Ten of the worst nightmares in literature

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best nightmares in literature.

One novel on the list:

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Poor Lockwood gets snowed in on a visit to Wuthering Heights and has to stay the night. He dreams that he puts his hand through the bedroom window and has it seized by "the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand". There is a sobbing voice and suddenly a terrifying child's face. It is Cathy, and the rest of the novel is an explanation of this dream.

Read about another bad dream on the list.

Wuthering Heights appears on Mullan's list of ten of the best foundlings in literature, Valerie Martin's list of novels about doomed marriages, Susan Cheever's list of the five best books about obsession, and Melissa Katsoulis' top 25 list of book to film adaptations. It is one of John Inverdale's six best books and Sheila Hancock's six best books.

The Page 99 Test: Wuthering Heights.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Bill Fitzhugh's "The Exterminators"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: The Exterminators by Bill Fitzhugh.

About the book, from the publisher:

All Bob Dillon ever wanted was a truck with a big fiberglass bug on the roof. All he had to do was survive a half dozen assassination attempts, pull a ten million dollar con on a Bolivian drug lord, and then fall off the face of the earth with his family and his new best friend, Klaus. Six years later, in The Exterminators, they surface in Oregon where they continue Bob’s work creating an all natural means of pest control. But now, instead of cross breeding different strains of assassin bugs, they’re using advanced gene sequencers to consolidate the perfect insect killing traits into one deadly bug. Only one problem: all this serious DNA tampering is expensive and they’re running low on funds. The venture capital outfit that wants to invest turns out to be a front for DARPA (the Department of Defense agency charged with R&D for exotic weapons). It seems the U.S. Government wants to enlist Bob, Klaus, and the bugs in the War on Terror. Oh, and did we mention unlimited funding? An offer too good to refuse, they move to Los Angeles and get to work. Things go swimmingly until that Bolivian drug lord discovers he was conned out of his ten million. Vowing revenge, he offers twenty million to whoever kills Bob and Klaus. Some of the world’s best assassins descend on Hollywood and, before you can say “It’s an honor just to be nominated,” the weirdness level reaches apocalyptic levels. It’s a battle pitting the far right against the far left with Bob stuck in the middle and subjected to some serious post 9/11 thinking.

Learn more about the book and author at Bill Fitzhugh's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Exterminators.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Fritz Allhoff's "Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture"

Today's feature at the Page 99 Test: Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture: A Philosophical Analysis by Fritz Allhoff.

About the book, from the publisher:

The general consensus among philosophers is that the use of torture is never justified. In Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture, Fritz Allhoff demonstrates the weakness of the case against torture; while allowing that torture constitutes a moral wrong, he nevertheless argues that, in exceptional cases, it represents the lesser of two evils.

Allhoff does not take this position lightly. He begins by examining the way terrorism challenges traditional norms, discussing the morality of various practices of torture, and critically exploring the infamous ticking time-bomb scenario. After carefully considering these issues from a purely philosophical perspective, he turns to the empirical ramifications of his arguments, addressing criticisms of torture and analyzing the impact its adoption could have on democracy, institutional structures, and foreign policy. The crucial questions of how to justly authorize torture and how to set limits on its use make up the final section of this timely, provocative, and carefully argued book.

Learn more about the book and author at Fritz Allhoff's website and blog.

The Page 99 Test: Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rosamund Bartlett's "Tolstoy: A Russian Life," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Tolstoy: A Russian Life by Rosamund Bartlett.

The entry begins:

The image of Tolstoy as an old sage is now deeply ingrained thanks to The Last Station. Christopher Plummer did a marvellous job, even if his character lacked Tolstoy’s gravitas. If they ever made my biography into a film, I'd like to concentrate on Tolstoy’s earlier years, when he was a reckless young man of extraordinary physical and intellectual prowess who caroused with the gypsies, bedded peasant girls, fought bears single-handed, served with honour in the Crimean War and gambled to excess while at the same time developing superlative literary gifts and the stamina to write War and Peace. Tolstoy was not a refined aesthete, but gruff and down to earth despite his aristocratic pedigree. He was an eccentric - a man who always went against the grain and against his class by siding with the beleagured peasants.

He abhorred convention and the hypocrisy of the society world he belonged to by birth, and he loved the natural world of rural Russia which was his home for the best part of his life. I think Russell...[read on]

Visit Rosamund Bartlett's website and learn more about Tolstoy: A Russian Life.

Writers Read: Rosamund Bartlett.

My Book, The Movie: Tolstoy: A Russian Life.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books on dissent in Central Europe

Timothy Snyder is professor of history at Yale University. His books include Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

One book tagged in his dialogue with Alec Ash at The Browser about books on the experience of dissent in Central and Eastern Europe:

Homage to Catalonia
by George Orwell

Your first book is Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, which you describe as a prehistory of dissent.

