How technology shapes the world: 10 books

Evgeny Morozov is a fellow at the Open Society Institute in New York and is working on a book about the Internet's role in authoritarian societies. His writing has appeared in The Economist, International Herald Tribune, Le Monde, Foreign Policy, Slate, San Fransisco Chronicle, and other media.

For Foreign Policy, he named ten books to learn how technology shapes the world.

One book on the list:

The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers by Tom Standage

Standage (who - full disclaimer - still edits my occasional pieces for The Economist's Technology Quarterly) offers a contrarian view on the relative importance of the telegraph (and the relative unimportance of the Internet) seen through the prism of history.

Read about another book on the list.

Writers Read: Tom Standage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Glenn Stout's "Young Woman and the Sea"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World by Glenn Stout.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 1926, before skirt lengths inched above the knee and before anyone was ready to accept that a woman could test herself physically, a plucky American teenager named Trudy Ederle captured the imagination of the world when she became the first woman to swim the English Channel. It was, and still is, a feat more incredible and uncommon than scaling Mount Everest. Upon her return to the United States, "Trudy of America" became the most famous woman in the world. And just as quickly, she disappeared from the public eye.

Set against the backdrop of the roaring 1920s, Young Woman and the Sea is the dramatic and inspiring story of Ederle’s pursuit of a goal no one believed possible, and the price she paid. The moment Trudy set foot on land, triumphant, she had shattered centuries of stereotypes and opened doors for generations of women to come. A truly magnetic and often misunderstood character whose story is largely forgotten, Trudy Ederle comes alive in these pages through Glenn Stout’s exhaustive new research.

Read an excerpt from Young Woman and the Sea, and learn more about the book and author at Glenn Stout's website and blog.

The Page 99 Test: Young Woman and the Sea.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Michael Robertson's "The Baker Street Letters"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: The Baker Street Letters by Michael Robertson.

About the book, from the publisher:

First in a spectacular new series about two brother lawyers who lease offices on London’s Baker Street--and begin receiving mail addressed to Sherlock Holmes

In Los Angeles, a geological surveyor maps out a proposed subway route--and then goes missing. His eight-year-old daughter, in her desperation, turns to the one person she thinks might help--she writes a letter to Sherlock Holmes.

That letter creates an uproar at 221b Baker Street, which now houses the law offices of attorney and man about town Reggie Heath and his hapless brother, Nigel. Instead of filing the letter like he’s supposed to, Nigel decides to investigate. Soon he’s flying off to Los Angeles, inconsiderately leaving a very dead body on the floor in his office. Big brother Reggie follows Nigel to California, as does Reggie’s sometime lover, Laura---a quick-witted stage actress who’s captured the hearts of both brothers.

When Nigel is arrested, Reggie must use all his wits to solve a case that Sherlock Holmes would have savored and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fans will adore.

Read an excerpt from The Baker Street Letters, and learn more about the novel at the publisher's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Baker Street Letters.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a canine: Mary Jane Maffini & Daisy and Lily

This weekend's feature at Coffee with a Canine: Mary Jane Maffini & Daisy and Lily.

Mary Jane Maffini is the author of three mystery series (all with beloved resident dogs and plenty of coffee-drinking scenes) and a number of short stories. Her real life dogs are Daisy and Lily, both miniature dachshunds of "a princessy disposition." They look a lot like Sweet Marie and Truffle in the Charlotte Adams mysteries.

Death Loves Your Messy Desk, the latest Charlotte Adams mystery, was released in May. In 2008, its predecessor The Cluttered Corpse was featured at the Page 99 Test.

Maffini is a former President of Crime Writers of Canada, and a former member of the board of directors of the Canadian Booksellers Association.

She is a frequent speaker on writing mysteries and on the importance of Canadian crime fiction. In real life, although she is a member of the Ladies' Killing Circle, she claims she has never killed anyone.

Learn more about the author and her work at Mary Jane Maffini's website.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Mary Jane Maffini & Daisy and Lily.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best: books on cosmetic surgery

Gerald Imber is an internationally known plastic surgeon. He has lectured widely on prevention and correction of facial aging, and has written numerous scientific papers and several books.

In 2005 he named a five best books on cosmetic surgery list for the Wall Street Journal.

One title on the list:

"Skin Tight" by Carl Hiaasen (Putnam, 1989).

Riotously funny, this early Carl Hiaasen novel has as its central character a venal, unscrupulous and blazingly incompetent cosmetic surgeon. Hiaasen's canvas is broad--really, the folly of civilization, with particular attention to the South Florida branch. And his palette includes oversize, outrageous behavior, fully two shades beyond reality. Every page made me roar with laughter as well as cringe for myself and my colleagues. Hiaasen makes us--plastic surgeons--remember what we are supposed to be and most particularly what we never want to become. The laugh is on all of us, both doctors and patients.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69 & 99: Maile Meloy's "Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It"

The current feature at The Page 69 Test and The Page 99 Test: Maile Meloy's Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.

About the book, from the publisher:

Award-winning writer Maile Meloy’s return to short stories explores complex lives in an austere landscape with the clear-sightedness that first endeared her to readers.

