What is Niraj Kapur reading?

Niraj Kapur, author of Heaven's Delight, the debut novel in a romantic comedy trilogy, is the latest contributor to Writers Read.

In addition to his recent reading, Kapur also remarked on some new and old classics:

When I wrote my debut, Heaven's Delight, I mixed rom com with adventure, so I read everything from J.K. Rowling, which astounded me, to the Narnia series, which was nostalgic, to Anthony Horowitz's Stormbreaker - a novel for teenage boys that also appeals to parents like me. [read on]

Writers Read: Niraj Kapur.

The Page 69 Test: Heaven's Delight.

My Book, The Movie: Heaven's Delight.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Ann Brashares reading?

Ann Brashares, author of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, talked to the Christian Science Monitor about what she's been watching and listening to.

And reading:

In the last month I read two books I absolutely loved. The first was Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. It has an unusual narrative structure, but do not be put off by it. It is a brilliant, funny, amazing book. The second was Lonesome Dove [by Larry McMurtry]. I was moved to go out and buy it when my trusted friend (and literary agent) said, "You haven't read 'Lonesome Dove'? I am jealous." Now I, in turn, am jealous of all of you who have yet to experience the pleasure of it.

Read more about Brashares's taste in movies and music.

Ann Brashares's new novel, The Last Summer (of You and Me) -- this one is for adult readers -- will be published by Riverhead on June 5.

--Marshal Zeringue

Books Chuck Cohen always wanted someone to write

Chuck Cohen writes at the Christian Science Monitor:

Recently I came upon a book titled – I am not making this up – "Hitler: Neither Vegetarian nor Animal Lover." Inspired by the "uniqueness" of this title, I have been searching for writers to flesh out some equally unexpected, and so far unavailable, manuscripts.

A few titles from Cohen's wish list:

Julia Child: The Basketball Years

Michelangelo: His Mother's Least Favorite Pastas

Chicken Caesar: Coward or Salad?

Harry S. Truman: Why the S. Didn't Stand for Sue

Read Cohen's full list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Bill Bryan's "Keep It Real"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Bill Bryan's Keep It Real.

About the book, from the author's website:

Ted used to be an investigative reporter — a good one. But that was before the divorce, the meltdown, the subsequent supervised visitation of his adorable little girl. Now he’s one of several peon producers for the inexplicably successful reality show, ‘The Mogul.’ Ted’s not a happy man. Unlike his viewers, he takes no joy in the vapid “reality” he helps edit together for ratings. That is, until it lands him in the middle of a murder investigation.

Among the praise for Keep It Real:

"Keep It Real is one of the funniest crime novels I've ever read. If you like Westlake, you'll love this. I did."
--J.A. Konrath, author of Whiskey Sour

"If you like to laugh, and you hate reality TV, you will love this wonderfully, viciously hilarious book."
--Dave Barry

“A scathing satire of… reality TV.. Every turn… provides one more excuse to rip away at the façade of today's hottest programming genre. And no, author Bryan doesn't care if this offends The Donald.”
--James Winter, January Magazine

“If Carl Hiaasen and Joseph Heller collaborated on a book to satirize reality TV, you’d get Bill’s Bryan’s Keep It Real. An instant classic.”
--Ken Bruen, author of The Guards

"Hilarious, profane, and dead-on funny. Keep It Real is a brilliant comic mystery which skewers the world of Reality TV, rap music, and Hollywood lawyers. Run out and buy it now and be prepared to stay up all night, choking with dark laughter."
--Robert Ward, author of Red Baker and Four Kinds of Rain

“TV writer and producer Bryan spoofs, satirizes, and burlesques his way through that kingdom of sin and sizzle, Hollywood, in this… funny debut crime novel… [that] shows a real gift for satire.”
--Publishers Weekly

“[A] funny… and politically incorrect romp.”
--Library Journal

Visit Bill Bryan's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Bill Bryan's Keep It Real.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Matt Wray's "Not Quite White"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Matt Wray's Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness.

About the book, from the publisher:

White trash. The phrase conjures up images of dirty rural folk who are poor, ignorant, violent, and incestuous. But where did this stigmatizing phrase come from? And why do these stereotypes persist? Matt Wray answers these and other questions by delving into the long history behind this term of abuse and others like it. Ranging from the early 1700s to the early 1900s, Not Quite White documents the origins and transformations of the multiple meanings projected onto poor rural whites in the United States. Wray draws on a wide variety of primary sources — literary texts, folklore, diaries and journals, medical and scientific articles, social scientific analyses — to construct a dense archive of changing collective representations of poor whites.

Of crucial importance are the ideas about poor whites that circulated through early-twentieth-century public health campaigns, such as hookworm eradication and eugenic reforms. In these crusades, impoverished whites, particularly but not exclusively in the American South, were targeted for interventions by sanitarians who viewed them as “filthy, lazy crackers” in need of racial uplift and by eugenicists who viewed them as a “feebleminded menace” to the white race, threats that needed to be confined and involuntarily sterilized.

Part historical inquiry and part sociological investigation, Not Quite White demonstrates the power of social categories and boundaries to shape social relationships and institutions, to invent groups where none exist, and to influence policies and legislation that end up harming the very people they aim to help. It illuminates not only the cultural significance and consequences of poor white stereotypes but also how dominant whites exploited and expanded these stereotypes to bolster and defend their own fragile claims to whiteness.

Among the praise for Not Quite White:

“White trash? What did you just call me? Not Quite White provides the best social history of America’s most quizzical moniker in the racial-class system. From its colonial origins to the era of eugenics to the public health campaign to eradicate hookworm in the South, Matt Wray’s careful analysis documents the roots of this label, showing what its apparently oxymoronic nature tells us about the larger system of symbolic stratification in the United States.”
—Dalton Conley, author of Honky

“Matt Wray’s Not Quite White is a richly textured social history of how and why the nation has come to conceive, categorize, and routinely vilify that part of its population known as ‘white trash.’ Because this subject has rarely been the focus of systematic scholarly inquiry, that alone would be a notable achievement. Yet the book aims for more — to propose a boundary theory of why ‘white trash’ has had so many uses — from literature to politics to social science. By any measure, this book is a major contribution.”
—Troy Duster, New York University

Matt Wray, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the Department of Society, Human Development, and Health at Harvard University. He is co-editor of White Trash: Race and Class in America, Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, and The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness.

The Page 99 Test: Not Quite White.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Michael Fullilove reading?

Michael Fullilove, who directs the global issues program at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, Australia, is the latest contributor to Writers Read.

He came to my attention with his recent article in Slate, "Chinese Love Triangle," which argues that however critical the bilateral relationship with China is, America "needs to understand that, in the future, its Asian relations will increasingly be dominated by trilateral configurations, as old allies and friends such as Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia move to accommodate the rising influence of the Middle Kingdom."

At Writers Read, Fullilove tagged a couple of books he was reading in preparation for a trip to Israel and Turkey as well as several other books, including one about David Hicks, the Australian held at Guantanamo until very recently.

Fullilove recently published an op-ed in the Financial Times on 30 March 2007 arguing that only Seinfeld can fully explain the US invasion of Iraq:

“This doctrine,” argues Fullilove, “recalls the classic episode of the TV comedy Seinfeld, “The Opposite,” in which George Costanza temporarily improves his fortunes by rejecting all the principles according to which he has lived his life and doing the opposite of what his training indicates he should do.” Fullilove believes that the Iraq policy pursued by the Bush administration satisfies the Costanza criterion because it is the opposite of every foreign policy the world has ever met.

For a follow-up on "the Costanza Doctrine," see Fullilove's Q & A.

Michael Fullilove is a Rhodes Scholar and former prime ministerial adviser who writes widely on politics and international relations. His work has appeared in publications such as Slate, the Financial Times, The National Interest and Foreign Affairs, and his first book, "Men and Women of Australia!": Our Greatest Modern Speeches, was published in 2005 by Vintage.

Writers Read: Michael Fullilove.

--Marshal Zeringue

The Rap Sheet's "one book project"

The best book blog feature I know of is The Rap Sheet's "one book project."

The Rap Sheet, spun off in May 2006 from the literary Web site January Magazine, and edited by J. Kingston Pierce, is a terrific news and feature resource for crime-fiction fans.

"[I]n anticipation of The Rap Sheet’s first birthday on May 22, [Pierce] e-mailed invitations to more than 100 crime novelists, book critics, and bloggers from all over the English-speaking world, asking them to choose the one crime/mystery/thriller novel they thought had been 'most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated over the years.'” The response was outstanding, both in terms of quantity and quality.

I started adding titles to my To Be Read list as soon as Pierce published them, then decided to save the energy and simply earmark the posts listing the titles along with the contributors' supporting remarks.

Now Pierce has "compile[d] a master list of all the 'unjustly overlooked' books.... The titles are arranged alphabetically, according to the book’s name. [He has] boldfaced those five titles that received more than one vote. In addition, for anyone who didn’t catch The Rap Sheet’s 'one book' series the first time through ... and is hoping to read all 10 parts in the order they were posted, [Pierce] set up a separate archive blog site, containing all of the text and book covers. You can find that here."

Bravo!

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "You're Not the Boss of Me"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Erika Schickel's You're Not the Boss of Me.

About the book, from the publisher:

Sometimes described as “Erma Bombeck in leather,” Los Angeles writer Erika Schickel is sexier and hipper than the divine Erma, but just as side-splittingly funny as she shares her misadventures in marriage, pregnancy, and motherhood. It all begins with her discovery that unsafe sex with her hubby is hot — and impregnating. From Week 1 when Schickel’s embryo is as small as a pinhead to Week 39 when baby morphs to the size of Marlon Brando, she finds out that motherhood doesn’t change her mind or her irrepressible spirit (her body is another story).

Erika still detests the SUV she calls her 4,299 pound mistake, she now accepts the life-altering power of a girdle when it helps her squeeze into a tight dress to rock out at a Patti Smith concert. Here she shares a decade of marriage and motherhood in a smart, outrageous, and laugh-out-loud book ... perfect for anyone who’s done time in a modern American family.

Among the praise for You're Not the Boss of Me:

"Soda-through-the-nose hilarious!"
--Los Angeles Times

"[A] frequently funny, entirely irreverent and occasionally inappropriate essay collection."
--Publishers Weekly

"Witty, observant, and fearless."
--Merrill Markoe

Visit Erika Schickel's website and read an adapted excerpt from You're Not the Boss of Me.

The Page 69 Test: You're Not the Boss of Me.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Name of the Wind," the movie

The current feature at My Book, The Movie is Patrick Rothfuss's debut fantasy novel The Name of the Wind, which has pulled some extremely good reviews and endorsements.

The overview to The Name of the Wind introduces--

the tale of Kvothe — from his childhood in a troupe of traveling players, to years spent as a near-feral orphan in a crime-riddled city, to his daringly brazen yet successful bid to enter a difficult and dangerous school of magic. In these pages you will come to know Kvothe as a notorious magician, an accomplished thief, a masterful musician, and an infamous assassin. But The Name of the Wind is so much more — for the story it tells reveals the truth behind Kvothe's legend.

Rothfuss has some interesting ideas for screenwriter and director, and would like to see one of my favorite actors cast in an film adaptation of the novel. Perhaps more interesting is what he has to say about the actor who would portray his protagonist. Read on.

Visit Patrick Rothfuss's website and his blog, and read an excerpt from The Name of the Wind.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Mark Haskell Smith's "Salty"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Mark Haskell Smith's Salty.

About the book, from the publisher:

Turk Henry is overweight, unemployed, and unafraid to have a cold beer for breakfast. He’s also a rock star (the bassist for the defunct megaplatinumselling Metal Assassin), married to a supermodel, and rich beyond his wildest dreams, and right now his pampered paunch is plopped on the beach in Phuket. Turk has discovered that Thailand is probably the last place a recovering sex addict should go on vacation, yet here he is, surrounded by topless groupies and haunted by the stares of hundreds of luscious bar girls. It is a catalytic environment cranked up to eleven. What would his therapist say?

Turk’s struggles with monogamy pale beside a greater challenge when his wife is abducted by a group of renegade, shipless Thai pirates. The U.S. government won’t help — they suspect the pirates are terrorists — and the law forbids Turk from paying the ransom. As Turk, his life skills limited to playing bass and partying, navigates the back alleys of Bangkok and the deadly jungles of Southeast Asia to save his wife, Salty heats up and sweats bullets.

Featuring skinflint American tourists, topless beaches, a hypochondriac U.S. government agent, suitcases loaded with cash, an overeager “full service” personal assistant, a horny Australian commando, inventive prostitutes, and an urbane pirate with a fetish for alabaster skin, this is a hilariously entertaining, thoroughly debauched novel — with a happy finish.

About the author, from his MySpace page:

I'm the author of three comic novels: Salty is the story of a pampered, paunchy rockstar bass player on vacation in Thailand and what happens to him when his wife is kidnapped by shipless Thai pirates. Author Tom Drury said "Graham Greene meets the Marx Brothers and the result is Salty, Mark Haskell Smith's riveting new novel about unquiet Americans on the loose in Thailand." Delicious is the story of a battle between local Hawaiians and outsiders for the film catering monopoly on Oahu told from the point of view of a young Hawaiian chef. It has been called "sexy and repulsive" by Publisher's Weekly; "brilliant" by Liz Smith; "utterly fresh" by author Jim Harrison, and "Rated NC-17" by Kirkus Reviews. It's kinda like taking a trip to Honolulu, getting drugged, robbed, and waking up on a beach with a nasty rum hangover and a ominous burning sensation when you urinate. Moist is about a young hipster in Los Angeles who falls in love with an erotic tattoo on a severed arm. Trouble comes in the form of the Mexican Mafioso who wants his arm back. Author TC Boyle called it, "Dark and mordantly funny", and the Los Angeles Times Book Review said "Smith's energetic thriller is an ode to the hard-boiled Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy spun out in brighter-than-life- Starburst colors." Moist will be re-issued by Grove Press in Fall '07.

Learn more about Salty at the author's website, and read some advance reviews.

The Page 69 Test: Salty.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: "A Journeyman to Grief"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Maureen Jennings's A Journeyman to Grief.

About the book, from the author's website:

In 1858, a young woman on her honeymoon is forcibly abducted accross the Canadian border into United States and is sold into slavery. Thirty-eight years later, Detective Murdoch's latest case is a murder that it will take all of his resourcefulness to solve. The owner of one of Toronto's livery stables has been found dead. He has been horsewhipped and left hanging from his wrists in his tack room, and his wife claims that a considerable sum of money has been stolen. Then a second man is also murdered, his body strangely tied as if he were a rebellious slave. Murdoch has to find out whether Toronto's small "coloured" community has a vicious murderer in its midst – an investigation that puts his own life in danger.

Among the praise for the novel:

“When it comes to evoking a bygone era of dim gas lighting, ill-heated homes, the shenanigans of the criminal underclass and the corrupt hypocrisy of our ‘betters,’ Jennings has [Anne] Perry beat hands down.”
— The Calgary Herald

“Jennings brings to life a violent but vital society of astonishing contradictions.”
— New York Times Book Review

“Jennings has always had a fine eye for telling details and good characters.”
— Globe and Mail

A Journeyman to Grief is the seventh Detective Murdoch novel: others include Except the Dying, shortlisted for both the Anthony and the Arthur Ellis Best First Novel Awards, Under the Dragon’s Tale, Poor Tom Is Cold, Let Loose the Dogs, shortlisted for the Anthony Best Historical Mystery Award, and Night’s Child, shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award, the Bruce Alexander Historical Mystery Award, the Barry Award, and the Macavity Historical Mystery Award, and Vices of My Blood.

Three of Jennings’s novels have been made into TV movies under the title Murder 19C: The Murdoch Mysteries. Bravo/CHUM is currently developing a series based on the character of Detective William Murdoch for broadcast in 2007.

Visit Maureen Jennings's website.

The Page 99 Test: A Journeyman to Grief.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is William Landay reading?

William Landay is the latest contributor to Writers Read. His write-up will be of interest to writers as well as readers because he caught a "brilliant" novel that temporarily threw him off the one that he's writing.

"How do you read in one voice then write in your own?," Landay asks. This novel "is precisely the sort of book that jams my creative gears. It is told in a voice so strong and so distinctive — so strange — that it is becoming hard, when I sit down to write, to hear my own voice."

Visit Writers Read and see what novel Landay refers to.

He's also been reading some "novels with narrative voices closer to what I’m trying to achieve. Lately I’ve been rereading Rosellen Brown’s Before and After, Sue Miller’s The Good Mother, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, books written in a closely observed, restrained style that suits me at the moment. Novels that unblock me, that help me write."

Landay is the author of the highly acclaimed Mission Flats, which was awarded the John Creasey Dagger as the best debut crime novel of 2003, and the widely-praised new novel, The Strangler.

Writers Read: William Landay.

Visit Landay's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Strangler.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gordon Brown's reading list

What sort of prime minister will Gordon Brown, Tony Blair's replacement, make -- especially regarding Britain's relations with America? On the one hand, Brown is more sympathetic with America on some important fronts than Blair was; on the other, there's that problem in Iraq, to which few observers think Brown is as committed as was Blair. Even the well-informed politics junkies I know here and in London are curious about what the new prime minister will do.

Thanks to the London Times, we know what Brown will be reading this summer:

Arguably our most profoundly bookish leader since Churchill, Mr Brown has revealed his summer reading selection exclusively to The Times. The first two choices are fairly predictable: The Assault on Reason by Al Gore, the former US Vice-President; and The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board.

Read on to learn about the third book Brown mentioned.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "When the Press Fails"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina by W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston.

About the book, from the publisher's website:

During the gravest moments of George W. Bush’s tenure — the response to 9/11, the buildup to war with Iraq, the Abu Ghraib scandal — the media largely reported reality as his administration scripted it. Why, in these times when we most need a critical, independent press, does this essential pillar of democracy fail us? A sobering look at the intimate relationship between political power and the news media, When the Press Fails argues that reporters’ dependence on official sources disastrously thwarts coverage of dissenting voices from outside the beltway.

The result is both an indictment of official spin and an urgent call to action that begins by questioning why the mainstream press neglected to cover considerable evidence against the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Drawing on hard-hitting interviews with journalists and analysis of content from major news outlets, the authors show that such catastrophic blind spots, particularly during the Abu Ghraib controversy, have stemmed from a lack of high-level sources within government willing to question the administration publicly. Contrasting these grave failures with the refreshingly critical reporting on Hurricane Katrina — a rare event that caught officials off guard, enabling journalists to enter a no-spin zone — When the Press Fails concludes by proposing new practices to reduce reporters’ dependence on power.

The authors ultimately contend that if ordinary Americans start to hear alternative perspectives aired in the legitimizing arena of the mainstream press, they just might begin to act as a public — no longer suffering with private shock and awe as world-changing events unfold before their eyes.

Among the praise for When the Press Fails:

"When the Press Fails confronts some of the most important questions now facing the press, the public, and our shared democracy-and does so with rare precision and insight. This book has the power to ignite a much-needed public discussion about the role of `the media' in public life and it should be required reading in newsrooms across the country."