Generally when people talk about Orwell in this context, they start with Animal Farm because it’s a retelling of Soviet history, or with 1984 because it’s an account of what a totalitarian society would look like, at a time when communism was spreading to Eastern Europe. The reason why I am so fond of Homage to Catalonia, and see it as an even more relevant precursor to dissent, is that in it you can see a man of the Left learning to make the distinction that breaks down the Left with a big L into lots of little lefts. He comes to understand what Soviet power actually is, and that it is qualitatively different to the other sorts of Spanish left, or to European left-wing intellectuals or Labour in England.

The difference is not just a matter of being on a different point of the spectrum. It is to do with the immediate violence of Soviet means which were visible to Orwell at that time and place. That’s the second thing which I find important about the book as a precursor to dissident literature. To the end of dissident literature, in the seventies and eighties, people defended themselves by making observations and elementary distinctions, preserving certain concepts, not allowing things to be vague. They defined themselves as individuals by their capacity to be specific about what was going on around them. And Orwell is wonderful at that. It is his creative gift.

He describes what is happening in Catalonia [during the Spanish Civil War] in such a way that we are able to see why he’s so upset about Soviet power. His argument is not one of category and concept but of irresistible observation, that builds itself up into facticity with a literary quality that is strong enough to contend with, if not defeat, ideological certainty. The dilemma that the dissidents had to face later on was that they had to build up a view of the world which was non-ideological, yet could somehow contend with and subvert ideological views of the world. Orwell did that on the basis of good observation and good prose.

Was it that fixed ideological dogma that repelled Orwell’s moral compass most?

My sense was that the ruthlessness of Soviet communist actions in Spain led him to an intuition about the wrongness of the total certainty of a worldview that could justify any action at any place and any time in service of the larger story. I think Orwell grasped that there was an almost arrogant coherence to Soviet activity when he saw the ruthlessness of Soviet behaviour, against a background where other people on the left were much less sure and confident, and were fighting for things that were much more immediate and palpable.

Read about another book Snyder discussed at The Browser.

Homage to Catalonia also appears among Carne Ross's five notable books on leaderless revolution, Samuel Muston's ten best travel books, Harold Evans's five best books on reporting, and Michael Symmons Roberts's ten best books on civil war.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dispatches from Sundance 2012: 1

Ray Taras is professor of political science at Tulane University in New Orleans where he also directed its World Literature Program until Hurricane Katrina forced its closure. Comparative literature and world cinema have been teaching and research interests of his for many years.

He regularly reviews world literature for the Campaign for the American Reader and has represented the site at the Sundance Film Festival since 2008.

Taras's first report from Sundance 2012:

On cue, it began snowing over the Wasatch Mountains days before the 2012 Sundance Film Festival opened. Snow is not essential to Sundance’s success, but it is a different matter for the U.S. national ski team, also making Park City its base. The old silver mining town is just 30 miles up the steep interstate from Salt Lake City, where the total precipitation for December was 0.03 inches. There are many reasons why Sundance is magical, and snow-covered slopes around the town is one of them.

One of the film categories of the Festival is called Spotlight, which is intended as a tribute to “impressive films that have played throughout the world.” One of the chosen films which I went to see late at night on the last Friday of the Festival was Elena, a 2011 Russian production directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev. It had premiered earlier that year at Cannes where it was awarded the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard category. The night I saw it in Park City, Zvyagintsev was in Moscow collecting Golden Eagle Awards given out by the Russian Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Elena was chosen as best film of the year and Zvyagintsev was named best director. The film’s Sundance connection comes full circle when we recall that the Russian’s director had been awarded a highly-competitive Sundance Institute grant for the film project that ended up with Elena.

The original idea, we were told at Q & A by one of the film’s production members, was to be one of four regions of the world which would make an English-language film on the theme of apocalypse. This grandiose idea did not materialize but maybe for the better, as Elena is a rooted Russian film examining the pathologies of wealth making in a country still in transition. Vladimir, a prosperous elderly man who married the nurse who had looked after him during one of his hospitalizations, is pressured to provide for his wife’s dysfunctional son and his family. When it is time to make a will, he tells Elena, his late-in-life wife, that most of his wealth will be left to his prodigal daughter, coquettishly played by Elena Lyadova. We cannot tell whether Elena is truly the subtle schemer that her step-daughter accuses her of being. But the transfer of wealth from a cultivated Russian gentleman to a family of low-lifes has apocalyptic dimensions that would make Chekhov shake in his grave. Philip Glass’s music resonates perfectly within these atmospherics.

Danish directorial debutante Lise Birk Pedersen received considerable attention at this year’s Sundance Festival for her documentary Putin’s Kiss. It may not have been her intention to attract so much interest, but inserting Vladimir Putin’s name in a book or film title will do that – helped by the series of oppositionist rallies in Russia in December. Pedersen provides an illuminating, even plodding study of the pro-Putin nationalist youth movement called Nashi (‘Ours’). It focuses on one of its leaders, a young girl named Masha Drokova, and it becomes a political coming-of-age story as we observe how her enthusiasm for the movement wanes, largely the result of personal intrigues.