Meloy’s first return to short stories since her critically acclaimed debut, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It is an extraordinary new work from one of the most promising writers of the last decade.

Eleven unforgettable new stories demonstrate the emotional power and the clean, assured style that have earned Meloy praise from critics and devotion from readers. Propelled by a terrific instinct for storytelling, and concerned with the convolutions of modern love and the importance of place, this collection is about the battlefields—and fields of victory—that exist in seemingly harmless spaces, in kitchens and living rooms and cars. Set mostly in the American West, the stories feature small-town lawyers, ranchers, doctors, parents, and children, and explore the moral quandaries of love, family, and friendship. A ranch hand falls for a recent law school graduate who appears unexpectedly— and reluctantly—in his remote Montana town. A young father opens his door to find his dead grandmother standing on the front step. Two women weigh love and betrayal during an early snow. Throughout the book, Meloy examines the tensions between having and wanting, as her characters try to keep hold of opposing forces in their lives: innocence and experience, risk and stability, fidelity and desire.

Knowing, sly, and bittersweet, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It confirms Maile Meloy’s singular literary talent. Her lean, controlled prose, full of insight and unexpected poignancy, is the perfect complement to her powerfully moving storytelling.

Visit Maile Meloy's website.

What is Maile Meloy reading?

The Page 69 Test: Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.

The Page 99 Test: Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tim Hallinan interviews Brett Battles

Timothy Hallinan and Brett Battles both have new books out in their acclaimed series.

Battles' Shadow of Betrayal, the third novel in the Jonathan Quinn series, was published earlier this month. Hallinan's Breathing Water, the third installment of his Poke Rafferty Bangkok thrillers, is due out in a couple of weeks.

At Author Interviews today: the first installment of a two-part Q&A in which the writers query each other about their series and their process.

Visit Brett Battles' website and blog, and Timothy Hallinan's website and blog.

Read: Tim Hallinan interviews Brett Battles.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Peter M. Shane reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Peter M. Shane, author of Madison's Nightmare: How Executive Power Threatens American Democracy.

Part of his entry:

I am currently looking at Scott Matheson's Presidential Constitutionalism in Perilous Times, Hal Bruff's Bad Advice, and Dana Nelson's Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People. I came across each of these after I published my own book, Madison's Nightmare. I am hoping the Matheson book will help me take a longer historical view of developments in presidential power I identified as becoming especially troubling between 1981 and 2009. The Bruff book is a really thorough analysis of what went wrong in the Justice Department's handling of national security-related legal questions after September 11. The Nelson volume is prodding me to consider whether my own critique of presidentialism goes deep enough. Even if Presidents remain squarely within the purview of their well-founded legal authorities, Americans might still be too preoccupied with the presidency as an instrument of democratic change; at least, that's the argument...[read on]

Peter M. Shane is the Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law and Director of the Project on Law and Democratic Development at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, and Executive Director of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.

Read an excerpt from Madison's Nightmare, and learn more about the book at the University of Chicago Press website.

Visit Peter M. Shane's website.

Writers Read: Peter M. Shane.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joanna Hershon's "The German Bride," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: The German Bride by Joanna Hershon.

The entry begins:

I do love a good casting session and when Vanity Fair asked me last March to "cast my novel" shortly after The German Bride was published, I admit to becoming so engrossed with the process that I had to remind myself that I did not, in fact, have Gael García Bernal on speed dial. I do think that this book would be a sweeping and juicy movie (if expensive to make, although thankfully that miraculous southwestern light is still free of charge) and there are terrific roles for actors.

Natalie Portman is the obvious choice for Eva-- complicated and intelligent, with just a touch of imp. Rachel Weisz would bring...[read on]

Read an excerpt from The German Bride, and learn more about the author and her work at Joanna Hershon's website.

Joanna Hershon is also the author of Swimming and The Outside of August. Her writing has appeared in One Story, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Post Road, the literary anthology Brooklyn Was Mine, and was shortlisted for the 2007 O. Henry Prize Stories.

The Page 69 Test: The German Bride.

My Book, The Movie: The German Bride.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Charlotte Greig's "A Girl’s Guide to Modern European Philosophy"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: A Girl’s Guide to Modern European Philosophy by Charlotte Greig.

About the book, from the publisher:

Susannah’s official boyfriend, Jason, is the perfect foil for her student lifestyle. He is ten years older, an antiques dealer, and owns a stylish apartment that prevents her from having to live in the seedy digs on campus. This way, she can take her philosophy major very seriously and dabble in the social and sexual freedom of 1970s university life. But circumstances become more complicated than Susannah would like when she begins to have an affair with her tutorial partner, Rob. Soon she is dating two men, missing her lectures, exploring independence and feminism with her girlfriends, and finding herself in a particularly impossible dilemma: she becomes pregnant. Forced to look beyond her friends and lovers for support, she finds help and inspiration from the lessons of Kierkegaard and other European philosophers.

A Girl’s Guide to Modern European Philosophy is a delightfully insightful, bittersweet coming-of-age romp, in which love is far from platonic and the mind—body predicament a pressing reality. It even succeeds where many introductions to philosophy have failed, by effortlessly bringing to life the central tenets of the most important European philosophers of modern times.