--Dan Rather, global correspondent, HDNet

"When the Press Fails is a valuable and clarifying book for people in the news media-and perhaps even more for members of the public who feel abused by the press's failures. Inside and outside the news business, everyone knows that something serious is wrong with the way Americans get and assess information. This book does a very good job of explaining what that something is, and what parts of it can be addressed."

--James Fallows, author of Breaking the News and correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly

"Political partisans have tried for years to discredit journalists, resulting in a press corps now overly conscious of its image. This book illustrates how America gets hurt when journalists are too intimidated to do their jobs."

--Bob Edwards, host of the Bob Edwards Show and former host of Morning Edition

"Not all Washington journalists will applaud the arrival of When the Press Fails, but they should and probably will read it. It is a stinging critique of media coverage of the Bush administration, especially its policy in Iraq, and it raises serious questions about how the White House has `spun' much of the media into a form of docile dependency on official handouts, leading to an overall failure of accountability. Thus is the public shortchanged. Between the lines is a cry for the media to wake up to its social and political responsibilities."

--Marvin Kalb, founding director and senior fellow of the Joan Shorenstein Center

Learn more about When the Press Fails at the publisher's website, and read an excerpt from the book.

W. Lance Bennett is Ruddick C. Lawrence Professor Communication and Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington; Regina G. Lawrence is Department Chair and Professor of Political Science in the Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University; and Steven Livingston is Professor of Political Communication in the School of Media and Public Affairs and holds a joint appointment in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.

The Page 69 Test: When the Press Fails.

--Marshal Zeringue

Most important books: Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde told Newsweek about his five most important books.

And one book that is not so important to him:

A classic that, on rereading, disappointed:

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. I had thought it was deep and full of painful unrequited love, but on rereading I think it's a bunch of very drippy people who accept being bullied for no very good reason.

Read more about Jasper Fforde's five most important books.

Fforde's new novel, Thursday Next: First Among Sequels, releases this summer.

For another view of Wuthering Heights, see the entry on the Emily Brontë novel at the Page 99 Test.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Hal Spacejock -- "Just Desserts"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Simon Haynes's third "Hal Spacejock" novel, Just Desserts.

About the book, from the author's website:

A mysterious sealed crate, a pair of shady mercenaries with more guns than brain cells and the amnesiac robot which may or may not be on a secret mission ... Only interstellar ignoramus Hal Spacejock and the unflappable Clunk could turn a straightforward cargo delivery into space opera with clowns.

Three simmering planets, two cocky spacemen and one huge mess: Just Desserts, for your pleasure.

Among the praise for Just Desserts:

"You can't read a chapter without running across a pun, joke or double-entendre that will get you smiling, chuckling or outright chortling. [...] You really care about these characters and are on the edge of your seat as you follow their adventures. A real page turner."
--/dev/random

"How Haynes dreams up his improbable scenarios is a mystery to me, but I'm glad he does it ... enjoy another fast and furious ride with the zap-happy, zany rapscallions."
--Specusphere

"Think A Night At The Opera or any other Marx Brothers movie, in which pompous characters get their -- er -- just desserts, in the midst of mostly unintended chaos.... If you enjoy golden age comic space operas, such as Harry Harrison’s, you’ll like this."
--Sue Bursztynski, January Magazine

Visit Simon Haynes's website to learn more about Just Desserts as well as the past and future adventures of Hal Spacejock.

The Page 99 Test: Just Desserts.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "The Virgin's Guide to Mexico"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Eric B. Martin's The Virgin's Guide to Mexico.

About the book, from the publisher's website:

A novel about crossing the border in the opposite direction: from wealthy, suburban Texas into the wild heart of Mexico.

Alma Price is seventeen — she’s smart, she’s angry, and she’s going to Mexico. Her grandfather lives there, or so she thinks, although it’s hard to know what’s true with a lying mother who raised her amongst the blond brigade of their rich Texas neighborhood. Sick of suburbia, Alma hops a bus, crosses the border, gets a disguise, and winds through the thugs and witches and whores, ultimately disappearing in the heart of Mexico City.

Her parents, Hermelinda and Truitt, are right behind her, swerving their big SUV around hallucinogenic cacti and through herds of wild pigs, trying to save their daughter and maybe even their marriage. But in her effort to bring her daughter home to Texas, Hermelinda finds that Mexico is slowly drawing her back in, reminding her of who she is and where she’s from, and just maybe leading her toward a reconciliation with both her past and her estranged daughter.

Among the praise for the novel:

“This is a startling book. It's vivid to the point of hallucination. You start to wonder where he learned all he knows. If you love Mexico, or if you fear Mexico, you will be thrown in either direction will equal vigor. This is very cool stuff indeed.”
– Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Hummingbird’s Daughter and The Devil’s Highway

“…earnestly beat…Part bildungs-road novel, part family saga and part identity lit, Martin's third novel is all heart.”
– Publishers Weekly

“…invokes both On the Road and The Catcher in the Rye…”
– Texas Monthly

"Introducing your next summer beach book ... fast-paced strangeness gives the novel a fluid, cinematic feel... Witches, wild boars, crowded Mexican bars -- finally, a guidebook that tells you how to experience the real Mexico."
– Esquire.com

“...one of those works that urges you to read its passages again and again....”
– The Skinny Magazine

“Eric Martin is one of our most intelligent and compassionate novelists. His new novel set in a thankfully unromanticized Mexico is his finest work to date.”
– Peter Orner, author of The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and The Esther Stories

“...The Virgin's Guide to Mexico is somehow still more than the sum of its parts, and somehow, against all odds, absolutely new.”
– Stephen Elliott, author of Happy Baby and My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up

Visit Eric B. Martin's website to read the novel's first line, its last word, and a favorite paragraph.

The Page 69 Test: Eric B. Martin's The Virgin's Guide to Mexico.

--Marshal Zeringue

What’s Elmore Leonard’s best novel?

"What’s Elmore Leonard’s best novel?," asks Dwight Garner in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. "In the right bar, that question could start a rumble. But Mark Reiter tackles it with elegance and wit in his recent book The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything, which he wrote with Richard Sandomir and Nigel Holmes."

I'm such a fan of the writer that I wouldn't even pretend to rank his novels, although I would have guessed Get Shorty would have made the Final Four. It didn't.

Nor did the new novel, Up in Honey's Room.

Click over to the Times to see which books made Dutch's Final Four.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Rhonda Pellero's "Knock Off"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Rhonda Pellero's Knock Off.

About the book, from the publisher's website:

Get ready for a rollicking, wickedly fun new mystery series from USA Today Bestselling Author Rhonda Pollero, featuring the most delicious sleuth ever to solve the crime, get the guy, and save a bundle on discount Gucci, all at the same time. Once Finley Tanner’s on the case, shopping and murder will never be the same…

Meet Finley Anderson Tanner. F.A.T. to her enemies. Underachiever extraordinaire. This West Palm Beach paralegal hates the gym, still rents her condo, and loves two-hour lunches with her friends. But what really gets Finley’s blood pumping is the thrill of the hunt — shopping for deeply discounted designer goods she can wear at her upscale law firm. Hey, if she holds that Chanel bag just right, no one will ever notice the weird smear on the pale pink lambskin.

Too bad work isn’t all about fashion. Especially when a grieving widow is sitting in your office, convinced that her husband’s accidental death was really murder. Okay, so she’s sincere…but crazy. She’s also a close personal friend of the boss, and the boss wants Finley to personally oversee the investigation. Good-bye outlet malls; hello pain-in-my-Asprey.

Investigating murder isn’t really Finley’s bag. (That would be Prada, 75% off.) But the deeper Finley digs, the stranger things get. There are an awful lot of “accidental” deaths out there. This discount shopper knows slightly irregular when she sees it, and this case is clearly not right. Kind of like sexy Liam McGarrity. Everything about the hot, hunky P.I. assigned to the investigation screams, “Get out while you still have your underwear!” When he’s not working the case, he’s working on Finley. Who knew crime could be this much fun?

Now, for a girl whose biggest ambition was take-out Moo Shu at exactly 5:01, life is taking some exciting, unpredictable, and decidedly dangerous turns. But someone doesn’t like Finley’s new work ethic. And if this paralegal wants to bring home the real goods, she’ll have to keep from becoming a killer’s total knock off…

Among the praise for Knock Off:

“Rhonda will take you on a fun, fanciful and fascinating journey. If you’re looking for romance and intrigue with an interesting twist, you won’t want to miss her.”
–NYT bestselling author Nora Roberts

“Rhonda Pollero is an amazing talent. Murder has never been this much fun!”
–NYT bestselling author Cherry Adair

“Rhonda Pollero's humor and compelling mystery will keep you turning pages.”
—NYT bestselling author Tess Gerritsen

“Witty, upbeat, all-around entertaining. A great read with plenty of attitude.”
—Janet Evanovich

Visit Rhonda Pellero's website and her blog; read an excerpt from Knock Off; and view the trailer.

The Page 69 Test: Knock Off.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Andrew Rehfeld reading?

Andrew Rehfeld is the latest contributor to Writers Read.

Rehfeld is the author of The Concept of Constituency: Political Representation, Democratic Legitimacy, and Institutional Design, which "asks whether liberal democracies are justified in using residency to define electoral constituencies for their national legislatures. US citizens, for example, are represented in Congress by where they live. The book explains the history of the territorial district in the United States, demonstrating that electoral districts at the founding were never intended to translate local interests into national policy (as they arguably do now) but rather were meant to defeat localism and particularity. Arguing for particular principles of republican deliberation, accountability, and stability, extremely large territorial districts have little justification today. Rather than promoting group or proportional representation, Rehfeld suggests that we randomly assign citizens into national, non-territorial electoral constituencies for life."

Jacob T. Levy wrote that "Rehfeld presents a surprisingly powerful argument for breaking the power of gerrymandering.... [P]eople ought to be thinking about both his proposal and his arguments about constituency more generally in trying to understand what to do about the American gerrymandering mess."

Visit Writers Read to see what Rehfeld has been reading outside his scholarly research.

The Page 69 Test: The Concept of Constituency.

--Marshal Zeringue

A 5 best list of books about soldiers in battle

In honor of Memorial Day, Senator John McCain picked a five best list of books about soldiers in battle for Opinion Journal.

One title is about the so-called "war to end all wars:"

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

In Erich Maria Remarque's extraordinary novel, based on his experience fighting for Germany in World War I, a young man and his classmates march off to the trenches full of bravado -- but in their first encounter with battle, they fall apart. All his vanity gone, the young man learns to hate the thing he thought would be an adventure. "All Quiet on the Western Front" is an indelible depiction of World War I, but it is also a timeless reminder that whether a conflict is necessary or not, whether it is ably commanded or mishandled, whether its outcome is just or unjust, war is a deadly enterprise. We should all shed a tear when war claims its wages.

Read about the book that topped McCain's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: "Pretty Little Mistakes"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Heather McElhatton's Pretty Little Mistakes.

About the book, from the author's website:

Heather McElhatton’s singularly-original debut novel has more than 150 possible endings. From your first choice – where to go after school - you decide which of your dreams to chase. Should you travel abroad or get a masters degree? Marry or stay single? Become an artist, an entrepreneur, a homemaker, a doctor, or a drug dealer? There are hundreds of lives sewn inside one book, some end fabulously and others in total disaster.

You may end up in an opulent mansion or homeless down by the river. Happily married with your own corporation, or alone and pecked to death by ducks in London. As a Zen master in Japan or morbidly obese in a trailer park. The book asks, is it destiny or decision that controls our fate? In real life you can’t go back and do your life over – but in Pretty Little Mistakes, you can.

The genesis of this book is the age-old game we all play called the What if Game. What if I would have taken that job? What if I hadn’t broken up with that guy? What if I quit my job and took a trip around the world? We can’t stop wondering if we’ve made the right choices in our life. If it’s decision or destiny running our lives. In real life we can’t stop, turn back and get a do over – but in Pretty Little Mistakes, you can.

Read more about the book -- including reviews, an excerpt, and FAQs -- at the author's website and at the Pretty Little Mistakes site.

Heather McElhatton is a writer and independent producer for Public Radio International. Her commentaries and stories have been heard nationally on This American Life, Marketplace, Weekend America, Sound Money and The Savvy Traveler. Her new radio show is called Stage Sessions and is held in front of a live audience at the Fitzgerald Theater in St Paul, Minnesota.

Pretty Little Mistakes is her first novel.

The Page 99 Test: Pretty Little Mistakes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Sophie Hannah's "Hurting Distance"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Sophie Hannah's Hurting Distance.

About the book, from the author's website:

Sundial-maker Naomi Jenkins is used to living with secrets: three years ago something terrible happened to her, so terrible that she never told anyone...

Now, Naomi has another secret: the man she has fallen passionately in love with, unhappily married Robert Haworth. When Robert vanishes without warning or explanation, Naomi knows he must have come to harm. But the police are less convinced, particularly when Robert's wife insists he is not missing.

In desperation, Naomi has an idea. If she can't persuade the police that Robert is in danger, perhaps she can convince them that he is a danger to others. Then they will have to look for him - urgently. Naomi knows how to describe in detail the actions of a psychopath. All she needs to do is dig up her own traumatic past.

Among the praise for Hurting Distance:

"This is a far better-written book than any genre label might suggest. Hannah is a respected poet and uses the fascinating motif of the sundial not only to provide the reader with clues but to underline perceptions of life, time and death. It’s also significant that she won a Daphne du Maurier award. Her powerful subjects of obsession with the past, and fear in the present, testify that she has made a transition to the narrative world of that iconic writer."
--Independent

"Thrilling from the first page, and not simply a whodunit. I thought I had the whole book pegged after the first chapter, but how wrong I was. Pick it up, but be warned, you won’t put it down."
--Caroline Davison, Birmingham Post

"The terror will continue to lurk on the edges of your subconscious long after you’ve put this book down."
--News of the World

Sophie Hannah is a bestselling poet, short story writer, and novelist.

Visit Hannah's website and read the beginning of Hurting Distance.

The Page 69 Test: Sophie Hannah's Hurting Distance.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Nathaniel Philbrick reading?

National Book Award-winner Nathaniel Philbrick talked to the Christian Science Monitor about what he's been watching and listening to.

And reading:

I'm in the middle of two books. The final installment of Larry McMurtry's Berrybender novels [Folly and Glory]. I've been inhaling him for this last year and now I'm on the fourth one [in the series] and I'm enjoying it. I just picked up Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Rifles, so I'm beginning that series, which I have never read.

Read more about Philbrick's taste in movies, television and music.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rober Kurson's list

This week at The Week magazine, Robert Kurson named "The List."

One of Kurson's picks:

Patrimony by Philip Roth

A brave and loving and beautifully honest farewell by the author to his dying father. It is impossible to read Roth’s true account without realizing how we say goodbye to our aging parents every day — and that we say goodbye to ourselves just as often.

Read about another title that Kurson called "The single book that truly changed my life."

Robert Kurson is the author of the 2004 bestseller Shadow Divers and the new book, Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure, and the Man Who Dared to See, "the stunning true story of one man’s heroic odyssey from blindness into sight."

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Garance Franke-Ruta reading?

Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor at The American Prospect magazine, is the latest contributor to Writers Read.

Most of her reading time is taken up with timely periodicals and newspapers, yet she did tag a few books, including:

Anthony Shadid's Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War.

Visit Franke-Ruta's entry at Writers Read to see what else she has her eyes on.

Franke-Ruta has also worked at The Washington City Paper, The New Republic, and National Journal magazine, and had stories, criticism, or reviews published in them and: The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Dallas Morning News, The Washington Monthly, Salon, The Utne Reader and Legal Affairs magazine.

Visit Garance Franke-Ruta's website, theGarance.com, and The American Prospect.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Lev Raphael's "Hot Rocks"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Lev Raphael's Hot Rocks.

About the book, from the author's website:

Fitness = Death when Nick Hoffman heads back to the gym right after a vacation, finding himself caught in a Desperate Housewives-type mystery. Michigan Muscle is a state-of-the-art health club adjacent to the State University of Michigan. Boasting luxurious facilities, the latest equipment, and topnotch personal trainers, it's a palatial complex for fitness. But every palace has its intrigue, and when Nick stumbles across a dead trainer, he's drawn into a web of passion and privilege unlike anything he's ever experienced before. The prime suspect because he's the one who discovered the body, Nick has to work this mystery out to its bitter end.

Among the praise for Hot Rocks:

"If you like your mysteries smart, witty, and steaming with suspense, you won't find a better read than Lev Raphael's Hot Rocks. The new spa in town is proving hazardous to Nick's health, and it's great to be back at his side while he sleuths in the sauna. Lev's turned up the heat in one of my favorite series in crime fiction."
--Linda Fairstein, author of Bad Blood

"Hot Rocks is a comic mystery of bad manners, written with the suspenseful touch of Alfred Hitchcock bred to the epigrammatic wit of Oscar Wilde. The hero of the tale, assistant professor Nick Hoffman, is among the most lovably erudite characters in all of mystery fiction."
--Robert Eversz, author of Zero to the Bone

"This is a refreshingly literate mystery without being the least bit pretentious. It's filled with evocative, beautifully readable prose that has plenty of flow, and no unnecessary words. It's also a lot of fun, sparkling with sharp wit and earthy humor, lightly seasoned with a sprinkle of the sort of casual literary capping I adore in British Golden Age mysteries. The plot is given depth through a variety of subplots, such as the new twist in Stefan's life — and therefore in Nick's — that promises to make things interesting going forward... However, what really makes the story, and the whole series, is the engaging protagonist. Nick is... very funny and very good company.... This is a series entry, but perfectly enjoyable as a standalone. Recommended."
--Kim Malo, MyShelf.com

"Raphael's series hero, Nick Hoffman, is in midlife crisis when he and partner Stefan Borowski return from their Caribbean vacation (marred by murder, of course; see Tropic of Murder, 2004) to resume teaching at the State University of Michigan. Nick's musings over getting older halt abruptly when he realizes that his companion in the health-club steam room is head trainer and all-around stud Vlado Zamario, and he's dead. Before you can say 'smoldering temptress,' series regular Professor Juno Dromgoole is on the scene, spreading the news that it's murder and proposing to solve it with Nick, the obvious suspect because of his previous involvements with homicide. Given Vlado's encounters with the women at Michigan Muscle, the plot quickly and deliciously thickens into layers of domestic discord highly seasone d with compromising photos. Raphael's latest smoothly delivers a satisfying mystery while providing insight into the middle-aging of America, gay marriage, the excitement of sleuthing as a means of exercising control over our lives, the 'Orwellian' Patriot Act, and more."
--Booklist

Lev Raphael is the author of Tropic of Murder, Burning Down the House, Little Miss Evil, The Death of a Constant Lover, The Edith Wharton Murders, and Let's Get Criminal.

Visit Lev Raphael's website.

The Page 69 Test: Hot Rocks.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Calculated Loss," the movie

Linda L. Richards is the author of three Madeline Carter novels: Mad Money, The Next Ex, and Calculated Loss.

Which actor should play her protagonist if the novels are adapted for the screen?

As I write, I never have any real living and breathing human in my head. My characters are so real to me, they seem to occupy all available space. I know just what they look like, and they don't look like anyone else, if you follow.

