things. This, for me, is where a novel begins to take form, out of situation. Who would be in that situation? What would he or she do, and why? What would be the consequence? Where would this go and what would happen next?

And so my original question, what would it be like, telling your story again and again, changed. Leaving Rose Freedman behind, my question became this: What would it be like to tell your story for 90 years, if your story wasn't quite true? If your story was a lie? What sort of lie might it be? Why would you keep the secret over the years? Would the truth eventually surface?

And so Triangle began to take shape. The main character, Esther Gottesfeld, dies in 2001 at the age of 106 as the novel begins, just days before the events of September 11th. Esther survives the same way Rose Freedman did, going up to the roof instead of trying to go down. But her sister and her fiance die in the fire.

Inspiration for those characters came to me from the Robert Pinsky poem Shirt, which I quote in its entirety as the epigraph for Triangle. Pinsky wrote about the unidentified man, described in numerous eyewitness accounts of the Triangle fire, a worker on the ninth floor, who helped several women up onto the windowsill so that they could jump, helping them, in Pinsky's words, As if he were helping them up to enter a streetcar, and not eternity. The third woman he assisted to her death put her arms around his neck and kissed him. He jumped too.

Who were they? Was the woman who kissed him his sweetheart, or did she simply have the impulse to experience kissing a man before she died? And so they joined my story and became central to the secrets and lies of Esther's 90 years of telling what happened. The truth of what actually happened to Esther the day the Triangle Waist Company went up in flames, hidden in plain sight on the first page of the novel, is not fully revealed until the last page.

Katharine Weber's fourth novel, Triangle, has just been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

 

 

What would it be like to be famous all your life — famous until you are 107! — for not having died on a certain day in 1911? When Rose Freedman, the oldest living survivor of the notorious Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, died in…

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FictionDebut Fiction

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Francesca Hornak, Samantha Silva

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Holiday preparations flood our hearts with the warmth of Christmases past—or the echoes of family dinners best forgotten. Wherever your memories lie, two debut works of Christmas fiction are sure to lighten your spirits.

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Journalist Megan Angelo has written extensively about pop culture, motherhood, womanhood, TV and film for the New York Times, Glamour, Elle and more. Her debut novel, Followers, is a perfect intersection of her passions that delivers a curious tale of three influencers and their followers, from 2015 to 2051.

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