Read an excerpt from A Girl’s Guide to Modern European Philosophy, and learn more about the author and her work--both words and music--at Charlotte Greig's website.

Charlotte Greig worked as a music journalist in print and radio before becoming a folk singer and songwriter. She has made five albums and written a book on girl groups, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?: Girl Groups from the 50s On. She is also a playwright, for radio and stage.

The Page 69 Test: A Girl’s Guide to Modern European Philosophy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 books to make your blood boil

Brian Schofield has been a journalist since 1998, and has worked as executive editor on GQ Active magazine, and as editor of the Sunday Times Travel Magazine.

His writing has appeared in the New Statesman, The Sunday Times, the Independent on Sunday, The Daily Telegraph, Conde Nast Traveller, GQ and FHM.

His first book, Selling Your Father's Bones, a work of literary non-fiction on the history and ecology of the American North-West, was published by Simon & Schuster in the US.

For the Guardian, he named a top ten list of "furious books that scream at the system." One title on the list:

Tourist Season by Carl Hiassen

I hero-worship Hiassen slavishly – his Florida thrillers are tearfully funny, but also steam with rage against corruption and eco-crime. The man's a living, vengeful god.

Read about another book on Schofield's list.

Visit Brian Schofield's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a Canine: Cheryl Norman & Ginger

The current feature at Coffee with a Canine: Cheryl Norman & Ginger.

They're a well-traveled duo:

Ginger is an RV dog.... She has been all over the U.S. and parts of Canada, including Alaska and British Columbia. She found Las Vegas sadly lacking in grass and Minnesota with too much snow (at least in March) but mostly loves every place. We’ve taken her along parts of the old Route 66, including Santa Rosa, New Mexico, and St. Louis, Missouri, two places featured in my two novellas in "Romance on Route 66." Next we plan a return to Arizona via Amarillo, two places I need to research for next year’s "Romance on Route 66" Christmas anthology. Ginger is always ready to go bye-bye.

Cheryl Norman won the 2003 EPPIE award for her contemporary romance, Last Resort. Her debut with Medallion, Restore My Heart, earned her a mention in Publishers Weekly as one of ten new romance authors to watch.

Read My Book, The Movie: Running Scared by Cheryl Norman.

Romance on Route 66, her anthology of romance novellas written with Judith Leigh, is out this summer.

Learn more about the books and author at Cheryl Norman's website and MySpace page.

For information about her latest Route 66 stories, visit http://romanceonroute66.com.

Read--Coffee with a canine: Cheryl Norman & Ginger.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Margot Canaday's "The Straight State"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America by Margot Canaday.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Straight State is the most expansive study of the federal regulation of homosexuality yet written. Unearthing startling new evidence from the National Archives, Margot Canaday shows how the state systematically came to penalize homosexuality, giving rise to a regime of second-class citizenship that sexual minorities still live under today.

Canaday looks at three key arenas of government control--immigration, the military, and welfare--and demonstrates how federal enforcement of sexual norms emerged with the rise of the modern bureaucratic state. She begins at the turn of the twentieth century when the state first stumbled upon evidence of sex and gender nonconformity, revealing how homosexuality was policed indirectly through the exclusion of sexually "degenerate" immigrants and other regulatory measures aimed at combating poverty, violence, and vice. Canaday argues that the state's gradual awareness of homosexuality intensified during the later New Deal and through the postwar period as policies were enacted that explicitly used homosexuality to define who could enter the country, serve in the military, and collect state benefits. Midcentury repression was not a sudden response to newly visible gay subcultures, Canaday demonstrates, but the culmination of a much longer and slower process of state-building during which the state came to know and to care about homosexuality across many decades.

Social, political, and legal history at their most compelling, The Straight State explores how regulation transformed the regulated: in drawing boundaries around national citizenship, the state helped to define the very meaning of homosexuality in America.

Read an excerpt from The Straight State, and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.

Margot Canaday is assistant professor of history at Princeton University.

The Page 99 Test: The Straight State.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten addictive true stories

Oprah and company came up with a ten best list of memoirs.

One title on the list:

Without a Map
by Meredith Hall
248 pages; Beacon

Nostalgic for the good old days of Norman Rockwell America? Without a Map may forever change the way you look at small-town life. Meredith Hall's memoir is a sobering portrayal of how punitive her close-knit New Hampshire community was in 1965 when, at the age of 16, she became pregnant in the course of a casual summer romance. Hall was expelled from high school, shunned by her friends and neighbors, cut loose by her parents, and forced to put up her baby for adoption. Unsurprisingly, the psychological damage she sustained was serious and persistent. After a reckless backpacking tour of Europe and the Middle East, Hall returned to her native state, married, had two sons, divorced, and was finally found by Paul, the son she'd been compelled to give away. Raised in New Hampshire, Paul had suffered through a childhood even more problematic than his (biological) mother's adolescence. As she documents her attempts to make sense of her parents' behavior and the cruelty of her son's adoptive father, Hall offers a testament to the importance of understanding and even forgiving the people who, however unconscious or unkind, have made us who we are.
—Francine Prose

Read about another book on the list.

Read an excerpt from Without a Map, and learn more about the book and author at Meredith Hall's website.