Sometimes, if I'm watching a movie or something on TV, I'll say, "Now she could play Madeline." And who have I said that about?

Read on to discover which actors get the nod from the character's creator.

Read more about the Madeline Carter novels at Linda L. Richards's website.

Richards is editor of January Magazine, maintains an active blog, and is one of the "usual suspects" posting at The Rap Sheet.

Her fourth novel, Death was the Other Woman, will be published January 2008 by St. Martin’s Minotaur and the advance praise for the novel is pretty damn impressive. A taste:

“You're about to meet a new great dame of crime fiction in Death was the Other Woman. Linda L. Richards does a stunning job in creating a character with a voice and eye right out of a 1930's L.A. hard-boiled classic: guns and gams, booze and bodies, peepers and perps. Move over, Sam Spade: Kitty Pangborn is on the case.”
--Linda Fairstein, author of Death Dance

The Page 69 Test: Calculated Loss.

My Book, The Movie: Calculated Loss.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: "The Price of Motherhood"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood.

About the book, from the author's website:

The Price of Motherhood, a widely acclaimed bestseller, was listed by the Chicago Tribune as one of the Top Ten feminist literary works since publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1964. The book argues that although women have been liberated, mothers have not. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, and the latest research in economics, family law, sociology, history, and child development, this provocative book shows how mothers are uniquely disadvantaged economically. Unlike most other nations, the United States systematically refuses to value or support unpaid caring labor. As a result, mothers, children, and society as a whole pay an enormous price. Crittenden makes a forceful argument that the anachronistic, dependent status of mothers and other caregivers is the finished business of the woman's movement. [read on]

Among the praise for the book:

"Written with a fine passion, The Price of Motherhood challenges the received ideas of economists, feminists and conservatives alike and ought to be read by all of them."
--Paul Starr, New York Times Book Review

"A bracing call to arms...Crittenden rows against the ideological current and has the temerity to suggest a mind-blowingly sensible alteration of America's present parenting arrangements."
--Ben Dickinson, Elle

"Fascinating...shows how women have been consistently denied social and, more importantly, monetary equality for raising their families."
--Susan Straight, Los Angeles Times

"A scathing indictment of policies that cheat mothers...Crittenden turns out a fresh, persuasive argument. Sure to inspire vigorous debate."
--Megan Rutherford, Time

"Powerful and important."
--New York Times

Ann Crittenden is an award-winning journalist, author, and lecturer. Her latest book, If You've Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything, received critical praise and was featured in People magazine. Her previous book, The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued, was named one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year in 2001.

Her previous books include Sanctuary: A Story of American Conscience and the Law in Collision, one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year in 1988, and Killing the Sacred Cows: Bold Ideas for a New Economy (1993). Her articles have appeared in every national newspaper and numerous magazines, including Foreign Affairs, The Nation, Barron's, and Working Woman.

The Page 99 Test: Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Ben Dolnick's "Zoology"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Ben Dolnick's Zoology.

About the book, from the publisher's website:

Zoology is the story of Henry Elinsky, a college flunk-out who takes a job at the Central Park Zoo and discovers that becoming an adult takes a lot more than just a weekly paycheck.

Among the praise for Zoology:

"Ben Dolnick is a writer of incredible sensitivity. Zoology explores the tricky journey to adulthood with honesty, humor, and generosity."
—Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything is Illuminated

“An exciting, confident, and thoroughly endearing debut. Dolnick writes with a maturity that belies his years, and Zoology – distinguished by a rare combination of narrative patience and instinctive kindness – is a real cause for celebration.”
—George Saunders, author of In Persuasion Nation

“Zoology is a wonderful first novel. It shines a light on that tricky time when you are trying to get a life, own it, make it yours. Ben Dolnick is as funny as he is wise, as honest as he is charming – and he has won me over entirely.”
—Laura Dave, author of London is the Best City in America

“Ben Dolnick's Zoology is a bright, sweet, sad, fresh, and funny novel, very honest and ultimately quite moving.”
—Gabriel Brownstein, author of The Man from Beyond

“I love Zoology. Ben Dolnick's narrator, Henry, is painfully familiar to those of us who have done some serious stumbling along life's road, and he is as engaging and interesting a character as I've come across in a long, long time. Best of all, he makes me laugh out loud.”
—Abigail Thomas, author of A Three Dog Life

Read an excerpt from Zoology and visit Ben Dolnick's website.

The Page 69 Test: Ben Dolnick's Zoology.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Keith Dixon reading"

Keith Dixon is the current featured contibutor at Writers Read.

Ghostfires, his first novel, was named one of the five best first novels of 2004 by Poets & Writers magazine.

His new novel, The Art of Losing, was published in February.

I recently asked him what he was reading and part of his reply included:

I'm most of the way through Martin Amis's Money -- I'm beginning to think I have some sort of literary crush on Amis, as I can't stop reading (and rereading) his stuff and marveling at what he has going on on the page. I finished his House of Meetings about two days after it hit the shelves and was awestruck by how far his tone and style have advanced. I'd always had The Information pegged as his best but I think House of Meetings runs neck and neck with it.

There's more: read Dixon's write-up at Writers Read.

Visit Keith Dixon's website to learn more about his novels.

The Page 69 Test: The Art of Losing.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "Accidents Waiting to Happen"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Simon Wood's Accidents Waiting to Happen.

About the book, from the author's website:

Josh Michaels is worth more dead than alive. He just doesn’t know it yet. He has no idea why someone would try to kill him, clearly that’s exactly what happened. When an SUV forced Josh’s car off the road and into a river, it might have been an accident. But when Josh looked up at the road, expecting to see the SUV’s driver rushing to help him, all he saw was the driver watching him calmly…then giving him a “thumbs down” sign. That was merely the first attempt on Josh’s life, all of them designed to look like accidents, and all of them very nearly fatal. With his time — and maybe his luck — running out and no one willing to believe him, Josh had better figure out who wants him dead and why … before it’s too late.

Among the praise for the novel:

“Accidents Waiting to Happen is a briskly plotted thriller that uses point of view shifts better than any novel I’ve read in quite a while in his debut.”
— CrimeSpree Magazine

“One of the most riveting first chapters I have read in some time. The pacing is spectacular and gets progressively faster as the reader nears the finale. An unqualified recommendation.”
— Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine

“An impressive debut.”
— Mystery Scene Magazine

“Simon Wood...delivers a suspenseful, brisk tale in his debut.”
— South Florida Sun Sentinel

“What a thrill ride!”
— Literary Editor for the East Bay Express

Simon Wood is the author of a robust and expanding list of novels and stories.

Visit Wood's website, his MySpace page, and his contributions to Murderati.

The Page 69 Test: Accidents Waiting to Happen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten satires

Poet/playwright/novelist Adam Thorpe selected a top ten list of satires for the Guardian.

He introduced his selections thus:

"I live in France, and as I write this, the newly-elected president, having declared himself committed to uniting the French and caring for the poor, is sailing on a huge luxury yacht around Malta. Is he satirising himself? One wonders. Sarkozy once declared that, to "paralyse" his enemies, he likes to use their own phrases. In our postmodern age, even satire can be anticipated and enrolled in the cause of power. George W Bush is his own satire: we need add nothing. Remember that time he couldn't find the stage exit after a lecture? And what modern Swift could ever have invented the moment he received the news that America was under attack, clutching The Pet Goat in front of the class, and then reading it out with the kids?

"Satirists have it hard, these days. They can barely match the truth. And shallow satire is no good at all; it is merely cynical, as husked of all value as the average TV chat show and its meaningless laughter. Good, deep satire has both rage and compassion behind it - along with the hope of something better."

One title from Thorpe's list:

Joseph Conrad: The Secret Agent

This damp, dark thriller dances about on satirical feet, from its opening paragraph to the very last, where it suddenly plunges like Chernobyl's core to our own apocalyptic times, seamed with petit-bourgeois envy and crazed fundamentalist dreams. Whether attacking the former or the latter, Conrad never lets go of his grim, twitchy smile.

Read about the only title on Thorpe's list written by a woman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: "Around the Bloc"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Stephanie Elizondo Griest's Around the Bloc.

About the book, from the author's website:

As a high school senior desperate to escape South Texas, Stephanie Elizondo Griest listened up when a CNN correspondent offered the how-to-be-like-me advice of "Learn Russian." Though she barely knew enough of her mother's native Spanish to communicate with her Abuelita, Stephanie enrolled in Russian at the University of Texas, commencing what would become a four-year, 12-nation tour of the Communist Bloc that shattered her preconceived notions of the "Evil Empire."

In Around the Bloc, Stephanie relates her experiences as a volunteer at a children's shelter in Moscow, a propaganda polisher at the Chinese Communist Party's mouthpiece in Beijing, and a belly dancer among the rumba queens of Havana. She falls in love with an ex-soldier who avoided radiation clean-up duties at Chernobyl by slitting his wrists, fights to feature the Spice Girls in print, hangs out with Cuban hip-hop artists who rap about Revolution, and makes difficult realizations about the meaning of democracy and social justice. She also learns how to buy vodka for a Russian dinner party (one bottle per guest plus one), stumbles upon Beijing's underground gay scene, marches with 100,000 mothers demanding Elian's return to Cuba, and gains new appreciation for the Mexican culture she left behind.

Among the praise for Around the Bloc:

"Stephanie Elizondo Griest has the soul of an adventurer, the heart of a child, the wit of a jester, and the mind of a wise old woman. Lucky for us, she also has a pen."
-Deborah Copaken Kogan, author of Shutterbabe

"A must-read for every student traveling or studying abroad. Griest’s four-year journey through communist capitol cities is an absorbing tale of political, social and personal discovery."
-Marybeth Bond, author Travelers' Tales: Gutsy Women; editor Travelers' Tales: A Woman's World

“A Chicana in China y mas? Who wouldn’t want to partake in Stephanie Elizondo Griest’s ongoing love affair with adventure? Unlike some travel stories where a smug author painfully tries to convince themselves (and their readers) how well they can adapt to foreign soil, Miss Stephanie, my dear beige sister, confesses full frontal vulnerability. She is the awkward tourist, the savvy traveler and … one hell of a writer! As long as there are books like this, one never needs to redeem mom’s frequent flyer points to experience true adventure!”
-Michele Serros, author of How to be a Chicana Role Model and Chicana Falsa

"Forget about J-school. Stephanie Elizondo Griest practices journalism the way it should be practiced. I wish I could have been hiding in her suitcase at each stop along her remarkable journey."
-Tom Miller, author of Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba and The Panama Hat Trail

"A stunning first. Stephanie Elizondo Griest's memoir is a coming of age odyssey every American should read. Around the Bloc does more than tell a story. It vibrates with humor, insight and honesty -- a rare gem."
-Anchee Min, author of Red Azalea and Becoming Madame Mao

"A delightful and saucy romp through strange places and even stranger states of mind. Griest is not only an inspiration as a traveler and observer – she is darn funny too."
–James O'Reilly, author of Travelers' Tales

"Opening Around the Bloc is rather like popping the cork off a champagne bottle. This book fairly brims over with a refreshing zest and sparkle, which, one imagines, is probably an apt description of its author, as well. Stephanie Elizondo Griest, who embarked on her own Pilgrim’s Progress around the world’s greatest former (and current) communist capital cities, has written a delightful account of her curious journey. Full of humour, compassion and a great degree of personal candour, Around the Bloc is clearly just the beginning for this gifted young writer.”
-Jon Lee Anderson, author of The Lion’s Grave

Stephanie Elizondo Griest spent much of 2005 traveling throughout Mexico, interviewing undocumented workers and rallying with Zapatistas: Atria/Simon & Schuster will publish her memoir about it in the spring of 2008. Travelers' Tales published her guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go in March 2007.

Read an excerpt from Around the Bloc and visit Stephanie Elizondo Griest's website.

The Page 99 Test: Around the Bloc.

--Marshal Zeringue

Overlooked and underappreciated crime novels

The Rap Sheet is running yet another entertaining and enlightening feature about crime fiction.

Editor J. Kingston Pierce "invited scores of crime novelists, critics, and bloggers from all over the world to answer a not-so-simple question: What one crime, mystery, or thriller novel do you think has been most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated over the years?"

Among those who responded: Michael Connelly, Laura Lippman, Ian Rankin, Michael Marshall, Rhys Bowen, Peter Temple, Zoë Sharp, Lee Child, Gary Phillips, Sarah Weinman, Barry Eisler, Sara Paretsky, and Declan Hughes. And there are many more.

Read the first round of responses.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Tom Gabbay's "The Lisbon Crossing"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Tom Gabbay's The Lisbon Crossing.

About the book, from the publisher:

Teeming with Nazis, spies, and ambiguous loyalties, the early days of World War II come alive with dark intrigue and heart-stopping action in this brilliant second tale from the author of the hit thriller The Berlin Conspiracy.

It's the summer of 1940 and Europe is in the grip of the Nazi war machine. Jack Teller arrives in neutral Lisbon on the arm of international screen legend Lili Sterne, to help her search for her childhood friend, Eva Lange. Having escaped Germany, staying one step ahead of the Nazi terror, Eva is believed to be hiding among the thousands of desperate refugees who have descended upon Lisbon. But Jack isn't the first on her trail. Top Hollywood detective Eddie Grimes had been on the case — until he turned up dead.

Instead of answers, Jack uncovers a series of lies that leads from Estoril's glittering nightclubs — rubbing elbows with the likes of Edward, Duke of Windsor, and his scheming wife, Wallis Simpson — into Lisbon's dank and dangerous backstreets. Along the way, Jack makes a shocking discovery that takes him from Portugal to the perilous boulevards of Nazi-occupied Paris, where his actions could change the course of the war.

The Lisbon Crossing brilliantly evokes a time of terror and uncertainty, and establishes Tom Gabbay's place among the best of modern suspense novelists.

Among the early praise for The Lisbon Crossing:

"The year is 1940, and the war in Europe is building to a crescendo. Jack Teller is a former gangster, bit actor, stand-in and sometime lover and friend of beautiful Hollywood star Lili Sterne. Jack finds himself in Lisbon as Lili's escort as she attempts to find a lost childhood friend named Eva Lange, who may or may not be a German spy. A private eye in Lili's employ who had been searching for Eva has met a gruesome end. As stand-in gumshoe, Jack's going to need all the skills he can muster - and a heaping helping of luck - to stay alive and unravel the story of Eva Lange.... Gabbay has taken on the mantle of countless previous WWII thriller writers and has done them proud with a hairpin plot and believable suspense."
--Peter Mergendah, Rocky Mountain News

"Gabbay serves it all up with Raymond Chandler-esque dark humor, a rich sense of place and a fine feel for the yawning chasm between those privileged to float above the exigencies of that dark time and those who were engulfed in its horrors."
--ForbesLife

Tom Gabbay is also the author of The Berlin Conspiracy.

The Page 69 Test: Tom Gabbay's The Lisbon Crossing.

--Marshal Zeringue

Most important books: Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith told Newsweek about his five most important books.

And two books that are not so important to him:

A classic that, on rereading, disappointed:

Alan Paton's Cry, The Beloved Country. Still a great book, but it has not aged well.

A Certified Important Book that you haven't read:

A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking. I tried; I really tried.

Read more about Alexander McCall Smith's five most important books.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is David Edgerton reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read is David Edgerton, author of The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, and other works.

Part of his entry:

My current leisure reading is Robert Winder’s Bloody Foreigners, a passionate and to the point history of immigration into Britain. A key theme is the racism, hypocrisy and forgetfulness of the authorities and the people. At the same time it stresses that Britain has indeed become a richer society as a result of immigration.

Still in other respects things have got worse: for the last ten years Britain has had its most mendacious Prime Minister ever. Yet Tony Blair is so overrated by so many that they blind themselves to this, and to the disaster he contributed to in Iraq. As he leaves office it is good to have one’s critical faculties fortified by the splendid polemic of Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s short Yo, Blair! Like me he despises the man’s deep dishonesty and ignorance, particularly of history. Unfortunately, as Ken Alder’s The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession tells us, even if we could have strapped him down and stuck electrodes on his head we would not either find out the truth, or get him to tell it. While not quite the page turner that was The Measure of All Things, this book is a wonderful example of how modern history of science can be brought to a wider public.

There is much more to Edgerton's entry: read on.

David Edgerton is the Hans Rausing Professor at Imperial College London where he was the Founding Director of its Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine.

The Page 69 Test: The Shock of the Old.

Writers Read: David Edgerton.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Thomas McCraw's "Prophet of Innovation"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Thomas K. McCraw's Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction.

About the book, from the publisher:

Pan Am, Gimbel's, Pullman, Douglas Aircraft, Digital Equipment Corporation, British Leyland -- all once as strong as dinosaurs, all now just as extinct. Destruction of businesses, fortunes, products, and careers is the price of progress toward a better material life. No one understood this bedrock economic principle better than Joseph A. Schumpeter. "Creative destruction," he said, is the driving force of capitalism.

Described by John Kenneth Galbraith as "the most sophisticated conservative" of the twentieth century, Schumpeter made his mark as the prophet of incessant change. His vision was stark: Nearly all businesses fail, victims of innovation by their competitors. Businesspeople ignore this lesson at their peril -- to survive, they must be entrepreneurial and think strategically. Yet in Schumpeter's view, the general prosperity produced by the "capitalist engine" far outweighs the wreckage it leaves behind.

During a tumultuous life spanning two world wars, the Great Depression, and the early Cold War, Schumpeter reinvented himself many times. From boy wonder in turn-of-the-century Vienna to captivating Harvard professor, he was stalked by tragedy and haunted by the specter of his rival, John Maynard Keynes. By 1983 -- the centennial of the birth of both men -- Forbes christened Schumpeter, not Keynes, the best navigator through the turbulent seas of globalization. Time has proved that assessment accurate.

Prophet of Innovation is also the private story of a man rescued repeatedly by women who loved him and put his well-being above their own. Without them, he would likely have perished, so fierce were the conflicts between his reason and his emotions. Drawing on all of Schumpeter's writings, including many intimate diaries and letters never before used, this biography paints the full portrait of a magnetic figure who aspired to become the world's greatest economist, lover, and horseman -- and admitted to failure only with the horses.