It is easy to lose sight of the smaller picture here – how organizational politics, career ambitions, and the role of gender play out. While interviews with several major oppositionist figures, most noteworthy of these blogger Oleg Kashin, suggest that Nashi have developed into a brown-shirts movement, Pedersen might be uneasy with such an inference based on her account. The film is about Masha, a young Moscow woman with above-average leadership skills and circumspection (who now works in public relations for a multinational firm, the director informed us). It is not about Putin, who seemed blindsided by a hug he received from her when she was still in her teens.--Ray Taras

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Elizabeth Popp Berman reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Elizabeth Popp Berman, author of Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine.

Her entry begins:

I have more time to read fiction in the summer, when I’m not teaching. And I’m the kind of person who likes to create arbitrary projects for herself. So last summer I started reading the Man Booker Prize winners in reverse order. I started with 2009, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which I loved. It’s a long historical novel about Thomas Cromwell, a nobody who, sphinxlike, rises to become Henry VIII’s right-hand man. It was completely gripping, and I can’t wait to read the sequel, which is coming out this year. Unfortunately, we know how Cromwell’s going to end up—the same way all those wives did.

From there I worked my way...[read on]

About Creating the Market University, from the publisher:

American universities today serve as economic engines, performing the scientific research that will create new industries, drive economic growth, and keep the United States globally competitive. But only a few decades ago, these same universities self-consciously held themselves apart from the world of commerce. Creating the Market University is the first book to systematically examine why academic science made such a dramatic move toward the market. Drawing on extensive historical research, Elizabeth Popp Berman shows how the government--influenced by the argument that innovation drives the economy--brought about this transformation.

Americans have a long tradition of making heroes out of their inventors. But before the 1960s and '70s neither policymakers nor economists paid much attention to the critical economic role played by innovation. However, during the late 1970s, a confluence of events--industry concern with the perceived deterioration of innovation in the United States, a growing body of economic research on innovation's importance, and the stagnation of the larger economy--led to a broad political interest in fostering invention. The policy decisions shaped by this change were diverse, influencing arenas from patents and taxes to pensions and science policy, and encouraged practices that would focus specifically on the economic value of academic science. By the early 1980s, universities were nurturing the rapid growth of areas such as biotech entrepreneurship, patenting, and university-industry research centers.

Contributing to debates about the relationship between universities, government, and industry, Creating the Market University sheds light on how knowledge and politics intersect to structure the economy.

Learn more about Creating the Market University at the Princeton University Press website and Elizabeth Popp Berman’s website.

Elizabeth Popp Berman is a sociologist at the University at Albany, SUNY.

Writers Read: Elizabeth Popp Berman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Meredith H. Lair's "Armed with Abundance"

This weekend's feature at the Page 99 Test: Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War by Meredith Lair.

About the book, from the publisher:

Popular representations of the Vietnam War tend to emphasize violence, deprivation, and trauma. By contrast, in Armed with Abundance, Meredith Lair focuses on the noncombat experiences of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, redrawing the landscape of the war so that swimming pools, ice cream, visits from celebrities, and other "comforts" share the frame with combat.

To address a tenuous morale situation, military authorities, Lair reveals, wielded abundance to insulate soldiers--and, by extension, the American public--from boredom and deprivation, making the project of war perhaps easier and certainly more palatable. The result was dozens of overbuilt bases in South Vietnam that grew more elaborate as the war dragged on. Relying on memoirs, military documents, and G.I. newspapers, Lair finds that consumption and satiety, rather than privation and sacrifice, defined most soldiers' Vietnam deployments. Abundance quarantined the U.S. occupation force from the impoverished people it ostensibly had come to liberate, undermining efforts to win Vietnamese "hearts and minds" and burdening veterans with disappointment that their wartime service did not measure up to public expectations. With an epilogue that finds a similar paradigm at work in Iraq, Armed with Abundance offers a unique and provocative perspective on modern American warfare.

Learn more about Armed with Abundance at the University of North Carolina Press website.

Meredith H. Lair is assistant professor of history at George Mason University.

The Page 99 Test: Armed with Abundance.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books by the homesick

Susan J. Matt is Presidential Distinguished Professor of History at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. She is the author of Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890-1930 and Homesickness: An American History.

For the Wall Street Journal, she named a five best list of books by the homesick.

One title on the list:

Twelve Years a Slave
by Solomon Northup (1853)

In 1841, Solomon Northup, a free black man living with his wife in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., met two men who promised him a job playing the violin in a circus. He followed them to Washington, D.C. There he was drugged and, upon awakening, found himself the prisoner of traders who sold him into slavery. "Thoughts of my family . . . continually occupied my mind. When sleep overpowered me I dreamed of them—dreamed I was again in Saratoga—that I could see their faces and hear their voices calling me." It would be a dozen years until he saw them again. During that time, he was sold and resold, eventually landing in Louisiana. He labored there until he was finally able to get word to friends and family, who, with the support of New York's governor, sent a party to rescue him in 1853. Northup's account of his enslavement describes the arduous work, his masters' violence and, most tragically, the cruel shattering of families by slave auctions.

Read about another book on the list.