The Page 69 Test: Meredith Hall's Without a Map.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Samantha Wilde's "This Little Mommy Stayed Home"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: This Little Mommy Stayed Home by Samantha Wilde.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Mother of all Motherhood novels.

In this riotously funny, ruefully honest, and irresistibly warmhearted debut, Samantha Wilde writes about one new mother who discovers the wonders and terrors of motherhood—one hilarious crisis at a time. For new moms, potential moms-to-be, and anyone who just wants to (wisely) live the experience vicariously…

New mom Joy McGuire hasn’t changed her sweatpants since her baby was born. Of course she’s crazy about her newborn son; it’s her distracted, work-obsessed husband and his impossible mother she can’t stand. Joy turns to her own mom for support, but she’s too busy planning her fourth wedding to a suspicious self-help guru. Sure, Joy’s a woman on the brink, but it’s nothing a little sleep, sanity, and chocolate can’t fix.

Until her old college boyfriend shows up at their ten-year reunion. The one she was still in love with when she married her husband. It must be the lack of sleep, because Joy is starting to think she might have ended up with the wrong man. Not to mention she’s obsessed with her sexy yoga instructor, who might just be interested in her. Joy used to be single, skinny, and able to speak in complete sentences, but who is she now? As she’s trying to figure that out, her husband goes missing….

Frank, bawdy, and full of keenly self-aware observations, this novel tells the story of one new mother, three men, one marriage, and the baby love that keeps us up at night.

Preview This Little Mommy Stayed Home, and learn more about the book and author at Samantha Wilde's website.

The Page 69 Test: This Little Mommy Stayed Home.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Renée Rosen reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Renée Rosen, author of Every Crooked Pot.

Her entry begins:

My reading tastes have been all over the board the past few months, with a mixture of old and new. I’ve also been very intrigued by the use of voice, especially multiple voices, which is what I found so captivating about Andre DuBus III’s House of Sand and Fog. I became completely engrossed with these different voices. Each character took on a life of his or her own and the suspense kept me turning pages, despite the story’s darkness.

Now I’m reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett, an impressive debut novel that...[read on]

Among the praise for Every Crooked Pot:

"Every Crooked Pot is a beautifully nuanced tale about an extraordinary family and even more extraordinary young woman. Not since Myla Goldberg's Bee Season has a first novel so deftly captured the complexities, joys, and frustrations of daughters and their families. It's hard to believe this is a debut -- Rosen's voice is already as good as it gets. Keep an eye out for this rising star."
--Sara Gruen, New York Times bestselling author of Water for Elephants

Read an excerpt from Every Crooked Pot and learn more about the novel at Renée Rosen's website.

The Page 99 Test: Every Crooked Pot.

Writers Read: Renée Rosen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best novels about novelists

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best novels about novelists.

One book on the list:

Any Human Heart by William Boyd

Boyd's novel consists of the journals of Logan Mountstuart, a novelist whose inventiveness diminishes as he gives more and more of his energy to disastrous affairs and the cultivation of celebrities. Even as his own fiction dries up, he meets Joyce, Woolf, Hemingway and Waugh, and donates ideas for their novels to them.

Read about another novel on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Mary Anna Evans' "Floodgates"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Floodgates by Mary Anna Evans.

About the book, from the Booklist review:

Archaeologist Faye Longchamp is taking a break from her doctoral studies to do some fieldwork in New Orleans. She is working at the site of the Revolutionary War’s Battle of New Orleans when a park ranger offers to show her a neighborhood destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Volunteers cleaning up a damaged home find a body there. The police think that it’s another drowning victim, but Faye notices that the debris piled on the corpse is all wrong. A young female detective brings Faye and her fiancé, Joe Wolf Mantooth, into the case because their archaeological expertise will be useful in sorting out what happened. They soon discover that the victim, Shelly Broussard, played an important role in the poststorm rescue work but may have made some serious enemies in the process. Evans has written a fascinating tale linking the history of New Orleans’ levee system to the present and weaving into the story aspects of the city’s widely diverse cultures. Voodoo, Native American spirituality, greed, and corruption all play roles in what is easily the best installment yet in a too-little-known series.

Read an excerpt from Floodgates, and learn more about the author and her work at Mary Anna Evans' website.

The Page 69 Test: Floodgates.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a Canine: Steven D. Hales & Sophie

The current feature at Coffee with a Canine: Steven D. Hales & Sophie.

Steven D. Hales is a Professor of Philosophy at at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. He is the author and editor of many scholarly articles and books, including What Philosophy Can Tell You About Your Dog, What Philosophy Can Tell You About Your Cat, and Beer and Philosophy.

Among the topics addressed in What Philosophy Can Tell You About Your Dog:

* Do dogs live in the same world that we do?
* What's your dog thinking about?
* Are dogs extensions of the human mind?
* If dogs are our best friends, why do we assume we can have them neutered?
* Do dogs use logic?

The origins of Sophie's name are linked to Hales' professional interests:

I wanted to name our daughter "Sophie" but got outvoted in favor of "Holly." However, I got to name the dog. "Sophia" is Greek for wisdom, and is one of the root words for "philosophy." A much better name for the dog would have been "Houdini." Sophie could escape from a supermax prison. It practically takes landmines and concertina wire to keep her in the yard; our 11 acres just isn't big enough for a dog with the wanderlust of Columbus. And she always heads straight for the muddy creek with her buddy Wiley, the big black dog next door.