Among the praise for Prophet of Innovation:

Much honored as an economic prophet, Joseph Schumpeter has had to wait half a century after his death for this splendid full-dress biography covering his ideas, life, and times.... [This is] a fat, learned biography by Thomas McCraw, one of America's most respected business historians, the author of a Pulitzer prize-winning history of the rise of regulation. He has found the perfect subject in Schumpeter. He succeeds in getting inside the economist's head, explaining not just what he thought but why he thought it. Beyond this, he also succeeds in painting a portrait of his times. Fin de siécle Vienna, Weimar Germany, Harvard University before and after the first world war: all come to life on these pages.
--The Economist

[Schumpeter's] private life was no less fascinating than his public message. In Prophet of Innovation, Thomas McCraw -- emeritus professor of history at the Harvard Business School -- artfully weaves the two together.
--Dan Seligman, Wall Street Journal

In this biography, Pulitzer Prize winner McCraw neatly divides his emphasis between Schumpeter's professional and personal life. He portrays his subject as a somewhat self-absorbed insatiable scholar not entirely comfortable with his contemporaries, which might explain marriages and affairs with much older and younger women, as well as his affinity with students and often-strained relations with colleagues of his own generation. McGraw lucidly addresses Schumpeter's economic theories through an examination of his letters, lectures, addresses, articles, and major works.... [An] insightful and highly readable biography.
--Lawrence R. Maxted, Library Journal (starred review)

[A] persuasive and eloquent biography.
--Jay Hancock, Baltimore Sun

This well-paced and beautifully written book explains not only Schumpeter's work but also the fast-changing phenomenon of modern capitalism. McCraw brings out Schumpeter's energy and charisma as well as the power of his ideas, quite skillfully linking the economist's colorful and adventurous personal life with the development of his views. This book is a fine tribute to a great thinker.
--Harold James, Princeton University

Read the entire review in The Economist.

Thomas K. McCraw is the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School. His other books include Creating Modern Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Countries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions and Prophets of Regulation, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history.

The Page 69 Test: Prophet of Innovation.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Lydia Millet's "My Happy Life"

The new feature at the Page 99 Test: Lydia Millet's My Happy Life.

About the novel, from the publisher:

At the opening of My Happy Life, the unnamed narrator of this bittersweet fictional memoir has been abandoned in a locked room of a defunct hospital for the mentally ill. She hasn't seen the nice man who brings her food in days; she's eaten the soap and the toothpaste; she tried to eat the plaster on her walls, a dietary adventure that ended none too well.

This woman's story — covering decades and spanning continents — is utterly tragic. And yet, curiously, the narrator is happy. Despite a lifetime of neglect, physical abuse, and loss, she's incapable of perceiving slight or injury. She has infinite faith in the goodwill of others, loves even her enemies, and finds grace and communion in places most people wouldn't dare to look. By stepping outside her meager circumstances, she's able to live each moment as though it were her last-with gratitude, longing, and delight.

With the utterly original and compelling narrative voice Millet has fashioned, this is a novel that hypnotizes the reader, that startles and keeps us reading and imbues us with the rich interior life of this woman.

Among the praise for My Happy Life:

"[S]trange, slender and incandescent ... sharp and frequently funny."
—Jennifer Reese, New York Times Book Review

"Occasionally a book comes along that is truly written (as writers are instructed books should be) as if it were the writer's last: Millet's sad and infinitely touching third novel (after the absurdist George Bush, Dark Prince of Love) is such an extraordinary work."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Lydia Millet ... strips life down to its simplest components in her strange and lovely new novel, My Happy Life... in Millet's slim tale, deprivation enables transcendence and reverie."
—Joy Press, Village Voice

"Lydia Millet's 'fictional memoir' succeeds as a relentlessly dark novel about a heartbreakingly cheerful woman whose grim life has been marked by abuse and loss."
—Boston Herald

Read more about the novel at the publisher's website, and visit the author's website for an excerpt.

My Happy Life won the 2003 PEN-USA Award.

Lydia Millet's other novels include Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, Everyone's Pretty, George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, and Omnivores.

The Page 99 Test: My Happy Life.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Singled Out," the movie

At My Book, The Movie, Bella DePaulo shares some ideas about the casting for a film adaptation of her nonfiction book, Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After.

DePaulo's contribution opens:

When Geena Davis accepted the Golden Globe for her role as Commander in Chief, she told a touching story about the little girl who looked up at her and said that she, too, wants to be president when she grows up. As some in the crowd started aw-ing at the cuteness of it all, Davis admitted that the tender tale had never really happened. She was just mocking the kinds of sappy stories people tell at awards shows.

Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After is my book that takes aim at all the sentimentalized myths about marriage and coupling, and the scare stories about staying single, that are perpetuated ad nauseam in contemporary American society. You know the ones: Marry, and you will never be lonely again. Stay single, and your life will be miserable and tragic until you die alone in your tiny apartment, where someone finally discovers you weeks later, eaten by your cats. Singled Out says: Those things don’t really happen.

So who could best tell that story in a movie? Read on.

Visit Bella DePaulo's website.

My Book, The Movie: Singled Out.

The Page 69 Test: Singled Out.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ann Rule's 5 best true-crime books

Ann Rule, best-selling author of two dozen true-crime books, named a "five best" list of true-crime books for Opinion Journal.

The most recent title on Rule's list:

The Wrong Man" by James Neff

In 1954, an Ohio jury and much of America quickly accepted that Dr. Sam Sheppard had killed his pregnant wife, Marilyn. James Neff, revisiting the much-reported case almost 50 years later, presents another suspect and a new view in "The Wrong Man." The book is rich in forensic detail, and it taught me things I never knew, thanks to Neff's close attention to the way blood had been sprayed and dripped at the crime scene. Blood evidence didn't really come of age until the 1990s. That's why the forensic data available at any 1954 crime scene are horse-and-buggy stuff compared with what Neff had access to when he wrote on this case -- and he made the most of it. His research is monumental and a shining example for any true-crime writer.

Read about the book that is Number One on Rule's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: George Kateb's "Patriotism and Other Mistakes"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: George Kateb's Patriotism and Other Mistakes.

About the book, from the publisher:

George Kateb has been one of the most respected and influential political theorists of the last quarter century. His work stands apart from that of many of his contemporaries and resists easy summary. In these essays Kateb often admonishes himself, in Socratic fashion, to keep political argument as far as possible negative: to be willing to assert what we are not, and what we will not do, and to build modestly from there some account of what we are and what we ought to do.

Drawing attention to the non-rational character of many motives that drive people to construct and maintain a political order, he urges greater vigilance in political life and cautions against “mistakes” not usually acknowledged as such. Patriotism is one such mistake, too often resulting in terrible brutality and injustices. He asks us to consider how commitments to ideals of religion, nation, race, ethnicity, manliness, and courage find themselves in the service of immoral ends, and he exhorts us to remember the dignity of the individual.

The book is divided into three sections. In the first, Kateb discusses the expansion of state power (including such topics as surveillance) and the justifications for war recently made by American policy makers. The second section offers essays in moral psychology, and the third comprises fresh interpretations of major thinkers in the tradition of political thought, from Socrates to Arendt.

Among the praise for the book:

"George Kateb is simultaneously a profound intellectual and an agent provocateur whose voice is urgently needed today. Wary of those who say that politics is governed simply by self-interest, principle, or some combination thereof, Kateb uncovers the aesthetic sensibilities inhabiting political interpretation, public vision and state action. He seeks to chasten the aesthetic, rather than to eliminate it. His critical forays into patriotism, state surveillance, fear and judgment inspire me, though others will draw just as much sustenance from his explorations into the Constitution, morality, and ideology. An indispensable book for our time."
--William E. Connolly, author of Pluralism

"Intended to challenge common sense and conventional wisdom, Patriotism and Other Mistakes is, in turn, erudite and angry, ingenious and outrageous, sophisticated and shrill.... A penetrating analysis of the non-rational ideas that bind citizens to their government."
--Glenn C. Altschuler, New York Observer

George Kateb is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He is the author of articles on issues in the Bill of Rights and constitutional law, and his books include Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil; The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture; and Emerson and Self-Reliance. At Princeton, he was Director of the Program in Political Philosophy, Director of the Gauss Seminars, and Director of the University Center for Human Values.

The Page 69 Test: Patriotism and Other Mistakes.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is David Fulmer reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read is David Fulmer, author of the Shamus Award-winning Chasing the Devil's Tail, The Dying Crapshooter's Blues, and other books.

Fulmer is a producer, too. Among his production credits is the documentary "Blind Willie's Blues." In giving the documentary a four-star "Editor's Choice" rating, Video Librarian called it "nothing less than the economic, social, and historical evolution of America's indigenous music." It earned a nomination for the W.C. Handy Award in 1998. "Blind Willie's Blues - Atlanta Strut" broadcast on Public Broadcasting Atlanta in May, 2007.

Included in Fulmer's long list of newspaper and magazine credits are features on blues and jazz for the Atlanta Journal & Constitution, Atlanta Magazine, Southline, Blues Access, the All Music Guide, Il Giornale, and National Public Radio.

One of the books Fulmer mentions he was reading:

A Left Hand Like God, by Peter Silvester, which is a scholarly study of boogie-woogie piano. He's an academician, God help him, and it shows, but this is the kind of work that people like me slog through, sifting for diamonds. [read on]

Writers Read: David Fulmer.

Visit David Fulmer's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Dying Crapshooter's Blues.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lee Child's list

This week at The Week magazine, Lee Child named The List.

The only title in translation on it:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

My private pick for the 20th–century novel that will live the longest. Read it now, and get a jump on history. And enjoy it along the way.

Read about an American classic that made Child's list.

Lee Child’s latest Reacher novel is Bad Luck and Trouble.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Cordelia Frances Biddle's "The Conjurer"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Cordelia Frances Biddle's The Conjurer.

About the book, from The Conjurer website:

Intrigue, passion and murder surround the suspicious disappearance of Philadelphia financier, Lemuel Beale, in the winter of 1842. A victim of accidental drowning, according to the local constabulary, Beale’s legacy is a sinister web of political and financial machinations, and a troubling relationship with his daughter, his only child. Unmarried at twenty-six in an era when women were expected to become brides before turning twenty, Martha Beale’s conflicted search for her father eventually emboldens and frees her, bringing her love in the person of Thomas Kelman, an assistant to Philadelphia’s mayor - and a man whose business is homicide investigation.

The inquiry into Beale’s disappearance uncovers connections between the city’s most affluent and its most destitute: an escaped inmate from the infamous Eastern State Penitentiary; the freed African-American prisoner, Ruth; the ritual slayings of several young girl prostitutes; and Eusapio Paladino, a conjurer and necromancer who claims to communicate with the dead.

Among the praise for The Conjurer:

"...juggling multiple plot lines and narrators, this debut entry in a new historical crime series is a feast for those fans who enjoy engaging characters and historical periods that have not been done to death. This may also attract readers who loved Caleb Carr's attention to detail in The Alienist and Jacqueline Winspeare's appealing sleuth, Maisie Dobbs."
- Library Journal

"... disparate yet interrelated story threads combine in an intricately orchestrated narrative that implicates the Brahmin class and the corruption that comes with their absolute power. Biddle wonderfully evokes the color and culture of the time."
– Publishers Weekly

...appealing characters... a wealth of intriguing period detail
– Kirkus

A first-rate mystery featuring rich period authenticity and beguiling characters, The Conjurer succeeds on all levels –as top-flight historical fiction, and as a classic whodunnit. Biddle’s voice is uniquely suited to pre-Civil-War Philadelphia. This one goes on my keeper shelf!
– Julia Spencer-Fleming, author of All Mortal Flesh

Visit Cordelia Frances Biddle's website and read an excerpt from The Conjurer.

The Page 69 Test: The Conjurer.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Wilbur Smith reading?

Wilbur Smith, author of The Quest and thirty other African adventure novels, talked to the Christian Science Monitor about what he was watching and listening to.

And reading:

I receive a great number of proof copies of soon-to-be published books ... asking for quotes [for] the dust jackets. I bin most of them, but two caught my fancy recently. One was The Accident Man, a first novel by Tom Cain. It is a cracking thriller woven around the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Another one that I liked was Tip and Run by Edward Paice, which is a history of the campaign of the German General Von Lettow-Vorbeck in East Africa during World War II. It is a scholarly work, but totally fascinating.

Read about Smith's taste in movies and music.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Paul Schneider's "Brutal Journey"

The new feature at the Page 99 Test: Paul Schneider's Brutal Journey: The Epic Story of the First Crossing of North America.

About the book, from the publisher:

A gripping survival epic, Brutal Journey tells the story of an army of would-be conquerors, bound for glory, who landed in Florida in 1528. But only four of the four hundred would survive: eight years and some five thousand miles later, three Spaniards and a black Moroccan wandered out of the wilderness to the north of the Rio Grande and into Cortes’s gold-drenched Mexico. The survivors brought nothing back other than their story, but what a tale it was. They had become killers and cannibals, torturers and torture victims, slavers and enslaved. They became faith healers, arms dealers, canoe thieves, spider eaters. They became, in other words, whatever it took to stay alive.

Among the praise for Brutal Journey:

"A fast-paced, moving story, one that is difficult to believe and impossible to forget."
--New York Times

"A riveting tale of courage, cruelty, and ultimately survival, Schneider does for Cabeza de Vaca and his comrades what the late Stephen Ambrose did (with ''Undaunted Courage") for Lewis and Clark."
--Boston Globe

"[R]iveting... incorporates historical and archaeological research without stalling the story's epic sweep."
--Entertainment Weekly

"[A] delicious mix of the horrifying and the cheering."
--Washington Post

Paul Schneider is also the author of The Adirondacks: A History of America's First Wilderness and The Enduring Shore: A History of Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket.

Visit Schneider's website and read the Introduction and Chapter One from Brutal Journey.

The Page 99 Test: Brutal Journey.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Harold Cook's "Matters of Exchange"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age by Harold J. Cook.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this wide-ranging and stimulating book, a leading authority on the history of medicine and science presents convincing evidence that Dutch commerce — not religion — inspired the rise of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Harold J. Cook scrutinizes a wealth of historical documents relating to the study of medicine and natural history in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, Brazil, South Africa, and Asia during this era, and his conclusions are fresh and exciting. He uncovers direct links between the rise of trade and commerce in the Dutch Empire and the flourishing of scientific investigation.

Cook argues that engaging in commerce changed the thinking of Dutch citizens, leading to a new emphasis on such values as objectivity, accumulation, and description. The preference for accurate information that accompanied the rise of commerce also laid the groundwork for the rise of science globally, wherever the Dutch engaged in trade. Medicine and natural history were fundamental aspects of this new science, as reflected in the development of gardens for both pleasure and botanical study, anatomical theaters, curiosity cabinets, and richly illustrated books about nature. Sweeping in scope and original in its insights, this book revises previous understandings of the history of science and ideas.

Among the early praise for Matters of Exchange:

"Cook challenges existing interpretations of the rise of science during the early modern period and provides an immensely informative overview of science and medicine in the Dutch Golden Age."
—Mark Harrison, University of Oxford

"Matters of Exchange is a magisterial book linking science and commerce. From now on, 'the Scientific Revolution' has a Dutch accent."
—Mary E. Fissell, Johns Hopkins University

"In this ground-breaking book, Professor Cook investigates the way in which the unprecedented growth in global knowledge in the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries accompanied, and reflected the rapid expansion of the Dutch global commercial empire. Meticulously tracking the relations between these two areas of activity, Cook argues vividly and convincingly that in the case of medicine, commerce and the rise of a recognisable modern practice went hand in hand, and that, in general, across Europe, a new global economy marked the beginnings of science as we know it. A book of real importance for all cultural historians and historians of science of the early modern period."
—Lisa Jardine, Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, and Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary, University of London

Click here to listen to an interview with Harold Cook on the Yale Press Podcast.

Hal Cook is the Director of The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, which is "helping to promote the discipline throughout the world as making fundamental contributions to the understanding of the human condition." His other scholarly publications include The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London (Cornell University Press, 1986) and Trials of an Ordinary Doctor: Joannes Groenevelt in Seventeenth-Century London (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

Read "Medicine, Materialism, Globalism: The Example of the Dutch Golden Age," Cook's Professorial inaugural lecture, UCL (2003).

The Page 69 Test: Matters of Exchange.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Rhythm of the Road," the movie

At My Book, The Movie, Albyn Leah Hall shares some ideas about the casting for a film adaptation of her latest novel, The Rhythm of the Road.

The story is a "road novel and psychological thriller," according to the author:

The Rhythm of the Road is the story of Josephine, an English truck driver’s daughter, who spends her childhood in her father’s truck. Together with her Irish father, the sweetly depressive Bobby Pickering, Josephine lives out an ersatz version of the American dream, obsessively listening to country music while traveling the English motorways. Josephine and Bobby can’t believe their luck when Cosima Stewart, a beautiful country singer from Texas, hitches a lift with them. As Cosima’s career begins to rise, they become her biggest fans. This is harmless enough until Bobby, already a tormented and fragile soul, disappears on an overnight ferry to Dublin. Josephine, now a teenager and in denial about her father’s disappearance, manically pursues Cosima, conjuring a friendship that does not exist and even following her to California.

Read on to see who the author would have portraying her characters.

Among the praise for the novel:

"One of those rare literary novels-a fascinating story that keeps you gripped to the end, written in some of the finest prose I have read in a long time. It explores the themes of love, loss, grief, and eventual redemption with sparkling prose that is often funny and sometimes frighteningly chilling. A tender and compelling read!"
--Andrea Levy, author of the Orange Prize-winning novel, Small Island

"A stunning novel, a story of obsession and loss played out in the consciousness of a desperate and engaging young woman who was born on the move. Hall has powerful gifts of observation and sensitivity. She renders complex characters in sudden, deft strokes and unfolds with marvelous authority a vivid, funny, touching, and suspenseful world of wonders. I couldn't put this book down."
--Valerie Martin, author of the Orange Prize-winning novel Property, Italian Fever, and The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories

"I have not stopped thinking about Hall's beautiful and engrossing novel. Her chronicle of a young woman's descent into madness is so rich in compassion and so believable, it should be required reading."
--Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha

Read an excerpt from The Rhythm of the Road and learn more about Albyn Leah Hall's writing at her website.

My Book, The Movie: The Rhythm of the Road.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Tim Harford reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read is Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, Why the Poor Are Poor -- And Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car!.

His entry opens:

For the past few months I've been mixing business and pleasure. As I work on my new book, so have been studying research from some great economists young and old: Thomas Schelling, Michael Kremer, Gary Becker, Steve Levitt, Ed Glaeser, Roland Fryer, Daron Acemoglu and many others. Schelling's books are particularly accessible to a general audience: I strongly recommend Micromotives and Macrobehavior and Choice and Consequence.

Since Schelling is the unofficial favorite Nobel Laureate of the Campaign for the American Reader, Harford's recommendation was especially well-taken here.

Harford went on to name a few books about poker and "Prisoner's Dilemma, the biography of John von Neumann that got [him] thinking about the relationship between poker and economics."

He also mentioned "The Soulful Science and More Sex is Safer Sex, both of which are new appearances from famliar economics writers, Diane Coyle and Steve Landsburg," and both of which are in the Page 69 Test Series ... as is The Undercover Economist.

The Undercover Economist is now available in a paperback edition.

Jagdish Bhagwati, Professor of Economics at Columbia University and author of In Defense of Globalization, is among the eminent economists who have praised the book: "If you need to be convinced of the ever-relevant and fascinating nature of economics, read this insightful and witty book by Tim Harford. Using one interesting example after another, The Undercover Economist demonstrates how economic reasoning -- often esoteric and dull, but totally accessible in Harford's hands -- helps illuminate the world around us. Indeed, Harford's book is a tour de force."

The Page 69 Test: The Undercover Economist.

Writers Read: Tim Harford.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Daria Snadowsky's "Anatomy of a Boyfriend"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Daria Snadowsky's debut YA novel, Anatomy of a Boyfriend.