The Page 99 Test: Susan J. Matt's Homesickness.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Chris Morgan Jones's "The Silent Oligarch"

This weekend's feature at the Page 69 Test: The Silent Oligarch by Christopher Morgan Jones.

About the book, from the publisher:

A London intelligence agent pursues a money launderer to expose the dealings of a shadowy Russian oligarch.

In a world where national borders shrink to insignificance in the face of colossal wealth and corporate power, The Silent Oligarch offers a new kind of hero to combat a new kind of crime. Drawing on his decade of experience at the world's largest corporate intelligence firm-where the wealthy buy the justice they want and the silence they need-Chris Morgan Jones leads us down into the unvarnished realities of our time in the grand tradition of John le Carré. Bearing news from a world hidden behind closed doors, The Silent Oligarch effortlessly creates a new genre in its wake.

Deep in the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources sits a nondescript bureaucrat named Konstantin Malin. He draws a nominal government salary but from his shabby office controls half the nation's oil industry, making him one of the most wealthy and feared men in Russia. His public face is Richard Lock, a hapless money launderer bound to Malin by marriage, complacency, and greed. Lock takes the proceeds of his master's corruption, washes them abroad, and invests them back in Russia in a secret business empire. He knows little about Malin's true affairs, but still he knows too much.

Benjamin Webster is an investigator at a London corporate intelligence firm. Years before, as an idealistic young journalist in Russia, Webster saw a colleague murdered for asking too many hard questions of powerful people; her true killers have never been found. Hired to ruin Malin, Webster comes to realize that this shadowy figure might have ordered her gruesome death, and that this case may deliver the justice he has been seeking for a decade.

As Webster peels back the layers of Malin's shell companies and criminal networks, Lock's colleagues begin dying mysteriously, police around the world start to investigate, and Malin begins to question his trust in his increasingly exposed frontman. Suddenly Lock is running for his life- though from Malin or Webster, the law or his own past, he couldn't say.

Leading us into a world we can know little about, The Silent Oligarch is the brilliant overture of a major new literary talent.

Learn more about the book and author at Christopher Morgan Jones's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Silent Oligarch.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Rosamund Bartlett reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Rosamund Bartlett, author of Tolstoy: A Russian Life.

Her entry begins:

I’m particularly pleased to be asked this question now, as I’m currently abroad and having a bit of time off, so have been reading all kinds of things simultaneously. When I am at home in Oxford, I usually have my head in a book, but mostly with a view to writing about an aspect of Russian culture, so these last few weeks I have been enjoying getting away from my usual commitments and reading purely for pleasure, which for me is the best kind of holiday.

In November I was invited to lecture at the University of North Carolina, and was amazed and delighted to discover a second-hand book shop in the departure terminal at Raleigh-Durham Airport. I wonder if it’s unique? The literature usually on offer at airports makes one despair. Naturally I had to buy a book on principle, and to support the cause of reading, and was happy to find a book about the American Civil War dealing with the part of United States I had just been travelling in: Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic (Vintage/Random House, 1998). It’s an amusing read, and...[read on]

About Tolstoy: A Russian Life, from the publisher:

The first new biography in twenty years of the literary colossus, spiritual leader, and icon of the nineteenth century

In November 1910, Count Lev Tolstoy died at a remote Russian railway station. At the time of his death, he was the most famous man in Russia, with a growing international following, and more revered than the tsar. Born into an aristocratic family, Tolstoy had spent his life rebelling not only against conventional ideas about literature and art but also against traditional education, family life, organized religion, and the state.

In this exceptional biography, Rosamund Bartlett draws extensively on key Russian sources, including much fascinating new material made available since the collapse of the Soviet Union. She sheds light on Tolstoy’s remarkable journey from callow youth to writer to prophet; discusses his troubled relationship with his wife, Sonya, a subject long neglected; and vividly evokes the Russian landscapes Tolstoy so loved. Above all, she gives us an eloquent portrait of the brilliant, maddening, and contrary man who has, once again, been discovered by a new generation of readers.

Visit Rosamund Bartlett's website and learn more about Tolstoy: A Russian Life.

Writers Read: Rosamund Bartlett.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Burdett's "Vulture Peak," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Vulture Peak by John Burdett.

The entry begins:

I have always wanted Tony Leung (The Lover) to play Sonchai. That bony face and the way he can play the put-upon Asian to perfection seems right to me. Also, that obvious intelligence strikes me as fitting for my central character. Of course, I'm thinking of the movie as something with psychological content - which is not a popular idea with the studios. These days the only movies that make money seem to be crude action flics which I cannot say I dislike, because...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at John Burdett's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Godfather of Kathmandu.

The Page 69 Test: Vulture Peak.

Writers Read: John Burdett.

My Book, The Movie: Vulture Peak.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: William Cook's "In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits of Computation by William J. Cook.

About the book, from the publisher:

What is the shortest possible route for a traveling salesman seeking to visit each city on a list exactly once and return to his city of origin? It sounds simple enough, yet the traveling salesman problem is one of the most intensely studied puzzles in applied mathematics--and it has defied solution to this day. In this book, William Cook takes readers on a mathematical excursion, picking up the salesman's trail in the 1800s when Irish mathematician W. R. Hamilton first defined the problem, and venturing to the furthest limits of today's state-of-the-art attempts to solve it.