Read--Coffee with a canine: Steven D. Hales & Sophie.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Daniel E. Sutherland's "A Savage Conflict"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War by Daniel E. Sutherland.

About the book, from the publisher:

The American Civil War is famous for epic battles involving massive armies outfitted in blue and gray uniforms, details that characterize conventional warfare. A Savage Conflict is the first work to treat guerrilla warfare as critical to understanding the course and outcome of the Civil War. Daniel Sutherland argues that irregular warfare took a large toll on the Confederate war effort by weakening support for state and national governments and diminishing the trust citizens had in their officials to protect them.

Sutherland points out that early in the war Confederate military and political leaders embraced guerrilla tactics. They knew that "partizan" fighters had helped to win the American Revolution. As the war dragged on and defense of the remote spaces of the Confederate territory became more tenuous, guerrilla activity spiraled out of state control. It was adopted by parties who had interests other than Confederate victory, including southern Unionists, violent bands of deserters and draft dodgers, and criminals who saw the war as an opportunity for plunder. Sutherland considers not only the implications such activity had for military strategy but also its effects on people and their attitudes toward the war. Once vital to southern hopes for victory, the guerrilla combatants proved a significant factor in the Confederacy's final collapse.

Learn more about A Savage Conflict at the publisher's website, and visit Daniel Sutherland's faculty webpage.

The Page 99 Test: A Savage Conflict.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Helen Benedict reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Helen Benedict, author most recently of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq and The Edge of Eden, a forthcoming novel.

One book from her entry:

I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody by Sinan Antoon, an Iraqi novelist and film maker who now lives in the U.S., was published by City Lights Books in 2007. All things Iraqi fascinate me now, as I have just finished a nonfiction book about the Iraq War and am now writing a novel set in Iraq, too. Iraqi literature has a totally different tone and approach to Western literature, and often seems both experimental and ancient at the same time. This book plays with language and explores politics, but indirectly, as it is told through the voice of a man imprisoned under Saddam for writing an objectionable poem. It feels like reading a fever dream, one that is both meandering and bizarre yet strikingly clear at the same time. At times I was reminded of the formality and floridness of ancient Turkish poetry; at other times of Kafka. But either way, the novel gives you a clear sense of what it is like to seethe and squirm under...[read on]

Helen Benedict is the author of five novels and five books of nonfiction. Her new nonfiction book, The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq came out from Beacon Press in April 2009. Benedict's play based on the book, The Lonely Soldier Monologues, was performed in New York City at The Theater for the New City from March 5–22, and at La MaMa on March 17. It will be performed again this coming fall, dates to be arranged.

One of her articles on the subject, "The Private War of Women Soldiers" (Salon, March 2007) was awarded The James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism in 2008. She has since written other articles on women soldiers that have appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Ms., In These Times, Huffington Post, and elsewhere. Benedict's newest novel, The Edge of Eden, set in Seychelles in 1960, is to be published by Soho Press in November, 2009.

Learn more about Helen Benedict and her work at her official website.

Writers Read: Helen Benedict.

--Marshal Zeringue

Oprah: 7 books for dog lovers

Oprah and associates came up with 7 books for dog lovers.

One work of fiction on the list:

Nose Down, Eyes Up
by Merrill Markoe
320 pages; Villard

Gil, the growly, slovenly, haplessly divorced fellow in Merrill Markoe's Nose Down, Eyes Up, is clueless about human relationships; frankly, he's a bit of an animal. Listening in as his favorite dog, Jimmy, counsels his fellow canines on life and love ("It's the big emotion behind snack time"), Gil bumbles through comic misadventures with his bouncy girlfriend, Sara, and his sexpot ex-wife, Eden. Read this novel for its nose-to-the-ground wisdom, its unsentimental take on family, and for the funniest, furriest pack of jokesters this side of the Marx Brothers.
—Cathleen Medwick

Read about another book on the list.

Visit Merrill Markoe's website.

The Page 69 Test: Nose Down, Eyes Up.

Also see: Five best books about dogs and Five best books for your canine, and you.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Tess Callahan's "April & Oliver"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: April and Oliver by Tess Callahan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Best friends since childhood, the sexual tension between April and Oliver has always been palpable. Years after being completely inseparable, they become strangers, but the wildly different paths of their lives cross once again with the sudden death of April's brother. Oliver, the responsible, newly engaged law student finds himself drawn more than ever to the reckless, mystifying April - and cracks begin to appear in his carefully constructed life. Even as Oliver attempts to "save" his childhood friend from her grief, her menacing boyfriend and herself, it soon becomes apparent that Oliver has some secrets of his own--secrets he hasn't shared with anyone, even his fiancé. But April knows, and her reappearance in his life derails him. Is it really April's life that is unraveling, or is it his own? The answer awaits at the end of a downward spiral...towards salvation.

Read an excerpt from April & Oliver, and learn more about the novel and author at Tess Callahan's website.