About the book, from the publisher:

Before this all happened, the closest I'd ever come to getting physical with a guy was playing the board game Operation. Okay, so maybe that sounds pathetic, but it's not like there were any guys at my high school who I cared to share more than three words with, let alone my body.

Then I met Wes, a track star senior from across town. Maybe it was his soulful blue eyes, or maybe my hormones just started raging. Either way, I was hooked. And after a while, he was too. I couldn't believe how intense my feelings became, or the fact that I was seeing — and touching — parts of the body I'd only read about in my Gray's Anatomy textbook. You could say Wes and I experienced a lot of firsts together that spring. It was scary. It was fun. It was love.

And then came the fall.

Among the praise for Anatomy of a Boyfriend:

This frank depiction of a teen's first sexual relationship will cause some eyebrows to rise and some faces to blush, but that won't keep most readers from eagerly turning pages to find out if heroine Dominique Baylor will lose her virginity to her boyfriend. Boldly tackling such topics as masturbation, orgasm and oral sex, first-time novelist Snadowsky confidently marches where few YA writers have dared to tread . . . her witty, first-person narrative and humorous accounts of all-too-familiar situations come off as genuine. Dom, a klutzy, lovable high-school senior, meets her first love at a football game at the most unromantic of moments, when she slips on the wet grass on her way to the Porta-Potty. A “blue-eyed boy,” whom she discovers is named Wesley Gershwin, helps her up. After e-mailing each other a few times, the two begin to date ... Dom considers changing her college plans to stay close to Wes ... this romance offers some insight into a girl’s new-found sexuality....
--Publishers Weekly

In this sexually explicit exploration of first love in the tradition of Judy Blume -- to whom this is dedicated -- 17-year-old Dominique falls hard for handsome track star Wes, a shy boy who clearly likes her but makes no romantic moves. At last, the ice breaks and the two teens embark on their first awkward sexual experiences. When they separate as they leave for different universities, suspense ensues as readers wonder if they will succeed. In her debut, Snadowsky describes the sex realistically, without embarrassment or prurience ... Snadowsky's narrative easily holds the reader's interest with well-drawn, realistic characters, flowing prose, dialogue and emails. Highly reminiscent of Blume's Forever....
--Kirkus

[An] honest look[] at how to navigate complicated and confusing times. "Anatomy of a Boyfriend" starts with the tried-and-true teen-lit girl tropes. The main character, Dominique Baylor, is rather average. She's a virgin high school senior with a more experienced best friend, Amy, who is always egging her on to show more initiative with boys. She has a good relationship with her parents, and she wants to be a doctor. Enter Wes. He's like the female [sic] version of Dom -- a perfectly socially acceptable guy who has very little experience with girls. Their courtship rings true; many false starts and long e-mails and confusion about what kind of relationship they're getting into precede the lusty high school romance. They swoon over each other in a way that is both sweet and cringe-worthy. They are each other's firsts -- first boyfriend, first lover. They have first fights and then first makeup make-outs after the fight. First-time author Snadowsky does a good job of rendering all these emotions while keeping the plot chugging along. Sometimes her descriptions of sex sound slightly clinical, but they are also real ... But going off to college proves to be a whole new ballgame. By extending the story beyond prom night, Snadowsky complicates the rather simple girl-snags-first-boyfriend tale ... it's a promising debut ... it posits thoughtful questions about what happens after you've achieved that teenage dream, the acquisition of a boyfriend, and the dream loses its luster.
--Reyhan Harmanci, San Francisco Chronicle

Visit Daria Snadowsky's website, MySpace page, and LiveJournal page.

The Random House website for Anatomy of a Boyfriend hosts a "build your own (ex)boyfriend" game.

Read an excerpt from Anatomy of a Boyfriend.

The Page 69 Test: Daria Snadowsky's Anatomy of a Boyfriend.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: "Everything Is Miscellaneous"

The new feature at the Page 99 Test: David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.

About the book, from the publisher:

Human beings are information omnivores: we are constantly collecting, labeling, and organizing data. But today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place — the physical world demanded it — but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Simply put, everything is suddenly miscellaneous.

In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. In his rollicking tour of the rise of the miscellaneous, he examines why the Dewey decimal system is stretched to the breaking point, how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your children’s teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future in virtually every industry. Finally, he shows how by “going miscellaneous,” anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life.

From A to Z, Everything Is Miscellaneous will completely reshape the way you think — and what you know — about the world.

Among the early praise for the book:

"The world is messy, like it or not, and it's only going to get messier as the Web destroys rules and rule-makers. You can either complain about the chaos and wish for the good old days of order, or you can buy this book and understand why delirious disorder will soon make us all smarter."
—Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail

"David Weinberger attacks the complexity of the real world, not by making it simple, but by making it clear. Once he explains how things can be in more than one place at a time — and make sense — you'll never look at a humble index card the same way again."
—Esther Dyson

"From how information is organised, to the nature of knowledge and how meaning is determined, this book is a profound contribution to understanding the impact of the digital revolution."
—Richard Sambrook, director, BBC Global News

“Everything Is Miscellaneous is a rare and mesmerizing mix: one the one hand, it's an essential guide to latest information age trends, one that will be extremely useful for businesses and consumers alike. But the book is much more than that as well: it's a probing and profound exploration of how we create meaning in the world.”
—Steven Johnson, author of The Ghost Map and Everything Bad Is Good For You

"Just when I thought I understood the world, David Weinberger turns it upside down -- and rightside up -- again. Everything Is Miscellaneous explains the radical changes happening in digital information--and therefore in society as a whole."

—Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and chair, Wikia.com

David Weinberger is the co-author of the international bestseller The Cluetrain Manifesto and the author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined. A fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, Weinberger writes for such publications as Wired, The New York Times, Smithsonian, and the Harvard Business Review and is a frequent commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered. In 1994, he founded Evident Marketing, a strategic marketing firm on technology issues, and he served as the senior Internet adviser to the Howard Dean campaign.

Read an excerpt from Everything Is Miscellaneous, and visit the Everything Is Miscellaneous website.

The Page 99 Test: Everything Is Miscellaneous.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "The Faithful Spy"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Alex Berenson's The Faithful Spy.

About the novel, from the publisher:

John Wells is the only American CIA agent ever to penetrate al Qaeda. Since before the attacks in 2001, Wells has been hiding in the mountains of Pakistan, biding his time, building his cover. Now, on the orders of Omar Khadri – the malicious mastermind plotting more al Qaeda strikes on America – Wells is coming home. Neither Khadri nor Jennifer Exley, Wells’s superior at Langley, knows quite what to expect.

For Wells has changed during his years in the mountains. He has become a Muslim. He finds the United States decadent and shallow. Yet he hates al Qaeda and the way it uses Islam to justify its murderous assaults on innocents. He is a man alone, and the CIA – still reeling from its failure to predict 9/11 or find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq–does not know whether to trust him. Among his handlers at Langley, only Exley believes in him, and even she sometimes wonders. And so the agency freezes Wells out, preferring to rely on high-tech means for gathering intelligence.

But as that strategy fails and Khadri moves closer to unleashing the most devastating terrorist attack in history, Wells and Exley must somehow find a way to stop him, with or without the government’s consent.

From secret American military bases where suspects are held and “interrogated” to basement laboratories where al Qaeda’s scientists grow the deadliest of biological weapons, The Faithful Spy is a riveting and cautionary tale, as affecting in its personal stories as it is sophisticated in its political details. The first spy thriller to grapple squarely with the complexities and terrors of today’s world, this is a uniquely exciting and unnerving novel by an author who truly knows his territory.

Among the reviews of The Faithful Spy:

"The Faithful Spy offers a well-informed, often chilling look at how al-Qaeda might launch a major new attack in the United States.... [A] first-rate thriller."
--Patrick Anderson, Washington Post

"A well-crafted page-turner that addresses the most important issue of our time. It will keep you reading well into the night."
--Vince Flynn

"Berenson, who has a superb eye for the telling detail, is excellent at describing Wells's relations with his new chums in Afghanistan as well as battle scenes."
--Jacob Heilbrunn, New York Times Book Review

"The plotting is superlative, baffling readers and characters alike.... [O]ne could hardly ask for a more skillful, timely, and well-rounded translation of our worst fears into satisfying thrills; a sure bet for fans of Jack Higgins and Vince Flynn."
--Booklist (starred Review)

Alex Berenson is a reporter for the New York Times who has covered topics ranging from the occupation of Iraq to the flooding of New Orleans.

The Page 69 Test: Alex Berenson's The Faithful Spy.

--Marshal Zeringue

A top 10 list of books about wine

At the Guardian, London lawyer turned wine professional Jamie Ivey lists his top 10 books about wine.

Ivey's introduction to the list:

"Drinking wine is fun and reading about it should be as well. This selection might not please the purist, but it's as varied as a good cellar, with authors ranging from a 12th-century Persian poet to a Hollywood scriptwriter, and whether it's by a pool with a glass of rosé or curled on the couch with some warming rioja, the books below are the perfect accompaniment to your favourite tipple."

The title by the Persian poet:

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam translated by Edward Fitzgerald

And to finish, classic ancient Persian verse devoted to the love of wine.

"And much as Wine has play'd the Infidel
And robb'd me of my Robe of Honour -
Well, I often wonder what the Vintners buy
One half so precious as the Goods they sell."

Read about the book by the screenwriter.

Learn more about Ivey's book, Extremely Pale Rosé.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Donna Moore reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Donna Moore, author of …Go To Helena Handbasket.

She writes:

I love books which are dark, warped, nasty and funny. If I can get all those in one book then I'm as happy as Larry (that's Larry the dark, warped, nasty person your mother warned you about by the way).

Moore's recent reading list had several titles that fit the bill, including one with a masturbating hamster. Read all about it.

The Page 69 Test: …Go To Helena Handbasket.

Writers Read: Donna Moore.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Daniel Tobin's "The Narrows"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Daniel Tobin's The Narrows.

The Narrows is Tobin's third book of poetry.

Among the praise for The Narrows:

The Narrows is a prodigious feat of raw, physical, moral, psychic and literary energy in which Daniel Tobin recounts the many-sided history of his family. Conceived around the oldest theme in Irish literature, the dinnseanchas or lore of place poem, the poems in this collection range back and forth between the West of Ireland and New World Brooklyn. Tobin’s intention is to locate the narrative of family within the larger contexts of history, diasporic and literary, and to explore the small triumphs and great heartaches at the heart of family life. Passionate, complex, and original, The Narrows marks Tobin as one of the best poets of his generation. The Robert Lowell Irish America has been waiting for has arrived.
—Eamonn Wall

Written for the most part in a sinewy, richly textured blank verse, The Narrows is part family history and part bildungsroman bearing enough psychic weight to break the back of most poets, though Daniel Tobin succeeds in crafting a poem possessed of both narrative power and astonishing lyric depth and grace. All stories of arrival and survival in America are the American story, but rarely are they told as compellingly as this one.
—B.H. Fairchild

Daniel Tobin is the author of three books of poems, Where the World is Made, Double Life, and The Narrows, a book of criticism, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, as well as numerous essays on poetry. His poems have appeared widely in such journals as The Nation, The Paris Review, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The Southern Review, and The Times Literary Supplement, and have been anthologized in Hammer and Blaze, The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, and elsewhere. Among his awards are a “Discovery” / The Nation Award, the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, The Greensboro Review Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is Chair of the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston.

Read a few poems from The Narrows.

The Page 69 Test: Daniel Tobin's The Narrows.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Charles Tilly's "Why?"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Charles Tilly's Why?

About the book, from the publisher:

Why? is a book about the explanations we give and how we give them -- a fascinating look at the way the reasons we offer every day are dictated by, and help constitute, social relationships. Written in an easy-to-read style by distinguished social historian Charles Tilly, the book explores the manner in which people claim, establish, negotiate, repair, rework, or terminate relations with others through the reasons they give.

Tilly examines a number of different types of reason giving. For example, he shows how an air traffic controller would explain the near miss of two aircraft in several different ways, depending upon the intended audience: for an acquaintance at a cocktail party, he might shrug it off by saying "This happens all the time," or offer a chatty, colloquial rendition of what transpired; for a colleague at work, he would venture a longer, more technical explanation, and for a formal report for his division head he would provide an exhaustive, detailed account.

Tilly demonstrates that reasons fall into four different categories:

· Convention: "I'm sorry I spilled my coffee; I'm such a klutz."
· Narratives: "My friend betrayed me because she was jealous of my sister."
· Technical cause-effect accounts: "A short circuit in the ignition system caused the engine rotors to fail."
· Codes or workplace jargon: "We can't turn over the records. We're bound by statute 369."

Tilly illustrates his topic by showing how a variety of people gave reasons for the 9/11 attacks. He also demonstrates how those who work with one sort of reason frequently convert it into another sort. For example, a doctor might understand an illness using the technical language of biochemistry, but explain it to his patient, who knows nothing of biochemistry, by using conventions and stories.

Replete with sparkling anecdotes about everyday social experiences (including the author's own), Why? makes the case for stories as one of the great human inventions.

Among the reviews and endorsements for Why?:

"[Charles Tilly] argues convincingly that reason-giving always takes place in a social setting structured by the social relations of the persons in that setting. This [book is] eminently readable and interesting."
--Leon H. Brody, Library Journal

"We need to impose order on chaos, not by disregarding complicated realities, but by understanding what those complicated realities mean for us. Why? is a stimulating contribution to our thinking about this problem."
--Dolan Cummings, Culture Wars

"Tilly gives us ... a good read, a book that calls our attention to a prevalent human phenomenon and raises the importance of investigating its nature.... The book also suggests that we sit down and begin to examine the nature of reason giving in our society -- why we spend so much of our time doing it, what effect it has on our social relations, and ... what effect it has on our own behavior and emotions."
--Kurt Salzinger, PsycCritiques

"Readers will find this book stimulating, amusing, enlightening, and engaging. The veteran analyst of political conflict and change has shifted the scale and style of his analysis once again. The result is a tour de force."
--Viviana Zelizer, Princeton University

"Impressive in scope and ambition, in the breadth of knowledge from which it draws, in its shrewd and careful use of Tilly's own experiences in public and scholarly life as well as in illness, in its acute observations in the materials it uses, and not least in the clear non-technical prose in which everything is presented."
--Howard S. Becker, author of Tricks of the Trade

Charles Tilly is Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. His work focuses on large-scale social change and its relationship to contentious politics, especially in Europe, since 1500. His most recent books include The Politics of Collective Violence; Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650-2000; Social Movements, 1768-2004; Economic and Political Contention in Comparative Perspective, coedited with Maria Kousis; Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties; and Trust and Rule.

The Page 99 Test: Charles Tilly's Why?.

--Marshal Zeringue

Best books about powerful women

Harriet Rubin compiled the latest list in the Opinion Journal's "five best" series. Her topic: powerful women.

The book about the oldest subject on the list:

Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings by Amy Kelly

Sallie Krawcheck, Citigroup's chief financial officer, has said that she avoids autopsying "dead queens" for leadership lessons. She should make an exception for Eleanor, the 12th-century powerhouse. Opposing the passions of her husband, Louis VII, for crusades, Eleanor fashioned her own philosophy and power base -- the court of love. Laws were written in verse; crimes against love were punished by prison. It is like biting into a ripe peach to read Amy Kelly's impeccable account of how Eleanor wedded love and policy. "Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings" is a scholarly work that unfolds like a romance, because that's how Eleanor lived her life. Her court became an alternative culture that succeeded in drawing "men from the excitements of the hunt and war to feminine society and female majesty." The "four kings" of the book's title refer to Eleanor's two husbands -- the second, after an annulment, was England's Henry II--and two of her sons. But challenging established power was Eleanor's legacy--a worthy lesson for any modern queen.

Another Eleanor made the list: read about it at Lit Lists.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Charity Girl," the movie

Who would you cast as the two leads in a film adaptation of Michael Lowenthal's Charity Girl?

Here's how the author describes the characters:

Frieda is a bundle wrapper at the old Jordan Marsh department store (it's Boston, 1918) who gets caught up the U.S. government's World War I anti-vice campaign and incarcerated (as were 15,000 such women) for the “crime” of having venereal disease. When pressed to, I described her in the novel as being (in contrast to the refined girls in her magazine pinups) “the raw, unmilled grain: brown hair that ripened in the sun with red highlights, cheeks that went to freckles after June.” She's seventeen years old, the daughter of Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Russia.

Felix, the soldier Frieda falls for, is “tall and fidget-thin, with forceful features and an agitated poise. His uniform, a quarter-inch short at every cuff, made her think of bursting seams, magic beanstalks.”

Read what Lowenthal wrote about a possible adaptation of the novel at My Book, The Movie.

Visit Lowenthal's website.

The Page 69 Test: Charity Girl.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Angus McLaren's "Impotence"

At the Page 69 Test: Angus McLaren's Impotence: A Cultural History.

About the book, from the publisher:

As anyone who has watched television in recent years can attest, we live in the age of Viagra. From Bob Dole to Mike Ditka to late-night comedians, our culture has been engaged in one long, frank, and very public talk about impotence — and our newfound pharmaceutical solutions. But as Angus McLaren shows us in Impotence, the first cultural history of the subject, the failure of men to rise to the occasion has been a recurrent topic since the dawn of human culture.

Drawing on a dazzling range of sources from across centuries, McLaren demonstrates how male sexuality was constructed around the idea of potency, from times past when it was essential for the purpose of siring children, to today, when successful sex is viewed as a component of a healthy emotional life. Along the way, Impotence enlightens and fascinates with tales of sexual failure and its remedies — for example, had Ditka lived in ancient Mesopotamia, he might have recited spells while eating roots and plants rather than pills — and explanations, which over the years have included witchcraft, shell-shock, masturbation, feminism, and the Oedipal complex. McLaren also explores the surprising political and social effects of impotence, from the revolutionary unrest fueled by Louis XVI’s failure to consummate his marriage to the boost given the fledgling American republic by George Washington’s failure to found a dynasty. Each age, McLaren shows, turns impotence to its own purposes, using it to help define what is normal and healthy for men, their relationships, and society.

From marriage manuals to metrosexuals, from Renaissance Italy to Hollywood movies, Impotence is a serious but highly entertaining examination of a problem that humanity has simultaneously regarded as life’s greatest tragedy and its greatest joke.

Among the praise for Impotence:

An "erudite, entertaining, and insightful study of what's now been medicalized as 'erectile dysfunction.'"
--Nick Gillespie, editor-in-chief, Reason

“In this fascinating book, Angus McLaren gives us the first cultural history of impotence, exploring the many discussions, rumors, and controversies played out on the public stage throughout the centuries — from the days of Plato up to the present. This is a terrific book. ”
--Dr. Ruth Westheimer

“Men have been complaining about failed erections ever since Ovid, but as McLaren shows, their significance, and with it our conceptions of masculinity, have changed over the centuries…. This [is a] lively history.”
--Publishers Weekly

"Once seen mainly as a function of siring children, [male sexual potency] is now regarded as an important component of a healthy emotional state. McLaren offers a dynamic survey of masculinity, perceptions of impotence, and the never-ending search for help with male sexual dysfunction. He starts with the Greek and Roman view of male potency, then moves to the understanding of impotence during the early Christian era, the Age of Reason, the 19th century, the Freudian era, and the rise of modern medical research as exemplified by the famous Kinsey and Masters and Johnson studies. The author ends with a timely, thoughtful analysis of the contemporary approach, driven by major drug companies."
--Library Journal

Angus McLaren is a professor of history at the University of Victoria. His many other scholarly works include: Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History (Harvard University Press, 2002); Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945 ( Oxford University Press, 1997); A Prescription for Murder: The Victorian Serial Killings of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream (University of Chicago Press, 1993); The Trials of Masculinity: Studies in the Policing of Sexual Boundaries, 1870-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 1997); and Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History (Blackwell, 1999).

