First allow me to say that I had nothing to do with our current financial meltdown. A few years ago I found myself starting a novel about a family of bank robbers set during the Great Depression, a story that would become The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. At the time, our stock market was briskly accelerating, the wind in its hair and its wrist casually dangling out the window. My house had almost doubled in value, along with pretty much everyone else’s, and people at parties traded ideas for the next great investment (redo the kitchen? buy nanotech stocks? get a second house?).

While casting about for an idea for my second novel, I read a history of bank robbers during the Great Depression and was intrigued by colorful characters like John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd. I next read a number of books about the Depression itself and marveled at the stories. Fistfights at the offices of employers who announced they needed to hire two men and found themselves fending off a riot of hundreds of applicants; long lines of laid-off white-collar workers waiting on city sidewalks for a free lunch, shamefully shielding their faces from view; families facing desperate decisions about how to simply stay alive; angry young men robbing banks and redistributing wealth the old-fashioned way.

This all seemed so otherworldly to me as I read about the ’30s from the comfortable vantage of 2007. And it had seemed so otherworldly to the people living it, too. People in the Great Depression, particularly the early years, felt utterly unmoored. Their world had been turned upside down. One year, shoeshine boys had been trading stock tips; the next year, stockbrokers were taking walks out their 20th-floor windows. Countless people were dispossessed, out of work and literally starving. How had this happened? We were a nation in complete and utter shock. All of the foundations of normalcy had been torn down—faith not only in capitalism but also in democracy; the belief that hard work would be rewarded, that the American Dream could be achieved. Our most basic assumptions had been revealed to be no more than empty myths.

One year, shoeshine boys had been trading stock tips; the next year, stockbrokers were taking walks out their 20th-floor windows.

I had always wanted to write a novel centered on a typical American middle-class family unexpectedly derailed by economic disaster, but had struggled with figuring out how to do so without being too depressing—and had wondered how I might make the story interesting to readers who were themselves living in the strongest economy ever known to man. The larger-than-life bank robbers of the Depression, I realized, presented me with a perfect opportunity. My fictional family could be a shop-owning clan in a small Midwestern city, ruined by the father’s horribly timed real estate speculation. In response, two of the three sons become bank robbers—and, soon enough, folk heroes to the legions of angry souls who blame the banks and the government for the hard times—and a third son can stay home to try supporting the family legitimately. The domestic tension, the sibling rivalries, the cool bank-robbing scenes, the fedoras and Tommy guns and fast cars, the mythology of the ’30s bank robbers, the sense that all of America’s founding principles had suddenly and irrevocably been called into question, a nation that seemed on the verge of revolution—all these were rich in narrative possibility for the novelist, even in 2007. I had no idea that any of this might also become frighteningly relevant to my own times—after all, as I wrote the rough draft, the Dow was above 13,000.

A very unfunny thing happened during the final revisions of The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers—the world economy collapsed. I had, alas, not seen this coming (one glance at my retirement account will prove my point). But as I read and reread my book in the final months of copyediting and proofreading, it was eerie that so many things I had once considered borderline fantastical were becoming commonplace in 2009: entire neighborhoods foreclosed and vacant; a modern-day Hooverville popping up beneath a highway overpass in my childhood home of Providence, Rhode Island; populist rage at government and banks, along with accusations and counteraccusations about the merits of socialism and the failures of capitalism; the sense that we had, for the last few years or decades, been deluded fools, recklessly living according to a set of fictional principles that had finally crumbled in the face of reality.

When writing The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, I had not been trying to tell the future or draw parallels between a distant time and our own—and I think the book works even for readers unconcerned with such analogies. But it also proves that no matter how hard a writer might try to tell own his story and control his characters, there are always more powerful forces at work. The best you can do is tell your tale and let it loose upon a world that we’re all trying to make sense of, even as it changes around us, day after day.

Thomas Mullen made his literary debut in 2006 with the award-winning novel The Last Town on Earth. His second novel, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, has just been published by Random House. Mullen lives in Atlanta with his wife and two sons.

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.

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.

<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>

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.

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.