The Page 69 Test: April and Oliver.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marie Brennan's "In Ashes Lie," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Marie Brennan's In Ashes Lie and Midnight Never Come.

The entry begins:

I'm very bad at visualizing faces, so I do occasionally try to "cast" my characters, in order to have a reference point to work from. In my Onyx Court series of London-based historical fantasies -- installments so far are the Elizabethan Midnight Never Come and Civil War-era In Ashes Lie -- I've had variable luck with finding suitable choices.

Michael Deven, the human protagonist of Midnight, was the first one I cast. My choice for him is a younger James Purefoy, whom I first saw playing Edward, the Black Prince, in A Knight's Tale. (Without the scar he sported in that movie, though.) Good-looking, but not excessively Hollywood-pretty, and unlike some actors, he doesn't look weird in a historical context. Lune, the faerie protagonist, took much longer; it's hard to find a human with the right kind of delicacy. I only recently settled on Olivia Wilde, most famous as Thirteen on House M.D. She's got an austere beauty that's pretty close to what I had in mind. As for Invidiana, the cruel faerie Queen, I've never found anyone suitable at all. Strangely, Hollywood seems to have a shortage of women who are both inhumanly gorgeous and utterly terrifying. If you dressed up Sleeping Beauty's Maleficent in Elizabethan clothing, though, you'd come close.

For the sequel, In Ashes Lie, I knew even before I wrote Jack Ellin that he looked like...[read on]

Learn more about the books and author at Marie Brennan's website.

My Book, The Movie: In Ashes Lie and Midnight Never Come.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jennifer Mathews' "Chicle"

This weekend's feature at the Page 99 Test: Chicle: The Chewing Gum of the Americas, From the Ancient Maya to William Wrigley by Jennifer P. Mathews.

About the book, from the publisher:

Although Juicy Fruit® gum was introduced to North Americans in 1893, Native Americans in Mesoamerica were chewing gum thousands of years earlier. And although in the last decade “biographies” have been devoted to salt, spices, chocolate, coffee, and other staples of modern life, until now there has never been a full history of chewing gum. Chicle is a history in four acts, all of them focused on the sticky white substance that seeps from the sapodilla tree when its bark is cut. First, Jennifer Mathews recounts the story of chicle and its earliest-known adherents, the Maya and Aztecs. Second, with the assistance of botanist Gillian Schultz, Mathews examines the sapodilla tree itself, an extraordinarily hardy plant that is native only to Mesoamerica and the Caribbean. Third, Mathews presents the fascinating story of the chicle and chewing gum industry over the last hundred plus years, a tale (like so many twentieth-century tales) of greed, growth, and collapse. In closing, Mathews considers the plight of the chicleros, the “extractors” who often work by themselves tapping trees deep in the forests, and how they have emerged as icons of local pop culture—portrayed as fearless, hard-drinking brawlers, people to be respected as well as feared. Before Dentyne® and Chiclets®, before bubble gum comic strips and the Doublemint® twins, there was gum, oozing from jungle trees like melting candle wax under the slash of a machete. Chicle tells us everything that happened next. It is a spellbinding story.

Read an excerpt from Chicle, and listen to a National Public Radio interview with Jennifer P. Mathews.

Visit Jennifer P. Mathews' website.

The Page 99 Test: Chicle.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best: novels about immigrants in America

Matthew Kaminski, a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, named his five favorite novels about immigrants in America for his newspaper.

One title on the list:

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz
Riverhead, 2007

The eponymous hero of Junot Diaz’s breakout novel is a fat, warm, complex, lonely, sex-starved, sci-fi-obsessed New Jersey kid who happens to be a Dominican. We’re in Philip Roth ­territory here. Wao’s angst is that of an adolescent (where does he, a ­Dominican “GhettoNerd,” fit in?) and of an immigrant (ditto). Diaz peppers his book with Spanish phrases and ­pop-dweeb trivia without explaining ­either, which in no way hurts the book. As for sections of the novel set back in the native land of Oscar’s mother, extended footnotes are provided “for those of you who missed your ­mandatory two seconds of Dominican history.” The novel is a rare ­accomplishment, a serious literary work with “street” appeal.

Read about another book on Kaminski's list.

Also see Junot Díaz's most important books and the Page 99 Test: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Whitney Terrell reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Whitney Terrell, author of the award winning novels The Huntsman and The King of Kings County.

His entry begins:

Of late, I have been reading Updike, Updike, Updike. This is a jag that began with his death which spurred me, as I suspect it did many people, to go back and actually read his work again, rather than dealing with him as an idea, a “great author,” a brand name. I began with the third and best of the Rabbit books, Rabbit is Rich, and read back from there to Redux and finally to Run. I was shocked and abashed by how much he achieved in these books, how serious and consistent their purpose seemed, and how far they exceeded the achievement I’d granted them in my memory. The fault was all mine, not his. In the encomiums that followed Updike’s death, many spoke of his writing about sex, the titillating aspects of his work, as well as his majestic prose. But in the Rabbit books, he seems to me, more than any writer I can think of, the great American poet of...[read on]

Whitney Terrell is the New Letters Writer-in-Residence at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The Huntsman was a New York Times notable book and was selected as a best book of 2001 by The Kansas City Star and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The King of Kings County won the William Rockhill Nelson award from The Kansas City Star and was selected as a best book of 2005 by the Christian Science Monitor. In 2006, he was named one of 20 “writers to watch” under 40 by members of the National Book Critics Circle.