Cook examines the origins and history of the salesman problem and explores its many important applications, from genome sequencing and designing computer processors to arranging music and hunting for planets. He looks at how computers stack up against the traveling salesman problem on a grand scale, and discusses how humans, unaided by computers, go about trying to solve the puzzle. Cook traces the salesman problem to the realms of neuroscience, psychology, and art, and he also challenges readers to tackle the problem themselves. The traveling salesman problem is--literally--a $1 million question. That's the prize the Clay Mathematics Institute is offering to anyone who can solve the problem or prove that it can't be done.

In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman travels to the very threshold of our understanding about the nature of complexity, and challenges you yourself to discover the solution to this captivating mathematical problem.

Learn more about the book and author at William Cook's webpage and the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best seductions in literature

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best seductions in literature.

One novel on the list:

David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

We do not exactly see the seduction of Little Em'ly by handsome, heartless Steerforth, for the young David does not understand what he is witnessing. He sees her "listening with the deepest attention, her breath held, her blue eyes sparkling like jewels, and the colour mantling in her cheeks". The trouble is that Em'ly wants to be a lady, so cannot resist a gentleman.

Read about another novel on the list.

David Copperfield is one of Elizabeth Gilbert's six favorite books. It appears on Mullan's lists of ten of the best trips to Canterbury in literature and ten of the best valets in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Wessel Ebersohn's "The October Killings"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: The October Killings by Wessel Ebersohn.

About the book, from the publisher:

Abigail Bukula was fifteen when her parents were killed in a massacre of antiapartheid activists by white security forces. Because a soldier spoke in her defense, she was spared. Now she’s a lawyer with the new government, and while she has tried to put the tragedy behind her, she has never forgotten that soldier. So when Leon Lourens walks into her office almost twenty years later with a story of how someone is killing off members of the team who murdered her parents, she turns to Yudel Gordon, an eccentric white prison psychologist, for help. To save Leon’s life they must untangle the web of politics, identity, and history before the anniversary of the raid—only days away.

The October Killings brings to life the new South Africa, and also Abigail Bukula—the most determined sleuth in international crime fiction.

Learn more about the book and author at Wessel Ebersohn's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The October Killings.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is John Burdett reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: John Burdett, author of Vulture Peak.

His entry begins:

I'm reading Thomas E. Ricks's Fiasco: the American Military Adventure in Iraq and The Operators by Michael Hastings (inside story of the Afghan war and how Hastings' reporting brought down General McChrystal). They are research for my next novel which features a Vietnam Vet who cannot resist war. I did not set out to educate myself on how many lives and dollars America has spent on unnecessary wars over the past forty years - but once you start to look into it, the conclusion is...[read on]

About Vulture Peak, from the publisher:

Nobody knows Bangkok like Royal Thai Police Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, and there is no one quite like Sonchai: a police officer who has kept his Buddhist soul intact—more or less—despite the fact that his job shoves him face-to-face with some of the most vile and outrageous crimes and criminals in Bangkok. But for his newest assignment, everything he knows about his city—and himself—will be a mere starting point.

He’s put in charge of the highest-profile criminal case in Thailand—an attempt to bring an end to trafficking in human organs. He sets in motion a massive sting operation and stays at its center, traveling to Phuket, Hong Kong, Dubai, Shanghai, and Monte Carlo. He draws in a host of unwitting players that includes an aging rock star wearing out his second liver and the mysterious, diabolical, albeit gorgeous co-queenpins of the international body-parts trade: the Chinese twins known as the Vultures. And yet, it’s closer to home that Sonchai will discover things getting really dicey: rumors will reach him suggesting that his ex-prostitute wife, Chanya, is having an affair. Will Sonchai be enlightened enough—forget Buddha, think jealous husband—to cope with his very own compromised and compromising world?

All will be revealed here, in John Burdett’s most mordantly funny, propulsive, fiendishly entertaining novel yet.

Learn more about the book and author at John Burdett's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Godfather of Kathmandu.

The Page 69 Test: Vulture Peak.

Writers Read: John Burdett.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 books of the night

Ian Marchant's books include two acclaimed memoir/travel books, Parallel Lines and The Longest Crawl, and the recently released night-owl's guide to Britain, Something of the Night.

One of his top ten books of the night, as told to the Guardian:

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin

I wonder if the wonderful Ursula Le Guin had read [Cherry Apsley-Garrard's] The Worst Journey in the World before she wrote this, arguably her masterpiece. The climax of the book is a terrifying journey, also undertaken in Arctic darkness and temperatures. But it takes place on the distant planet Winter, and the travellers are an ambassador from a galactic civilisation and the ex-prime minister of a decadent kingdom. Le Guin's twist is that the inhabitants of Winter are all of the same sex, which gives her a chance to explore what gender means while telling a gripping story about love under different stars from our own.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Eben Miller's "Born along the Color Line"

Today's feature at the Page 99 Test: Born along the Color Line: The 1933 Amenia Conference and the Rise of a National Civil Rights Movement by Eben Miller.