Visit the publisher's page for Impotence and read excerpts from Impotence and view a 1920s advertisement for the The Vital Power Vacuum Massager.

The Page 69 Test: Impotence.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Lippman's most important books

Laura Lippman told Newsweek about her five most important books.

And two books that are not so important to her:

A classic that, on rereading, disappointed:

The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger. As an adult, I have no use for it.

A Certified Important Book you haven't read:

Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. It was one of only three novels I packed for a three-month fellowship in Mexico. I don't think I ever got past page three.

Lippman described Number One on her list:

I began reading this at 12 because I had inferred that it was very dirty. I think I was 19 by the time I identified the dirty parts, and by then I no longer cared. My favorite novel, hands down.

Try to guess the title before reading more about Lippman's list at Lit Lists.

Laura Lippman's most recent novel, What the Dead Know, is enjoying terrific reviews.

The Page 69 Test: What the Dead Know.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Marc Acito reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Marc Acito, author of How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater.

He writes:

I like funny books. There, I’ve said it. Call me a lightweight. (Please. I’ve been on a diet since I was fourteen.)

And, contrary to the paleolithic opinion of Christopher Hitchens in the January Vanity Fair, I find women to be very funny indeed. Lately, in fact, I find myself positively swimming in a sea of estrogen. In quick succession, I’ve devoured three terrific titles: [read about Acito's picks]

But why female writers?

I think it’s because, more often than comic male writers, they not only tickle the funny bone, but they tap an emotional vein. In my reading, I look for writers who achieve what I strive (and strive some more) to do myself — make readers laugh, make them cry, and make them think.

Visit Marc Acito's website and read an excerpt from How I Paid for College.

Check out Acito's five favorite authors.

The Page 99 Test: How I Paid for College.

Writers Read: Marc Acito.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: "The Radical and the Republican"

At the Page 99 Test: James Oakes's The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery.

About the book, from the publisher:

A major history of Civil War America through the lens of its two towering figures: Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

“My husband considered you a dear friend,” Mary Todd Lincoln wrote to Frederick Douglass in the weeks after Lincoln’s assassination. The frontier lawyer and the former slave, the cautious politician and the fiery reformer, the president and the most famous black man in America—their lives traced different paths that finally met in the bloody landscape of secession, Civil War, and emancipation. Opponents at first, they gradually became allies, each influenced by and attracted to the other. Their three meetings in the White House signaled a profound shift in the direction of the Civil War, and in the fate of the United States. In this first book to draw the two together, James Oakes has written a masterful narrative history. He brings these two iconic figures to life and sheds new light on the central issues of slavery, race, and equality in Civil War America.

Among the praise for The Radical and the Republican:

The perennial tension between principle and pragmatism in politics frames this engaging account of two Civil War Era icons. Historian Oakes (Slavery and Freedom) charts the course by which Douglass and Lincoln, initially far apart on the antislavery spectrum, gravitated toward each other. Lincoln began as a moderate who advocated banning slavery in the territories while tolerating it in the South, rejected social equality for blacks and wanted to send freedmen overseas—and wound up abolishing slavery outright and increasingly supporting black voting rights. Conversely, the abolitionist firebrand Douglass moved from an impatient, self-marginalizing moral rectitude to a recognition of compromise, coalition building and incremental goals as necessary steps forward in a democracy. Douglass's views on race were essentially modern; the book is really a study through his eyes of the more complex figure of Lincoln. Oakes lucidly explores how political realities and military necessity influenced Lincoln's tortuous path to emancipation, and asks whether his often bigoted pronouncements represented real conviction or strategic concessions to white racism. As Douglass shifts from denouncing Lincoln's foot-dragging to revering his achievements, Oakes vividly conveys both the immense distance America traveled to arrive at a more enlightened place and the fraught politics that brought it there.
--Publishers Weekly

[A]n eye-opening and absorbing account of [Lincoln and Douglass's] relationship.... [T]he book succeeds quite well at charting the ups and downs of a complex and seminal relationship between two great men, both dedicated to making America live up to its loftiest ideals.
--Chuck Leddy, Christian Science Monitor

[A]n astute and polished study...
--James M. McPherson, New York Review of Books

James Oakes is professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His other books include Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (1990) and
The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (1982, 1998).

The Page 99 Test: The Radical and the Republican.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Tara Ison's "The List"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Tara Ison's The List.

About the book, from the publisher:

The List is an irreverent, sophisticated take on the classic breakup story. In fierce and exquisite prose, Tara Ison has written an astonishing story of love and hate.

Isabel is finishing medical school and destined to become a brilliant heart surgeon. Al is a video store clerk, a one-hit-wonder director whose first and only film became a cult classic. Their electric, passionate, and deeply maddening relationship can't possibly work. Tired of endlessly coming together and breaking up, they make a list of ten things to do before they finally say good-bye. But after a few perfect dates the list takes a dark turn, and their plan spirals out of control as they realize they would rather destroy each other than let go.

Among the praise for The List:

"The List is both wise and wicked about love: why it lasts or doesn't, and what's to be done about it. Tara Ison limns her characters' choices with dark precision and wit."
— Meg Wolitzer, author of The Position and The Wife

"The List is visceral, honest, and intensely readable; Ison builds two complex, memorable characters, and then embraces their layers and contradictions, both alone and together."
— Aimee Bender, author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Willful Creatures

"The List is one fast-paced, word-drunk, film-obsessed, side-splitting roller-coaster: a screwball comedy, an anti-romance romance, the quintessential LA novel. Ison is some kind of genius."
— Brad Kessler, author of Birds in Fall

Visit Tara Ison's website and read an excerpt from The List.

Tara Ison's first novel, A Child out of Alcatraz, was a Finalist for the 1997 Los Angeles Times Book Awards, "Best First Fiction." Her short fiction, essays and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Nerve.com, The Mississippi Review, LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine and Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News, and numerous anthologies. She is also the co-writer of the movie Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead.

Read about her six favorite books that make the most of lists.

The Page 69 Test: Tara Ison's The List.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lore Segal's list

This week at The Week magazine, Lore Segal named The List.

One entry on it:

The Bible, Samuel 1 and 2

Read for the human drama. When God transfers his favor from King Saul to the future King David, Saul’s daughter, Michal, falls in love with David; his son Jonathan, the heir presumptive, falls in love with David; Saul himself, even God, is in love with David. Watch Saul’s lonely, terrible deterioration into murderous rage and madness.

Check out another entry on Segal's list.

Lore Segal has worked as novelist, essayist, translator, and writer of children’s books. Her novels include Other People's Houses, serialized in The New Yorker and published by Harcourt Brace in 1964, currently available from The New Press, 1994; Lucinella (FSG, 1978); and Her First American, which won an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (Knopf, 1985, The New Press, 1995).

Her new book is Shakespeare’s Kitchen.

The Page 99 Test: Lore Segal's Shakespeare's Kitchen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "Weapons of Mass Seduction"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Lori Bryant-Woolridge's Weapons of Mass Seduction.

About the book, from the publisher:

Fortysomething and still single, music-video exec Pia Jamison has given up her grandiose ideas on men and marriage but not motherhood. Her biological clock is on red alert, but after years of self-imposed celibacy she has no clue how to attract the man she needs to get the baby she wants. Help comes in the form of Pia’s savvy assistant, who tricks her boss into attending, under the guise of a business conference, a flirting workshop called Weapons of Mass Seduction. There Pia meets other women looking to amp up their amorous arsenals, including the devastated Texas belle Florence Chase, who’s trying to save her failing marriage; and Rebecca Vossel, a twenty-two-year-old small-town biracial girl who’s dying to release her inner diva.

What they learn about the art of sensuality and flirtation turns them into bona fide bombshells. The three return home, armed and deliciously dangerous, to spectacular results. Florence reunites with her husband, but the new and improved Flo must now determine if she’s staying in her marriage out of happiness or habit. The plain Jane Rebecca has transformed herself into the super-sexed “Becca,” but will she realize when she’s gone to far? And Pia is happily pregnant but unexpectedly falls in love — not with the father of her unborn child but with a sexy and very conservative candidate for the U.S. Senate.

Weapons of Mass Seduction is a fun and sexy book (think of it as a flirting workshop within a novel) that promises to unleash the sensual woman in you!

Among the early praise for the novel:

“A smart and flirty read for smart and flirty women.”
—ReShonda Tate Billingsley, author of I Know I’ve Been Changed

“Weapons of Mass Seduction tantalizes the body, mind, and spirit in a sensual page-turner every woman will understand.”
—Trisha R. Thomas, author of Nappily Ever After

Lori Bryant-Woolridge is the author of the best-selling novels, Read Between the Lies and Hitts and Mrs., and the cofounder of the Femme Fantastik Literary Tour. She is a former television executive and Emmy Award recipient.

Visit Bryant-Woolridge's website and the Weapons of Mass Seduction blog.

The Page 69 Test: Lori Bryant-Woolridge's Weapons of Mass Seduction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Stacey Richter's "Twin Study"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Stacey Richter's Twin Study.

About the story collection, from the publisher:

Cavemen roam the suburbs, morality is questionable, teens are angsting, and alcoholics abound. This is the world as Stacey Richter sees it. In spite of-or perhaps because of-this alarming cast of characters, Richter’s stories are infused with wit, humor, and keen observations of what makes humans tick. There is no sentimental hand-wringing about alcoholic or absentee parents, lost loves, or the most terrible suburban neighborhood Christmas displays. Richter’s characters live, exist, play, and often drink too much because that is simply what they do. Carrying on is the only option. Richter writes with volatile energy, hurtling through her stories while coasting seamlessly between the regular and mundane. She sees the repercussions of bad parenting, forgotten kids, and while she may scoff, her caustic observations never demean her characters. By turns heartbreaking, mirthful, sardonic, and wise, her stories occasionally take a turn into the bizarre. Still, Richter’s flights of fancy are not about whimsy or science fiction. They are one imaginative woman’s clever and naked view of the absurdities teeming around her.

Among the early praise for Twin Study:

Twelve bracingly imaginative tales from Richter (My Date with Satan) look at pairs of women (mostly) at various crisis points, small and large. The title tale follows an actualset of twins, two deeply conflicted 30-something women, who see each other for the first time in four years at a Cal State twin study. "The Long Hall" sets two rebellious daughters of a divorced alcoholic mother in Mormon Utah, where they must choose between their outrageous punk band and their growing desire to be with boys. In "Blackout," a student narrator on a spring break in Baja confesses to betraying a sorority acquaintance. "Duet" follows two gifted Juilliard musicians: one chooses marriage and mediocrity, and the other finds mastery as an artist. "The Cavemen in the Hedges" shows the sadly hilarious unraveling of an unmarried suburban couple when they come into contact, thrillingly, with a savage band of transient cavemen. Richter has a great feel for dialogue and conflict, extreme and otherwise.
--Publishers Weekly

Richter possesses a commanding grasp of narrative and human interaction, and a sharp ear for dialogue.... The collection is witty, poignant, and admirably perceptive.
--Booklist

With prose as beautiful and spiny as a flowering cactus, Richter coaxes us close enough to deliver a sting. The stories are wry and funny, reminiscent of Lorrie Moore at her snarky best.... Like Moore's characters, Richter's are trying to make a place outside the noise of commercial culture.
--Erika Schickel, Los Angeles Times

Several of the stories from Twin Study are available online.

Stacey Richter received her M.F.A. from Brown University. The author of the story collection My Date with Satan, she is a three-time Pushcart Prize winner, and has been named a Village Voice Writer on the Verge.

Visit Richter's website.

The Page 99 Test: Twin Study.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is James Marcus reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: James Marcus, author of Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot-Com Juggernaut and five translations from the Italian (the most recent being Tullio Kezich's Dino: The Life and Films of Dino De Laurentiis and Saul Steinberg's Letters to Aldo Buzzi).

He mentioned several titles that he has recently read or was reading, and wrote that he was looking forward to Elizabeth McKenzie's new novel MacGregor Tells The World.

James Marcus is a writer, translator, critic, and editor.

He has contributed to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Salon, Newsday, The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Book Review, Lingua Franca, The Nation, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and many other publications.

Marcus also writes about jazz, pop, and classical music for WBUR Online Arts.

Check out his blog, House of Mirth.

He recently reviewed Lore Segal's Shakespeare Kitchen, which is covered at the Page 99 Test this week, and Steve Geng's Thick as Thieves, about which I've recently posted a few words.

Writers Read: James Marcus.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Susan Hahn's "The Scarlet Ibis"

Today at the Page 69 Test: Susan Hahn's The Scarlet Ibis.

About the poetry collection, from the publisher:

In The Scarlet Ibis, Susan Hahn has created an intricately structured sequence of interlinked poems centered around the single compelling image of the ibis. The resonance of this image grows through each section of the book as Hahn skillfully employs theme and variation, counterpoint and mirroring techniques. The ibis first appears as part of an illusion, the disappearing object in a magician's trick, which then evokes the greatest disappearing act of all-death-where there are no tricks to bring about a reappearance. The rich complexity multiplies as the second section focuses on a disappearing lady and a dramatic final section brings together the bird and the lady in their common plight-both caged by their mortality, their assigned time and role. All of the illusions fall away during this brilliant denouement as the two voices share a dialogue on the power of metaphor as the very essence of poetry.

Among the early praise for The Scarlet Ibis:

"The sense of line is effortless, never forced, and the images come from deep in the imagination. Nothing in these poems is predictable and yet within the context of the poetic world that Hahn has created all is lucidly clear."
--Stuart Dybek

"Hahn's lustrous and spiky poems radiate from a thematic nucleus in her distinctive collections . ... [Her] quicksilver poem-play is brilliant in its misdirection, camouflaging with plumage and word magic great depths of feeling and insight."
--Booklist, starred review

"This new work by TriQuarterly editor Hahn begins and ends in the womb, its subject being the human body and its 'interior music.' By employing her musically gifted ear in various rhythmical ways, resulting in lines like 'The cradle understands its own/determination. The Heart/... forms its thump,/thump, thump announcement.' The music of such lines is so unpredictable and intense that it becomes almost the poem's meaning."
--Library Journal

Susan Hahn is a poet, playwright and the editor of TriQuarterly literary magazine. She has published six other volumes of poetry: Harriet Rubin’s Mother’s Wooden Hand (1991), Incontinence (1993), Confession (1997), Holiday (2001), Mother In Summer (2002), and Self/Pity.

The Page 69 Test: Susan Hahn's The Scarlet Ibis.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books about medicine or dissection

Sherwin B. Nuland suggests five books "about the fascinating history of medicine or of anatomical dissection" in The New Republic (free registration req.).

One title from Nuland's list:

Sherwin B. Nuland, Doctors: The Biography of Medicine

If you believe, as I do, that Thomas Carlyle was correct when he wrote, "History is the essence of numerous biographies," you'll love reading this book as much as I loved writing it. I've told the life stories of 13 eminent physicians, from Hippocrates in the classical period to Helen Taussig, who invented the blue-baby operation in the mid-twentieth century. In this way, the history of Western medicine is followed through its intellectual and literary development. The final chapter brings it all together by tracing the history of cardiac transplantation all the way from classical antiquity to its ultimate stages in the present.

Read about another title (this one not by Sherwin Nuland) on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bronte’s Egg," the movie

At "My Book, The Movie," science fiction writer and poet Richard Chwedyk shares some ideas on the casting of a film adaptation of his Nebula Award-winning novella, "Bronte's Egg." The basics, from the author:

My best-known work is the novella "Bronte's Egg," a story that takes place in a kind of rescue mission for genetically engineered toys that look like small versions of dinosaurs, called "saurs." The central character is a little bundle of energy named Axel, who wakes up one morning wanting to send a message to "Space Guys," and to build a robot he's calling Rotomotoman. At the same time, an apatosaur named Bronte has produced an egg – something that bioengineered saurs are not supposed to be capable of doing. Bronte and the other saurs hope to hatch this egg, but keep it secret from "the humans." Axel's and Bronte's efforts ultimately converge. That's the story of mine that moviemakers might be most interested in, with an assist from my other saur stories "The Measure of All Things" and "In Tibor's Cardboard Castle."

Chwedyk has a long list of famous actors -- and a few fresh faces -- in mind for the cast and director.

See My Book, The Movie: "Bronte's Egg."

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Sanderson on Harlan Coben's "The Woods"

From Mark Sanderson's column in the Telegraph (U.K.):

From The Woods by Harlan Coben, published next month by Orion: 'There was an obvious magic to a college campus. There is no entity more protected, more shielded, and while it was easy to complain about that, it was also how it should be. Some things grow better in a vacuum. It was a place to feel safe when you're young.'

In the light of events at Virginia Tech perhaps these lines will be removed from the paperback edition.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Lore Segal's "Shakespeare's Kitchen"

The current entry at the Page 99 Test: Lore Segal's Shakespeare's Kitchen.

About the book, from the publisher:

The thirteen interrelated stories of Shakespeare’s Kitchen concern the universal longing for friendship, how we achieve new intimacies for ourselves, and how slowly, inexplicably, we lose them. Featuring six never-before-published pieces, Lore Segal’s stunning new book evolved from seven short stories that originally appeared in the New Yorker (including the O. Henry Prize–winning “The Reverse Bug”).

Ilka Weisz has accepted a teaching position at the Concordance Institute, a think tank in Connecticut, reluctantly leaving her New York circle of friends. After the comedy of her struggle to meet new people, Ilka comes to embrace, and be embraced by, a new set of acquaintances, including the institute’s director, Leslie Shakespeare, and his wife, Eliza. Through a series of memorable dinner parties, picnics, and Sunday brunches, Segal evokes the subtle drama and humor of the outsider’s loneliness, the comfort and charm of familiar companionship, the bliss of being in love, and the strangeness of our behavior in the face of other people’s deaths.