His non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Details, The New York Observer, The Kansas City Star, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Recently, he embedded with the 22nd infantry in Baghdad, an experience he covered for the Washington Post Magazine.

Visit Terrell's website to learn more about the author, his novels, and his non-fiction.

The Page 99 Test: The King of Kings County.

Writers Read: Whitney Terrell.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Hyatt Bass' "The Embers"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: The Embers by Hyatt Bass.

About the book, from the publisher:

A once-charmed family is forced to confront the devastating tragedy that struck it years ago in this fiercely tender tale of betrayal and reconciliation

It’s the fall of 2007, and Emily Ascher should be celebrating: she just got engaged to the man she loves, her job is moving in new and fulfilling directions, and her once-rocky relationship with her mother, Laura, has finally mellowed into an easy give-and-take. But with the promise of new love

Settling into old comes a difficult look at how her family has been torn apart in the many years since her brother died. Her parents have long since divorced, and her father, Joe, a famous actor and playwright who has been paralyzed with grief since the tragedy, carries the blame for his son’s death—but what really happened on that winter night? Why has he been unable to clear his name, or even discuss that evening with Laura and Emily?

As spring looms—and with it Emily’s wedding in the Berkshires and an unveiling of Joe’s new play—each Ascher begins to reevaluate the events of long ago, finally facing the truth of his or her own culpability in them. Moving between past and present over the course of sixteen years, The Embers is a skillfully structured debut novel of buried secrets and deep regrets that crush a family while bonding its members irrevocably.

Read an excerpt from The Embers, and view the video trailer.

Learn more about the book and author at Hyatt Bass' website.

The Page 69 Test: The Embers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Schickel's 5 best show-biz biographies

Richard Schickel is a film critic, documentary film maker and movie historian, who has written over 30 books, including Elia Kazan: A Biography.

A few years ago he named his five favorite show-biz biographies for the Wall Street Journal. One book on the list:

"A Life" by Elia Kazan (Knopf, 1988).

Common consent holds that this may be the greatest of all showbiz autobiographies and, for once, the conventional wisdom is correct. Kazan emerged from his fervent, apprentice years with the Group Theater determined to revolutionize American acting and theatrical writing by infusing it with greater realism. In the 1940s and '50s he did just that, in the process becoming our greatest stage director and one of our greatest movie directors. He was also a frenzied womanizer, a controversially engaged political figure and a man with passionate loves and hatreds for everyone he knew and worked with. All of that rambunctiously hangs out in this wounding, wounded and powerfully truthful and affecting book.

Read about another biography on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a canine: Nicholas Griffin & Otto

The current feature at Coffee with a Canine: Nicholas Griffin & Otto.

Griffin's books include the historical novels The Requiem Shark and House of Sight and Shadow and the nonfiction work, Caucasus. His latest novel is Dizzy City.

Read an excerpt from Dizzy City and learn more about the book and author at Nicholas Griffin's website.

Griffin on Otto the city dog:

He loves the dog parks, I’m not so keen. A French bulldog took a bite out of his ear last week so he came home, shook his head and redecorated the kitchen in blood. Every now and then, when I take him to the country, he tries to make friends with anyone who walks past hoping to be adopted and spared a return to a life of concrete and peeing against piles of trash. Last week, out of the city, he surreptitiously crept into someone’s golf cart while I was talking to them and almost made it to a life of grass and trees. I like to think of him as a canine Steve McQueen and we’re serving our time in the city together.

The Page 99 Test: Dizzy City.

Writers Read: Nicholas Griffin.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Nicholas Griffin & Otto.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Anna Stilz's "Liberal Loyalty"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State by Anna Stilz.

About the book, from the publisher:

Many political theorists today deny that citizenship can be defended on liberal grounds alone. Cosmopolitans claim that loyalty to a particular state is incompatible with universal liberal principles, which hold that we have equal duties of justice to persons everywhere, while nationalist theorists justify civic obligations only by reaching beyond liberal principles and invoking the importance of national culture. In Liberal Loyalty, Anna Stilz challenges both views by defending a distinctively liberal understanding of citizenship.

Drawing on Kant, Rousseau, and Habermas, Stilz argues that we owe civic obligations to the state if it is sufficiently just, and that constitutionally enshrined principles of justice in themselves--rather than territory, common language, or shared culture--are grounds for obedience to our particular state and for democratic solidarity with our fellow citizens. She demonstrates that specifying what freedom and equality mean among a particular people requires their democratic participation together as a group. Justice, therefore, depends on the authority of the democratic state because there is no way equal freedom can be defined or guaranteed without it. Yet, as Stilz shows, this does not mean that each of us should entertain some vague loyalty to democracy in general. Citizens are politically obligated to their own state and to each other, because within their particular democracy they define and ultimately guarantee their own civil rights.

Liberal Loyalty is a persuasive defense of citizenship on purely liberal grounds.

Read an excerpt from Liberal Loyalty, and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.