About the book, from the publisher:

In August, 1933, dozens of people gathered amid seven large, canvas tents in a field near Amenia, in upstate New York. Joel Spingarn, president of the board of the NAACP, had called a conference to revitalize the flagging civil rights organization. In Amenia, such old lions as the 65 year-old W.E.B. DuBois would mingle with "the coming leaders of Negro thought." It was a fascinating encounter that would transform the civil rights movement.

With elegant writing and piercing insight, historian Eben Miller narrates how this little-known conference brought together a remarkable young group of African American activists, capturing through the lives of five extraordinary participants--youth activist Juanita Jackson, diplomat Ralph Bunche, economist Abram Harris, lawyer Louis Redding, and Harlem organizer Moran Weston--how this generation shaped the ongoing movement for civil rights during the Depression, World War II, and beyond. Miller describes how Jackson, Bunche, Harris, and the others felt that, amidst the global crisis of the 1930s, it was urgent to move beyond the NAACP's legal and political focus to build an economic movement that reached across the racial divide to challenge the capitalist system that had collapsed so devastatingly. They advocated alliances with labor groups, agitated for equal education, and campaigned for anti-lynching legislation and open access to the ballot and employment--spreading their influential ideas through their writings and by mass organizing in African American communities across the country, North and South. In their arguments and individual awakenings, they formed a key bridge between the turn-of-the-century Talented Tenth and the postwar civil rights generation, broadening and advancing the fight for racial equality through the darkest economic times the country has ever faced.

In Born along the Color Line, Miller vividly captures the emergence of a forgotten generation of African American leaders, a generation that made Brown v. Board of Education and all that followed from it possible. It is an illuminating portrait of the "long civil rights movement," not the movement that began in the 1950s, but the one that took on new life at Amenia in 1933.

Learn more about Born along the Color Line at the Oxford University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Born along the Color Line.

The Page 99 Test: Born along the Color Line.

--Marshal Zeringue

Henry Alford's 6 favorite books

Henry Alford has written for the New York Times and Vanity Fair for over a decade. He has also written for the New Yorker. It is entirely possible that you have heard him on National Public Radio.

He is the author of a humor collection, Municipal Bondage, and of an account of his attempts to become a working actor, Big Kiss, which won a Thurber Prize. His book How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They are Still on This Earth), which was named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly.

Alford's new book about manners, Would It Kill You To Stop Doing That?, was published earlier this month.

One of the author's six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:

The Thurber Carnival by James Thurber.

One of the funniest pieces of cultural dissonance ever produced is Thurber's review of Salvador Dalí's memoir, contained in this collection. Thurber writes, "The naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dalí as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts."

Read about another book on Alford's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephanie Deutsch's "You Need a Schoolhouse," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: You Need a Schoolhouse: Booker T. Washington, Julius Rosenwald, and the Building of Schools for the Segregated South by Stephanie Deutsch.

The entry begins:

When my friend Tony Rizzoli asked me what Julius Rosenwald looked like I gave a rather flip response. I said, “kind of nebbishy.” But even as these words were leaving my mouth I realized they were incorrect. In his later years Rosenwald actually looked like Tony – thin, not much hair, angular face, friendly, open expression. Twenty five years ago, Tony’s performance in Larry Shue’s play The Foreigner was one of funniest things I’ve ever seen on stage. The sense of humor that lurks behind Tony’s own intelligent eyes was, I realized, a feature in Rosenwald as well. The millionaire president of Sears, Roebuck turned race conscious philanthropist could seem a rather wooden figure on the printed page. But Tony would save him from such a fate by showing his more energetic, playful, humorous side. I had long since decided that Booker T. Washington’s role would go to a rather more prominent actor -- either Morgan...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Stephanie Deutsch's website and blog.

My Book, The Movie: You Need a Schoolhouse.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Matt Bondurant reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Matt Bondurant, author of The Wettest County in the World and The Night Swimmer.

His entry begins:

I’m currently reading Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, which is one of those great books that has long been on my list and I’ve finally gotten around to it. What is surprising to me is the gorgeous prose; I had assumed I would get plenty of rich scenes of Africa but Dinesen’s gifts go far beyond simple landscapes or even dramatic encounters with wildlife. It is a real meditation on solitude, destiny, culture, and so many other things, written in an often understated but always fresh, lyrical and compelling style. I could...[read on]

About The Night Swimmer, from the publisher:

The Night Swimmer, Matt Bondurant’s utterly riveting modern gothic novel of marriage and belonging, confirms his gift for storytelling that transports and enthralls.

In a small town on the southern coast of Ireland, an isolated place only frequented by fishermen and the occasional group of bird-watchers, Fred and Elly Bulkington, newly arrived from Vermont having won a pub in a contest, encounter a wild, strange land shaped by the pounding storms of the North Atlantic, as well as the native resistance to strangers. As Fred revels in the life of a new pubowner, Elly takes the ferry out to a nearby island where anyone not born there is called a “blow-in.” To the disbelief of the locals, Elly devotes herself to open-water swimming, pushing herself to the limit and crossing unseen boundaries that drive her into the heart of the island’s troubles—the mysterious tragedy that shrouds its inhabitants and the dangerous feud between an enigmatic farmer and a powerful clan that has no use for outsiders.