Among the praise for Shakespeare's Kitchen:

Lore Segal is ... one of those rare people who combine art, eccentricity, honesty, and wisdom and who, by a change of tone, an altered inflection, produce such enchanting effects that the [reader] is swept along.
--Chicago Tribune

What began as seven interrelated short stories published in The New Yorker (including the O'Henry Prize-winning "The Reverse Bug") is now a full-length collection of thirteen -- the first major work of fiction in 20 years from the acclaimed author of Her First American. Filled with all the pomp and depressed glory of a modern-day Great Gatsby, each installment delivers an entertaining glimpse into the dysfunctional lives of a group of hoity-toity Connecticut think tank intellectuals as they philosophize over wine and cheese, fall in and out of love and go about their daily lives with reckless abandon. Most of the action takes place (or is retold, properly discussed and drunkenly digested) in the kitchen of the institute's director, Leslie Shakespeare, while Leslie's wife alternatively entertains and lambastes their friends. Although the plot centers on nothing more than everyday comings and goings, Segal gives readers a peek into the sausage factory of daily routine, in which humdrum-but-necessary minutia belie the intrigue and angst stirred up in her self-absorbed characters' internal monologues. When stacked together, these vignettes are hilarious and telling. Segal exhibits a rare insight into the human character that is at once humbling and shamelessly enjoyable to behold.
--Publishers Weekly, starred review

Segal is an enchanting storyteller. An old hand at dodging sentimentality — who else could have transformed her childhood expulsion from Hitler's Europe into such a dry and delightful tale, as she did in "Other People's Houses"? — she compels our attention without ever asking for it. Perhaps that is her secret: She never does ask; she maintains a dignified distance from the reader.... In any case, her oddly telescoping paragraphs are impossible to resist. We read them, we read them again, and we are reminded of Eliza's crabby comment halfway through the book: "My idea of hell is a child telling you the plot of a story." Nobody who has ever undergone such an ordeal will disagree. But my idea of heaven is a brilliant adult doing the very same thing, and that's what we get in "Shakespeare's Kitchen."
--James Marcus, Los Angeles Times

Winner of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and the Carl Sandburg Award for Fiction, Lore Segal is the author of the novels Other People’s Houses and Her First American (both available from The New Press), and several books for children.

The Page 99 Test: Lore Segal's Shakespeare's Kitchen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Katherine Min's "Secondhand World"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Katherine Min's Secondhand World.

About the book, from the publisher:

Isadora Myung Hee Sohn — Isa — worships her mother, an exceptional beauty, born in Seoul and sheltered in a harem of sisters inside the wealthy family’s compound. Isa’s father, a scientist and professor, an orphan, is haunted by the war in which he served as a South Korean soldier and by a painful secret that he keeps from his wife. Still mourning the death of Isa’s younger brother, Stephen, her parents are traditional enough to prize their dead son over their living daughter; to them, Isa only half exists.

But unlike many Asian American daughters, Isa is neither meek nor a quiet victim of tradition. Despite her parents’ success and sophistication — they’ve achieved the American dream — she repudiates their values, embarks on her own sexual education, and runs away with an albino boy, Hero. At the same time, Isa suspects that despite her mother’s strict adherence to Korean traditional values, she is involved with another man, and Isa determines to make the affair known. What begins as a child’s unthinking fury at her mother soon leads to more deadly consequences.

Among the praise for Secondhand World:

“This disquieting début novel begins like a murder mystery: in a hospital burn unit, a badly scarred eighteen-year-old flatly informs us of her parents’ death by fire. The story that follows, however, is less an investigation than an exorcism…. The writing is exquisite and exacting.”
—The New Yorker

“Min’s strengths lie in her lush writing and full development of the vibrant, complex characters… By the end of the book, readers feel as though the characters are personal friends, and are fully invested in the satisfying conclusion.”
—Sara Astruc, MSNBC.com

“In Secondhand World Katherine Min depicts with wonderful eloquence the coming of age of an unusually spirited heroine — Isadora Myung Hee Sohn — as she struggles to negotiate between her family’s Korean past and their American present. A fiercely compelling and immensely intelligent debut.”
—Margot Livesey, author of Banishing Verona

“What makes this novel so memorable — and hard to put down — is the realness and urgency of its emotion. It’s a force that commands the reader from one aching and beautifully concise chapter to the next. Secondhand World is both powerful and intimate and offers us a piercing, new view of immigrant isolation."
—John Dalton, author of Heaven Lake

“[A] haunting debut.... Swirling, textured, beautifully detailed ... Min’s rendering of an outsider family’s tight-knit alienation is spot-on.”
—Publishers Weekly

Katherine Min’s short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, and Prairie Schooner, and have been widely anthologized, most recently in The Pushcart Book of Stories: The Best Short Stories from a Quarter-Century of The Pushcart Prize. Secondhand World is her first novel.

Visit Katherine Min's website, and read an excerpt from Secondhand World.

The Page 69 Test: Katherine Min's Secondhand World.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom McCarthy's top 10 European modernists

Liesl Schillinger called Tom McCarthy's Remainder "more than an entertaining brain-teaser: it’s a work of novelistic philosophy, as disturbing as it is funny," and Jonathan Lethem said it is “A stunningly strange book about the rarest of fictional subjects, happiness.”

Before his reputation as a novelist developed, McCarthy was known for the reports, manifestos, and media interventions he made as General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network.

Over at the Guardian, he offered a list of the top 10 European modernists, with this preface:

"From time to time, Western literature undergoes an upheaval so momentous that its entire landscape is transfigured. The old order falls away, or rather is devoured and transformed by its own offspring, and the tremors carry on for decades, even centuries, with fault lines spreading out in all directions. Modernism is not a movement, nor even a way of thinking, but an event: an event with which any serious writer has, in some way or another, to engage, and to which they should respond."

Only one of McCarthy's modernists remains among us:

Alain Robbe-Grillet

The only one of my ten still alive. If proper, serious writing has to respond to the high-Modernist challenge, this guy is a writer than which they don't come more serious or proper. Architecture and technology conspire throughout his novels to produce a landscape of infinite repetition in which time and consciousness must find their troubled place. This is the landscape of modernity, and for all the utter strangeness of his stories, Robbe-Grillet is, like Kafka, fundamentally an ultra-realist.

See who tops McCarthy's list.

Check out McCarthy's response to "Deceased author I’d most like to do it with."

--Marshal Zeringue

Steve Geng's "Thick as Thieves"

I read Steve Geng's Thick as Thieves a couple of months ago and have been eagerly awaiting the reviews.

Toni Bentley got it just about right in the Sunday New York Times Book Review:

Thick as Thieves does not, to Geng’s credit, propound the false heroics of addiction and recovery so popular in the media these days. It just shows us how lies destroy love — no solutions, no wisdom…. His book, one surmises, would not make his sister [the late Veronica Geng of The New Yorker] laugh, but weep with pride at the little boy with oatmeal on his head.

Bentley also confirmed one of my thoughts about the book:

For anyone who still hasn’t reached personal closure with James “I am an Alcoholic and I am a Drug Addict and I am a Criminal” Frey and his self-aggrandizement, Geng’s memoir... is here as a reminder: addicts lie as often as they need a fix. What was so disturbing about the Frey debacle was not his deceit, but that the entire world, and Oprah Winfrey, were so surprised at his mendacity.

I enjoyed Frey's book but never bought it as factual. Geng's book also gives off a similar vibe but, unlike Frey's, there is nothing in it that doesn't, on reflection, pass the smell test: Geng's life is nothing like mine, but I do believe that many people (too many, sadly) have shared his experiences.

One thing Bentley's review gets wrong: "Geng’s narrative ... races along in tight, low-key, Elmore Leonard-like prose while he’s high, violent and angry."

"Elmore Leonard-like prose?" Oh, c'mon....

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Stephen Burt reading?

The poet and critic Stephen Burt is the current featured contributer at "Writers Read."

He owns up to reading a lot of books at once. Among the books he named: A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow by Noah Eli Gordon, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography by J. E. Malpas, and One Kind of Everything by Dan Chiasson.

And:

The Full Indian Rope Trick by Colette Bryce. Fun, emotionally rich, rhyme-wielding second collection by a poet from Ireland, living in Scotland, well-thought-of there and unknown here. Reminds me at times of Merrill, at times of Richard Wilbur, at times of Lavinia Greenlaw.

There are more titles in Burt's entry: check it out.

Stephen Burt is Associate Professor of English at Macalester College. He reviews new poetry (and books about poetry) frequently for a variety of publications in the United States and Britain, among them the New York Times Book Review, Boston Review, Poetry Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Yale Review. He has also edited for publication some posthumous writings of Randall Jarrell's, including Jarrell's lectures on W. H. Auden, which is available from Columbia University Press.

His critical study, Randall Jarrell and His Age, appeared from Columbia University Press in 2002; his book of poetry, Popular Music (CLP/Colorado) in 1999. Another book of poetry, Parallel Play, was published last year by Graywolf.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Chris Mooney's "The Missing"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Chris Mooney's The Missing.

About the book, from the publisher:

Darby McCormick had known Melanie Cruz and Stacey Stephens forever. Best friends since childhood, the threesome had survived high school together. But one night in the woods, drinking beers to celebrate Melanie's sixteenth birthday, the three unsuspecting teenagers witnessed the grisly murder of a woman. Darby and her friends fled the scene, but they left behind a clue to their whereabouts, which only simplified the killer's revenge. It didn't take long to find them. This time, only Darby survived. Twenty-five years later, Darby is a crime-scene investigator for the Boston Police Department. When a young woman is abducted from her home in the middle of the night, Darby finds an unexpected witness -- a woman dressed in rags hiding behind garbage cans kept underneath the back porch of the victim's house. The woman is dangerously malnourished and is so distraught, so terrified, she believes she is still locked inside a dark prison cell -- and that Darby is one of her fellow prisoners. Darby's investigation reveals that the woman, Rachel Swanson, has been missing for more than five years. And there are others. As Darby tries to get Rachel to talk about the other missing women and the horrors she endured, the killer known as Traveler is brought to light. As the race to find him heats up, Darby finds herself trying to unravel forensic clues about the case while attempting to uncover the existence of a killer who has eluded the police and FBI for more than two decades. A killer who, years ago, introduced Darby to violence and death. A killer who will use every means necessary to protect himself and to keep the missing women from ever being found. A breathless, gripping read from beginning to end, The Missing is an unforgettable story about a courageous woman whose past has literally come back to haunt her. Told with tremendous style at a breakneck pace, this is thriller writing at its best.

Among the praise for The Missing:

I devoured The Missing in one greedy, breathless sitting. This is a scary, breakneck ride with thrills that never let up.
—Tess Gerritsen

The Missing is the season's most unrelenting thriller. It will keep readers enthralled from its gripping opening chapters to its last shocking page.
—George Pelecanos

The smart money has long been on Chris Mooney, one of crime fiction's rising stars, and The Missing ably demonstrates why this is so. This is a page-turner written with great empathy, filled with strong, resilient characters that the reader will cheer and champion.
—Laura Lippman

A masterful thriller; dark and disturbing, with a tearing pace. Mooney writes like a man on fire.
—Linda Fairstein

The Missing is an absolutely gripping mix of suspense and mystery. Chris Mooney is a wonderful writer and in his hands this story is compelling, thrilling and touching.
—Michael Connelly

Scary story. Scary talent. I love this book.
—Lee Child

Read an excerpt from The Missing and an interview with Mooney by Ali Karim for "The Rap Sheet."

The Page 69 Test: Chris Mooney's The Missing.

--Marshal Zeringue

Naomi Wolf's list

Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, chose six recent books for The Week magazine that have had a strong impact on her.

One title on her list:

Guantánamo by Michael Ratner with Ellen Ray

I can’t say this book makes pleasant reading, but it is definitely one of the most important books on my list. Written by a leading human-rights lawyer who represents Guantánamo detainees, Guantánamo will trouble your conscience. What we are doing there to innocent people as well as to people who are guilty — both of whom should face a fair trial — is far beyond what even educated people are likely to have read about.

Read more about Wolf's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Lynn Hunt's "Inventing Human Rights"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights.

About the book, from the publisher:

How were human rights invented, and what is their turbulent history?

Human rights is a concept that only came to the forefront during the eighteenth century. When the American Declaration of Independence declared “all men are created equal” and the French proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of Man during their revolution, they were bringing a new guarantee into the world. But why then? How did such a revelation come to pass? In this extraordinary work of cultural and intellectual history, Professor Lynn Hunt grounds the creation of human rights in the changes that authors brought to literature, the rejection of torture as a means of finding out truth, and the spread of empathy. Hunt traces the amazing rise of rights, their momentous eclipse in the nineteenth century, and their culmination as a principle with the United Nations’s proclamation in 1948. She finishes this work for our time with a diagnosis of the state of human rights today.

Among the praise for Inventing Human Rights:

"[An] exemplary book...."
--Gary J. Bass, The New Republic

"[I]n this remarkable little book ... [Hunt] covers so much ground in so few pages and with such clarity, Inventing Human Rights is a tour de force of compression."
--Gordon Wood, New York Times

"[W]hy and when did we ever start to think that human beings were universally equal, let alone obviously so? Lynn Hunt's elegant Inventing Human Rights offers lucid and original answers."
--Maya Jasanoff, Washington Post

"[A] lively and informative history of human rights...."
--Joshua Muravchik, Wall Street Journal

Read more about Inventing Human Rights at the publisher's website.

Lynn Hunt is a former president of the American Historical Association and the Eugen Weber professor of modern European history at UCLA, and the author of Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution and coauthor of Telling the Truth About History.

The Page 69 Test: Inventing Human Rights.

--Marshal Zeringue

Agatha Award winners

Jeff Pierce of "The Rap Sheet" has reported the winners of the 2007 Agatha Awards.

Best First Novel went to The Heat of the Moon, by Sandra Parshall.

Read the Page 69 Test entry for Parshall's Disturbing the Dead.

The Best Novel award went to The Virgin of Small Plains, by Nancy Pickard.

Read about all the winners and the nominees.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: "Love and Other Near-Death Experiences"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Mil Millington's Love and Other Near-Death Experiences.

About the book, from the publisher:

Hello. My name is Robert, and I haven’t been dead for sixty-three days now.

If he hadn’t bought those crummy towels, Rob would be six feet under. But his poor shopping sense accidentally set off a convoluted chain of events that meant he lived when all those others died in the pub explosion. Okay, maybe it wasn’t the ugly towels that saved his life. Perhaps it was some other random action, some other small movement that was the utterly trivial yet vitally important factor. And that’s the real problem.

Now, with his wedding fast approaching, Rob suddenly finds himself paralyzed with indecision–about Every. Little. Thing. He just can't be sure which seemingly innocuous choice will mean the difference between life and death: Should he wash the fork or the knife first? Should he step out of the shower with his left leg or his right leg? Red sweater or blue? One thing is certain: His fiancée, Jo, is at her wits’ end.

To save his relationship and his sanity, Rob embarks on a quest to find out why he’s still breathing. When he meets up with others who have had similar lifesaving near misses, he figures the answer must be close. But fate may just catch them yet, for Rob’s search to understand why he’s still alive might well turn out to be the very thing that kills them all.

Filled with the barbed and sparkling dialogue that made Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About a cult hit, Mil Millington’s Love and Other Near-Death Experiences is a hilarious existential romantic comedy about second guesses and second chances.

Among the praise for the novel:

"If there is a male Bridget Jones, bringing intimate dispatches from the other side of the sex divide, it is Mil Millington.... He is horribly accurate and highly amusing about the nuts and bolts of modern relationships.... Hilarious."
--Kate Saunders, (London) Times

"'Mil Millington ... is sharp and witty and bright as a button."
--Wiliam Leith, Daily Telegraph

"Love and Other Near-Death Experiences really is laugh out loud funny.... Millington has come up with an ingenious and ... wholly original premise - the kind of premise that the aforementioned 99 per cent of comic novelists would walk barefoot across hot coals to have dreamt up."
--Roger Cox, The Scotsman

Read an excerpt from Love and Other Near-Death Experiences.

Mil Millington has written for various magazines, radio, and the Guardian (he also had a weekly column in the Guardian Weekend magazine). His website has achieved cult status, and he is also a co-founder and co-writer of the online magazine The Weekly. His other novels include A Certain Chemistry and Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About.

The Page 99 Test: Love and Other Near-Death Experiences

--Marshal Zeringue

Important books: Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe recently talked to Newsweek about books that were important to him.

The dialogue included:

An Important Book you haven't read:

There are lots of those. Many books are easier to praise than they are to read. James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is one of those.

The book I'd most want my kids to read:

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber. He wrote about status groups. I don't really expect my kids to read it, but I wish they would.

Read about the book that gave Wolfe "the idea for how to write The Bonfire of the Vanities."

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Ruth Scurr reading?

The scholar and literary critic Ruth Scurr is the latest contributor to the "Writers Read" series.

Her own book is a work of nonfiction -- the highly acclaimed Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution -- yet her current reading is all fiction: she's a judge for the 2007 Man Booker Prize.

Read about a few of the 120 novels that she will have evaluated before the end of summer.

--Marshal Zeringue

“People Die,” the movie

I asked Kevin Wignall about possible film adaptations of his novels. Here's part of his reply:

Both my last book, For the Dogs, and my forthcoming book, Who is Conrad Hirst?, have been optioned for film so I know better than to even dream of them actually becoming movies, let alone who I’d like to see cast in them.

People Die, my first novel, is actually the book that’s had the most film interest over the years but it’s the one that still hasn’t been optioned, in part because of plot problems. When the director Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break, Near Dark) wanted to adapt it, nearly all of the discussions we had were about how to remove the second half of the plot.

Subsequently, a producer from Marc Platt’s (Wicked) company wanted to concentrate on the second half of the plot and remove the first section. So it was always about plotting – at no point were there ever concerns about casting.

JJ, the central character, is a thirty year old government hitman – charming, intelligent, very aware of the impact of what he’s doing but completely capable of detaching himself in the crucial moment. When he becomes a target of his own organization he has to befriend the family of one of his victims to get to the bottom of why he’s wanted dead.

Lots of names were mentioned as a potential JJ ....

Click over to "My Book, The Movie" to see which actors were considered and who still has a chance to grab this choice role.

Visit Kevin Wignall's website to learn about his books and stories, and check out his posts at the group blog "Contemporary Nomad."

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability"

"[P]age 69 is actually the most striking, as well as perhaps the most disquieting, of the entire book," writes Gowan Dawson in today's entry at the Page 69 Test: Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability.

About the book, from the publisher:

The success of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theories in mid-nineteenth-century Britain has long been attributed, in part, to his own adherence to strict standards of Victorian respectability, especially in regard to sex. Gowan Dawson contends that the fashioning of such respectability was by no means straightforward or unproblematic, with Darwin and his principal supporters facing surprisingly numerous and enduring accusations of encouraging sexual impropriety. Integrating contextual approaches to the history of science with recent work in literary studies, Dawson sheds new light on the well-known debates over evolution by examining them in relation to the murky underworlds of Victorian pornography, sexual innuendo, unrespectable freethought and artistic sensualism. Such disreputable and generally overlooked aspects of nineteenth-century culture were actually remarkably central to many of these controversies. Focusing particularly on aesthetic literature and new legal definitions of obscenity, Dawson reveals the underlying tensions between Darwin's theories and conventional notions of Victorian respectability.

• An innovative new interpretation of Victorian attitudes to Darwin and his theories

• Uses an interdisciplinary approach and many unpublished sources

• Reveals a surprising new context for the many cartoons depicting Darwin, eight of which are included

Among the advance press for Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability:

"Dawson shows in wonderful detail how the very shape of Darwin's theory was affected by his sensitivity to public opinion and by his abiding desire for respectability."
--George Levine, author of Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World

Read an excerpt from Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability at the Cambridge University Press website.