The poignant unraveling of a marriage, the fierce beauty of the natural world, the mysterious power of Irish lore, and the gripping story of strangers in a strange land rife with intrigue and violence—The Night Swimmer is a novel of myriad enchantments by a writer of extraordinary talent.

Learn more about the author and his work at Matt Bondurant's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Wettest County in the World.

Writers Read: Matt Bondurant.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books on mountaineering

One title on the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books about mountaineering:

The Ledge
by Jim Davidson and Kevin Vaughan

Davidson and his friend Mike Price were coming down Washington State's Mount Rainier when the pair fell 80 feet into a crevasse. The fall killed Price and left Davidson badly injured, stranded on the ledge that gives this harrowing book its title. Against all odds, he crawled to safety. But the joy of making it back was tempered by the loss of his close friend, and Davidson chronicles his conflicted emotions in this story of adventure, grief, and perseverance.

Read about another book on the list.

Also see Andy Cave's top ten books on Alpinism.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Colin Cotterill's "Slash and Burn"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Slash and Burn (Dr. Siri Paiboun Series #8) by Colin Cotterill.

About the book, from the publisher:

Dr. Siri might finally be allowed to retire (again). Although he loves his two morgue assistants, he's tired of being Laos's national coroner, a job he never wanted in the first place. Plus, he's pushing 80, and wants to spend some time with his wife before his untimely death (which has been predicted by the local transvestite fortune teller).

But retirement is not in the cards for Dr. Siri after all. He's dragged into one last job for the Lao government: supervising an excavation for the remains of U.S. fighter pilot who went down in the remote northern Lao jungle ten years earlier. The presence of American soldiers in Laos is a hot-button issue for both the Americans and the Lao involved, and the search party includes high-level politicians and scientists. But one member of the party is found dead, setting off a chain of accidents Dr. Siri suspects aren't completely accidental. Everyone is trapped in a cabin in the jungle, and the bodies are starting to pile up. Can Dr. Siri get to the bottom of the MIA pilot's mysterious story before the transvestite fortune teller's prediction comes true?

Learn more about the book and author at Colin Cotterill's website.

The Page 69 Test: Anarchy and Old Dogs.

My Book, The Movie: Curse of the Pogo Stick.

The Page 69 Test: Killed at the Whim of a Hat.

My Book, The Movie: Killed at the Whim of a Hat.

Writers Read: Colin Cotterill.

The Page 69 Test: Slash and Burn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Hendrik Hartog's "Someday All This Will Be Yours"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age by Hendrik Hartog.

About the book, from the publisher:

We all hope that we will be cared for as we age. But the details of that care, for caretaker and recipient alike, raise some of life’s most vexing questions. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, as an explosive economy and shifting social opportunities drew the young away from home, the elderly used promises of inheritance to keep children at their side. Hendrik Hartog tells the riveting, heartbreaking stories of how families fought over the work of care and its compensation.

Someday All This Will Be Yours narrates the legal and emotional strategies mobilized by older people, and explores the ambivalences of family members as they struggled with expectations of love and duty. Court cases offer an extraordinary glimpse of the mundane, painful, and intimate predicaments of family life. They reveal what it meant to be old without the pensions, Social Security, and nursing homes that now do much of the work of serving the elderly. From demented grandparents to fickle fathers, from litigious sons to grateful daughters, Hartog guides us into a world of disputed promises and broken hearts, and helps us feel the terrible tangle of love and commitments and money.

From one of the bedrocks of the human condition—the tension between the infirmities of the elderly and the longings of the young—emerges a pioneering work of exploration into the darker recesses of family life. Ultimately, Hartog forces us to reflect on what we owe and are owed as members of a family.

Learn more about Someday All This Will Be Yours at the Harvard University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Someday All This Will Be Yours.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five notable science fiction classics

Adam Roberts received his MA (English and Classics Jt-Hons) from Aberdeen University and his PhD (Robert Browning and the Classics) from Cambridge University. He has worked in the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, since 1991, and he is currently Professor of Nineteenth Century Literature.

His books include The History of Science Fiction as well as numerous science fiction novels, eight parodies, two novellas, a collection of short stories and various other things.

One of five top science fiction classics he discussed with Alec Ash at The Browser:

The Time Machine
by HG Wells

[One book] on your list is 1895’s The Time Machine by HG Wells.

This is the novel that inaugurated time travel as a sub-genre. Wells picked up the up-to-date (in the 1890s) scientific speculation about time being a fourth dimension, and ran with it, imagining a machine that could take a man backwards and forwards through time. Wells’s time traveller – we are not given his name – goes from late Victorian times to the year 802,701, where he finds that humanity has by a process of divergent evolution degenerated into two species – the infantile, hedonist Eloi and the subterranean, monstrous Morlocks who prey upon them.

It is a short novel, almost a novella, but it is smoothly and evocatively written, and it manages to open a chink in the reader’s mind that gives a her dizzying, thrilling glimpse down the vertiginous perspectives of long time. My favourite moment comes near the end, after the time traveller has left the Eloi and Morlocks behind him (as it were) and travelled more than 30 million years into the far distant future. He finds himself on a desolate beach, seemingly lifeless but for green slime on the rocks, the sun grown to massive proportions, and witnesses an eclipse:

“The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black.”

Time viewed from the perspective of the sublime. It still makes the hairs stir on the back of my neck.

Tell us more, if you will, about what makes Wells’s sci-fi so unique.

Wells is the first genius of science fiction, and the genre informs his choice of core metaphor. We see it in pretty much all his short fiction – in an ordinary, contemporary environment we come across a device, object or circumstance which opens vistas to strange new worlds. In the short story “The Door in the Wall”, the protagonist finds a mysterious green door that permits him to leave the grimy reality of 19th century London and enter “a world with a different quality, a warmer, more penetrating and mellower light with a faint, clear gladness in its air”. And there are many subsequent stories that employ the same device. In “The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes”, a malfunctioning scientific experiment replaces the protagonist’s ordinary vision with vision of the exact opposite point of the globe. In “The Crystal Egg”, the object of the story’s title gives its possessor, a London junk-shop owner, unexpected visual access to a scene on Mars, with Martian house and flying Martians.

That last story epitomises the way this sort of tale operates. Wells draws a clear distinction between the shabby, lower middle class existence of the shopkeeper who owns the crystal egg and the fantastic, exotic world opened up by the egg itself. This contrast is integral to the functioning of the story. As Wells said in 1934 in Experiment in Autobiography, with reference to The Time Machine, “I had realised that the more impossible the story I had to tell, the more ordinary must be the setting”. In “The Crystal Egg” the egg is, in fact, science fiction itself. It is the thing that gives us fantastic, other-worldly visions. By setting a seedy junk shop against the exotic Martian palace, the story balances the genre of late-century “realist” fiction – of the sort that Wells also wrote but which is more strongly associated with writers such as [George] Gissing and [Arnold] Bennett – with the sparkling possibilities of SF itself.

This is the key to The Time Machine. Instead of reading the tale as an allegorical coding of contemporary class circumstances, we can read it as deliberate mediation of the generic representation of those circumstances (realism) and the escape from such quotidian, everyday representation (the time machine itself, or science fiction). It is of course possible to say, as critics have done, that the time machine is a mechanism by which the author can represent, for instance, Darwinian time. The time machine is like a clock, a car, a weapon and all the various things that critics have read into the tale built around it. But the time machine is a literary device. The time machine is science fiction.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Time Machine is among David Lodge's top ten H.G. Wells books and Linda Buckley-Archer's top ten time-travelling stories.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Lescroart's "The Hunter," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: The Hunter by John Lescroart.

The entry begins:

The Hunter is my third Wyatt Hunt novel, and I’d love to have Taylor Kitsch (the Tim Riggins character from Friday Night Lights) take on the role of Wyatt. He would be perfect. In fact...[read on]

Learn more about the book and its author at John Lescroart's website.

Writers Read: John Lescroart.

The Page 69 Test: The Hunter.

My Book, The Movie: The Hunter.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Jesse Browner reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Jesse Browner, author of Everything Happens Today.

His entry begins:

It is difficult to credit, or to explain, just why so many masterpieces were written in Hungary in the early part of the twentieth century. Perhaps it has something to do with the rich loam created by a decaying empire. In any case, whenever I tell anyone about my thing for mid-century Middle-European literature, they always have another obscure favorite for me to add to my list: Sándor Márai’s Embers, Miklós Bánffy’s They Were Counted, and most especially Dezsö Kosztolányi’s Skylark.

Most recent of these (for me) is Antal Szerb’s 1937 novel Journey by Moonlight. I’m not sure where I heard this, but apparently all Hungarians grow up reading Journey by Moonlight, which...[read on]

Among the praise for Everything Happens Today:

“A deeply compassionate novel by a very fine writer."
--Joe O’Neill, author of Netherland

"This is magic. This is hope... Browner has crafted a stupendous, thought-provoking, devilishly delicious novel that reads like Zen koan meets Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with some modern 'english' that sets the plate spinning."
--Library Journal (starred review)

"In this 60th anniversary year of the quintessential novel of New York teen angst, Catcher in the Rye, Jesse Browner's Everything Happens Today updates Holden Caulfield and perhaps even bests Salinger with a funnier, kinder and wiser tale."
--Shelf Awareness (starred review)

"Each of the characters is wonderfully evoked, flawed and lovable and three-dimensional. By the end I was counting on Browner to get me out of this novel in one piece emotionally. That's how you know a book was worth the money."
--Rebecca Coleman, author of The Kingdom of Childhood

Learn more about the book and author at Jesse Browner's website.

Writers Read: Jesse Browner.

--Marshal Zeringue