Gowan Dawson's other publications include, (co-author) Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and (co-editor) Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media (Ashgate, 2004). Learn more about Dr. Dawson's other published scholarship and research activities.

The Page 69 Test: Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Viviana Zelizer's "The Purchase of Intimacy"

This weekend's feature at the Page 99 Test: Viviana Zelizer's The Purchase of Intimacy.

About the book, from the publisher:

In their personal lives, people consider it essential to separate economics and intimacy. We have, for example, a long-standing taboo against workplace romance, while we see marital love as different from prostitution because it is not a fundamentally financial exchange. In The Purchase of Intimacy, Viviana Zelizer mounts a provocative challenge to this view. Getting to the heart of one of life's greatest taboos, she shows how we all use economic activity to create, maintain, and renegotiate important ties -- especially intimate ties -- to other people.

In everyday life, we invest intense effort and worry to strike the right balance. For example, when a wife's income equals or surpasses her husband's, how much more time should the man devote to household chores or child care? Sometimes legal disputes arise. Should the surviving partner in a same-sex relationship have received compensation for a partner's death as a result of 9/11?

Through a host of compelling examples, Zelizer shows us why price is central to three key areas of intimacy: sexually tinged relations; health care by family members, friends, and professionals; and household economics. She draws both on research and materials ranging from reports on compensation to survivors of 9/11 victims to financial management Web sites and advice books for same-sex couples.

From the bedroom to the courtroom, The Purchase of Intimacy opens a fascinating new window on the inner workings of the economic processes that pervade our private lives.

Among the reviews and endorsements for the book:

"Are sociologists today the best economic scientists? On the evidence of Viviana Zelizer's striking book on the mix of the sacred and profane in our lives, it seems so."
--Deirdre McCloskey, The Times Higher Education Supplement

"The interactions of our private lives consist of subtle blends of acts of intimacy and economic exchange, which the legal system awkwardly deconstructs when things go wrong. This beautiful book will gently guide you through the many ironies of intimate exchange."
--Daniel Kahneman, Princeton University, and Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences

"Do you think that the realm of money and the realm of intimacy are separate spheres? Viviana Zelizer will make you think again. A fascinating demonstration that romantic relationships are pervaded by transactions of multiple sorts -- and that we ignore those transactions at our peril."
--Cass Sunstein, author of Republic.com

"Zelizer demolishes the idea that caring and commerce inhabit two separate and mutually exclusive realms. As she shows in a wide range of examples drawn from marriage, the sex trade, and the caring professions, love and money have always been intimately intertwined. A fascinating and even liberating book."
--Ann Crittenden, author of The Price of Motherhood and If You've Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything

"Viviana Zelizer has long been known as the world's most astute, discerning, and original cultural analyst of economic processes. Here, she brings together the two streams of her work in a mighty river of a book. The Purchase of Intimacy will be read for years to come."
--Charles Tilly, Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Social Science, Columbia University, author of Roads from Past to Future

Viviana Zelizer's other books include The Social Meaning of Money, Pricing the Priceless Child, and Morals and Markets.

The Page 99 Test: The Purchase of Intimacy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Ashna Graves's "Death Pans Out"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test is Death Pans Out by Ashna Graves.

About the novel, from the publisher:

While recovering from a double mastectomy, journalist Jeneva Leopold seeks solitude and healing at her uncle's idle gold mine in the sagebrush desert of Eastern Oregon. Hiking the rocky ridges, swimming in the old mining pond, and ignoring the outside world save for occasional letters, Jeneva gains strength and a new will to live.

As her interest in life returns, so do Jeneva's journalistic habits. And though the locals are at first puzzled by all of her questions, she soon gets to know a young woman rancher, various miners, a quirky old artifact hunter, and an itinerant priest and medieval scholar. These people and other colorful locals give her the inside story on living in the harsh landscape of sagebrush and coyotes and revealing how the old west is changing under new economics and regulation.

But the Oregon desert is also a place of secrets. The more Jeneva talks with the locals, the more she wonders about her uncle's mysterious disappearance. Why did her uncle and her mother stop talking so many years ago? Does she know more than she is acknowledging? The murder of a young miner sends her on a quest for answers, leading her to an elderly woman artist living in a converted chicken house, a tongue-tied funeral home owner, and a swashbuckling sheriff with rule-bending tendencies.

The appalling business she uncovers shocks the region and nearly claims her life, but it also brings closure to an old family misunderstanding and the enigma of her uncle's fate.

Among the early praise for Death Pans Out:

"Engaging characters, evocative descriptions of a little-known area and a masterful mystery makes Graves's debut a riveting page-turner."
--Kirkus (starred review)

"In Graves's inspirational debut, 45-year-old Jeneva "Neva" Leopold retreats to her Uncle Matthew Burt's abandoned mining cabin in Billie Creek, Ore., for peace and healing after a double mastectomy and the recent loss of her mother. A columnist for the Willamette Current, the resilient, inquisitive Neva also hunts for clues to her uncle's disappearance from his mining claim 15 years earlier. She makes friends in the small desert community with colorful locals, including crusty artifact hunter Skipper Dooley, ex-beauty queen rancher Darla Steadman and miner Reese Cotter. Neva is horrified to discover the corpse of Reese's fellow miner, young Roy DeRoos, and is later skeptical when Reese is accused of murder. Strange events test Neva's courage, leading to a startling resolution that's both macabre and entertaining."
--Publishers Weekly

"Graves unearths a small, strong gem of a book."
-- Jeff Jensen, Entertainment Weekly

Visit the official website for Ashna Graves and Wendy Madar, and read an excerpt from Death Pans Out.

The Page 69 Test: Death Pans Out.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Lippman and "The Wire"

Linda L. Richards has an interesting post at "The Rap Sheet" about the latest on Laura Lippman, author of the terrific new novel, What the Dead Know.

Richards quotes from an interview Lippman gave the Wall Street Journal about the influence of HBO's "The Wire" on some writers:

I know young writers who want to write like “The Wire,” not realizing it’s built on such novels as Richard Price’s “Clockers” and Dennis Lehane’s “Mystic River,” or the great body of George Pelecanos's work.

Sometimes I hear people say it’s like Dickens or Tolstoy, and I think: Even the intellectuals don’t want to read a book any more. As complicated and daunting as “The Wire” is, if you can prop yourself up on the couch, it will proceed on its own. But a book requires initiative to turn the page and engage your own imagination. I don’t understand novelists looking to a TV show that has clearly drawn its strengths from novelists. They should be looking at it and say, “now I should read everything Richard Price has written.”

Those comments reminded me of what this guy wrote on the subject in August 2006.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books about France

Howard Bloch, Sterling Professor of French at Yale University and author of A Needle in the Right Hand of God, named a "five best books about France" list for Opinion Journal.

The oldest title on his list:

The Physiology of Taste by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1825)

Lawyer, judge and professor, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin invented the genre of food writing in 1825 with "The Physiology of Taste." This epicure's epicure defines how we taste and what we taste when we savor vegetable, beef, fowl or fish. He is obsessed by the perfection of the palate, noting that the gourmands of Rome could tell by the flavor whether a fish was caught between the city's bridges or lower down the Tiber. His writing is as varied as the most exquisite menu, from aphorisms ("the truffle is the diamond of the art of cookery"), to tales of Napoleon at table, to meditations upon the role of food in history. M.F.K. Fisher's English translation and notes show her a worthy heir to the throne of Brillat-Savarin's kingdom of gastronomy.

Read about the title that topped Bloch's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Robert Ward reading?

Robert Ward's first novel was the critically acclaimed Shedding Skin, which won the National Endowment of the Arts award for first novel of exceptional merit.

He has since written seven more novels, including Red Baker, which won the PEN West prize for Best Novel of 1985.

His latest novel is Four Kinds of Rain, which George Pelecanos called "feverish and funny, an end-of-the-dream novel that could only have come from the very talented, slightly twisted mind of Robert Ward."

Over at "Writers Read," Ward shares his thoughts on quality (and lame) writing, old and new. And he names names.

His bottom line:

When I was coming up literary intellectuals used to like to say that anything that was popular was junk. Maybe there was once some justification for that attitude but there isn't anymore. There are wonderful, entertaining and yet serious crime writers out there. Only a few of them are on the best seller list, but they do have decent sized audiences and they'll get even more readers. Crime fiction is the smartest of the popular arts now. If you haven't gotten hip to it yet, all you have to do is go to your nearest bookstore.

Visit Robert Ward's website and read an excerpt from Four Kinds of Rain.

The Page 69 Test: Four Kinds of Rain.

Writers Read: Robert Ward.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric Blehm's most influential books

Eric Blehm, author of The Last Season --the "true story of the life and mysterious disappearance of James Randall Morgenson, who, over the course of 28 summers spent in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains, became arguably the most celebrated ranger in the National Park Service's most adventurous unit" -- shared a list of his ten favorite books with Barnes & Noble's interviewer.

One book from the list:

A River Runs Through It by Norman MacLean --

MacLean's writing goes right to my heart. I grew up reading Field & Stream, fishing in ponds, creeks, and lakes near my home in Valley Center, California, and trout fishing in the High Sierra, so that aspect of the story was an immediate pull. The character building, the setting, the way MacLean portrays fishing "like religion" just slapped me on the forehead. The book is one of the most touching, beautiful, and emotional reads available for anybody who has a passion and a family with "issues."

Read more about Blehm's ten favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Pyschosomatic," the movie

The current feature at "My Book, The Movie" is Anthony Neil Smith's Pyschosomatic.

About the book, from the publisher:

“Because Lydia didn’t have arms or legs, she shelled out three thousand bucks to a washed up middleweight named Cap to give her ex-husband the beating of his life.”

But the beating turns to murder, and the murder into lust and desperation between Lydia and an underworld clean-up man. Meanwhile, overgrown frat boy car thieves take up cop killing as a side hobby. When these paths cross, a horror show of violence unfolds as they all slide into a hell of their own design, surrounded by the neon and noise of the casino strip on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Among the praise for Pyschosomatic:

"Anthony Neil Smith wants to horrify you on every level, so he wrote a novel called Psychosomatic. This book piles one atrocity on top of another and shows you just how dark and nasty and evil humanity can be. Psychosomatic doesn't let you rest or catch your breath. You think you've got the balls to read this novel? We'll see, punk. We'll just see."
--Victor Gischler, author of Shotgun Opera

"Anthony Neil Smith takes hardboiled, crunches it, peels back the shell, and finishes it off with a flamethrower. Always with an eye for the perfect detail, a tuning fork for crackling dialogue, and prose that goes down smooth. Don’t flinch, or you’ll miss something. You were warned."
--Sean Doolittle, author of Burn

"This is one sick, twisted book. Naturally I mean that in a good way.... I'm telling you, this is one wild ride."
--Bill Crider, author of Murder Among the OWLS

Check out Smith's ideas for the cast and crew -- and the soundtrack -- for a film adaptation.

Learn more about Pyschosomatic and Anthony Neil Smith ... and the soundtrack for [his] (fake) movie, and check out his blog, "Crimedog One," and his MySpace page.

Smith's other works include The Drummer and Plots With Guns.

"My Book, The Movie" -- Pyschosomatic.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Jennifer McMahon's "Promise Not to Tell"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Jennifer McMahon's debut novel, Promise Not to Tell.

About the book, from the author's website:

A woman’s past and present collide with unexpected results in this hauntingly beautiful debut novel set in rural Vermont

Interweaving past and present, Promise Not To Tell is a story of friendship, secrets, murder, and redemption. At its center is Kate Cypher, a reserved 41-year-old school nurse who returns to the small town of New Canaan, VT, to care for her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother. The night she arrives, a young girl is murdered. Slowly Kate is drawn into the investigation — and deep into the childhood she’s tried to escape — for the killing eerily echoes the death of another young girl: her childhood friend, Del. Poor, misunderstood, Del suffered the taunts of classmates who shunned her and called her “Potato Girl.” But in Del, 10-year-old Kate found a kindred spirit, until a painful falling out shattered their relationship shortly before Del’s death.

As the investigation unfolds, the facets of Kate’s life collide in a terrifying way: her mother is quickly deteriorating, her old friends are never quite what they seem, and the ghosts of her childhood have emerged to haunt her. Tautly written, deeply insightful, and beautifully evocative, Promise Not To Tell is a riveting and unforgettable debut.

Among the early praise for the novel:

"'What's the worst thing you've ever done?' That's the question, posed by a stranger, that 41-year-old Kate Cypher can't get out of mind in McMahon's impressive debut.... McMahon's gift is the deliciously twisty way she subverts all your expectations, keeping you guessing with wry wit and feverish chills. 'The dead can blame,' one character says. And the truth, this whipsmart novel reminds us, can break your heart. 4 out of 4 stars"
--People

“Well-plotted suspenseful fun.”
--Kirkus

“Part mystery-thriller and part ghost story, McMahon’s well-paced debut alternates smoothly between past and present…. McMahon does a particularly good job of portraying the cruelty of school children.”
--Publishers Weekly

“Deeply disturbing and darkly compelling, Promise Not to Tell will have you looking over your shoulder for the Potato Girl long after you’ve turned the last page.”
--Sara Gruen

Browse inside Promise Not to Tell for an excerpt or read a briefer excerpt at Jennifer McMahon's website.

Visit McMahon's MySpace page and the group blog, "The Debutante Ball."

The Page 69 Test: Promise Not to Tell.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Paulina Porizkova reading?

"Dancing with the Stars" contestant, former supermodel, and novelist Paulina Porizkova talked to the Christian Science Monitor about what she's been watching on television and listening to.

And reading:

I just finished Boomsday [by Christopher Buckley]. And right before that I finished Ten Days in the Hills, that was by Jane Smiley. I just loved the story. It was quite slow; I don't mean that in a negative sense. It was like water, the fluidity and the stream of it were just really beautiful.

Check out Porizkova's taste in television and radio.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Marc Acito's "How I Paid for College"

Marc Acito's debut novel, How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater, is the subject of the current feature at the Page 99 Test.

About the book, from the publisher:

A deliciously funny romp of a novel about one overly theatrical and sexually confused New Jersey teenager’s larcenous quest for his acting school tuition.

It’s 1983 in Wallingford, New Jersey, a sleepy bedroom community outside of Manhattan. Seventeen-year-old Edward Zanni, a feckless Ferris Bueller–type, is Peter Panning his way through a carefree summer of magic and mischief. The fun comes to a halt, however, when Edward’s father remarries and refuses to pay for Edward to study acting at Juilliard.

Edward’s truly in a bind. He’s ineligible for scholarships because his father earns too much. He’s unable to contact his mother because she’s somewhere in Peru trying to commune with Incan spirits. And, as a sure sign he’s destined for a life in the arts, Edward’s incapable of holding down a job. So he turns to his loyal (but immoral) misfit friends to help him steal the tuition money from his father, all the while practicing for his high school performance of Grease. Disguising themselves as nuns and priests, they merrily scheme their way through embezzlement, money laundering, identity theft, forgery, and blackmail. But, along the way, Edward also learns the value of friendship, hard work, and how you’re not really a man until you can beat up your father — metaphorically, that is.

How I Paid for College is a farcical coming-of-age story that combines the first-person tone of David Sedaris with the byzantine plot twists of Armistead Maupin. It is a novel for anyone who has ever had a dream or a scheme, and it marks the introduction to an original and audacious talent.

Among the praise for the novel:

"Witty... peppered with pitch-perfect, archly adolescent asides... The ease with which Acito has choreographed [these] crazy capers makes you hope there's a lot more where all this came from."
—New York Times Book Review

"Acito has fantastic narrative chops, writing funny, fast, and satisfying chapters... This is a book for mature readers that reminds us what a blast immaturity can be."
—People

"Like the class clown willing to do anything for a laugh, [How I Paid for College is] funny, entertaining, and ultimately endearing."
—Details

"A coming-of-age, coming-out tale that escapes triteness and predictability thanks to Acito's eye for the absurd truth."
—TimeOut New York

"Dazzling... a thumbs-up winner from a storyteller whose future looks as bright as that of his young hero."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Visit Marc Acito's website and read an excerpt from How I Paid for College.

How I Paid for College won the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction, was selected an Editors' Choice by the New York Times, and is in development at Columbia Pictures. Acito is an irregular contributor to All Things Considered, the New York Times, and Live Wire Radio.

Check out the author's five favorite authors.

The Page 99 Test: How I Paid for College.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Julie Kistler reading?

Julie Kistler's contribution is the current feature at "Writers Read."

In addition to being a prolific and acclaimed romance novelist, Kistler is a theater critic -- which accounts for the biography among her recent reading.

Read about that book and the fiction on her reading list.

Kistler put her latest novel Scandal to the Page 69 Test earlier this year.

Visit Julie Kistler's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg 69: "The Complete Tales of Merry Gold"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Kate Bernheimer's The Complete Tales of Merry Gold.

About the book, from the publisher:

Obsessive, prudish, and cold, Merry Gold lives in denial of her own condition. This seamstress — the eldest and meanest of the three Gold sisters — possesses a tarnished past and faces a bleak and lonely future. Guilty about her destructive desires and longing for innocence, her inner turmoil and explosive imagination belie a disarming honesty.

A sequel to The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold, the novel follows Merry from her suburban childhood through design school and a whirlwind of lovers, and into a desolate adulthood. Beginning with a toy seal and ending with mushrooms, this fairy tale set in modern times creeps through cruelty and violence to its inevitable end.

Reminiscent of a miniature, fragile ice sculpture, The Complete Tales of Merry Gold glistens with hard-hearted bliss. Kate Bernheimer has once again delved into the internal anguish of the Gold family to extract a magical, carefully stitched tale of strange and happy fear.

Among the praise for the novel:

"This is indeed a remarkably skillful performance, and the brilliance of Bernheimer’s achievement is spectacular. This is a novel of great power, one that will be of interest to every thoughtful reader."
—Bob Williams

"Here simmers witchery: the black magic of an ominous femininity. The little match girl has cut her teeth and her smile glitters with subversion and an irresistible malevolence."
—Rikki Ducornet

"Kate Bernheimer's fiction offers a unique and delicate gift, the tempting mirage of a grace that constantly escapes. The Complete Tales of Merry Gold is an exceptional, lovely book, beautifully enigmatic, speaking a language that mysteriously evokes the unspoken."
—Lydia Millet

"A real gem, my favorite book of the year. A novel so simple and beautiful that you forget how hard it is to pull off simple and beautiful. Bernheimer's second novel is a great, great success."
—Willy Vlautin

Read an excerpt from The Complete Tales of Merry Gold.

Kate Bernheimer is the author of two novels based on German, Russian and Yiddish fairy tales, The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold and The Complete Tales of Merry Gold, editor of a collection of essays, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales. She earned her BA from Wesleyan University and her MFA from the University of Arizona in Tucson. Her forthcoming books include Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales, and The Girl in the Castle inside the Museum, a children's book (Random House, 2008). She is also editor of the literary journal Fairy Tale Review.

She is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at The University of Alabama.

The Page 69 Test: The Complete Tales of Merry Gold.

--Marshal Zeringue