Anna Stilz is an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University.

The Page 99 Test: Liberal Loyalty.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher Buckley's best books

Novelist, editor, and humorist Christopher Buckley's most recent book is the memoir Losing Mum and Pup.

Back in 2002 he named a best books list for The Week. One title on the list:

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (Little, Brown & Co., $14).

Probably the only book I’ve read a half dozen times and hope to another half dozen before my time is up. A very great masterpiece of style, wit, satire, manners, and meaning, to say nothing of a godsend, since 1981, to the Yorkshire tourist economy. (It was filmed at Castle Howard.)

Read about another book on Buckley's list.

Alexander Waugh, grandson of Evelyn, recently reviewed Buckley's Losing Mum and Pup and shared a few anecdotes about the William F. Buckley-Evelyn Waugh relationship.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Blake Crouch's "Abandon"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Blake Crouch's Abandon.

About the book, from the publisher:

On Christmas Day in 1893, every man, woman and child in a remote gold mining town disappeared, belongings forsaken, meals left to freeze in vacant cabins; and not a single bone was ever found. One hundred thirteen years later, two backcountry guides are hired by a history professor and his journalist daughter to lead them into the abandoned mining town so that they can learn what happened. With them is a psychic, and a paranormal photographer—as the town is rumored to be haunted. A party that tried to explore the town years ago was never heard from again. What this crew is about to discover is that twenty miles from civilization, with a blizzard bearing down, they are not alone, and the past is very much alive.

Read an excerpt from Abandon, and learn more about the book and author at Blake Crouch's website.

Blake Crouch is also the author of Desert Places and Locked Doors.

The Page 69 Test: Abandon.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Maile Meloy reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Maile Meloy, author of the acclaimed new short story collection, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.

Her entry begins:

I just finished The Tin Princess by Philip Pullman. It’s the fourth and last of the Sally Lockhart mysteries, all set in the 19th century with a plucky heroine who falls into the detective business. They’re as wonderful as Pullman’s His Dark Materials, with history (exciting, fascinating history) in place of magic. When I was a kid, I read all of the Trixie Belden mysteries, to my grandmother’s dismay—she thought I should be reading something more edifying—and I loved them. I hadn’t read many mysteries since, so I think Sally Lockhart has answered a deep, forgotten need.

In the first book....[read on]

Maile Meloy is the author of the story collection Half in Love, and the novels Liars and Saints, shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize, and A Family Daughter. Meloy’s stories have been published in The New Yorker, and she has received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2007, she was chosen as one of Granta’s Best American Novelists under 35.

Among the early praise for Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It:

“Though it might seem strange to praise a writer for the things she doesn’t do, what really sets Meloy apart is her restraint. She is impressively concise, disciplined in length and scope. And she’s balanced in her approach to character, neither blinded by love for her creations, nor abusive toward them.... She’s such a talented and unpredictable writer that I’m officially joining her fan club; whatever she writes next, I’ll gladly read it.”
—Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times Book Review

Visit Maile Meloy's website.

Writers Read: Maile Meloy (March 2008).

The Page 99 Test: A Family Daughter.

Writers Read: Maile Meloy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 tales from cold climes

Marcus Sedgwick's latest novel Revolver, now available in the U.K., is a tense psychological drama set above the Arctic Circle.

For the Guardian, he named his top ten tales from cold climes. One novel on the list:

On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian Fleming

Rather unfairly deemed a second cousin in the series, the film version of Fleming's OHMSS still has its good points (including the best soundtrack of any Bond film) and yet, as so often, the novel gives so much more. As Bond passes himself off as an expert in heraldry to investigate Blofeld's Alpine lair, you can almost hear the swish of skis cut into the crust of the snow as the pages turn.

Read about another novel on Sedgwick's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Richard Lange's "This Wicked World"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: This Wicked World by Richard Lange.

About the book, from the publisher:

Elmore Leonard meets Denis Johnson in this explosive first novel set on the seedy side of Southern California.

Ex-marine Jimmy Boone-former bodyguard to Los Angeles's rich and famous-is fresh out of Corcoran, on parole, and trying to keep his nose clean until he figures out his next move. He has a job tending bar on Hollywood Boulevard, serving drinks to tourists, and is determined to put the past behind him.

But trying to do the right thing has always been Boone's downfall. When he backs up a buddy on a hero-for-hire gig-looking into the mysterious death of a kid on a downtown bus-he once again finds himself in a world of trouble.

As Boone learns more about the boy, an innocent who got involved with the wrong people, his investigation becomes a mission. Along the dangerous margins of Los Angeles, he encounters down-on-their-luck drug dealers, a vengeful stripper, a dog-fighting ring, a beautiful ex-cop, a vicious crime boss and his crew, and a fortune in counterfeit bills. Before long, Boone realizes that his quest to get at the truth about a ruthless murder may also turn out to be his last chance at redemption.

This Wicked World is a knock-out blend of superb writing and breakneck storytelling that grabs you by the collar and makes it impossible to stop reading.

Read an excerpt from This Wicked World and learn more about the book and author at Richard Lange's website.

Writers Read: Richard Lange.

The Page 69 Test: This Wicked World.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a canine: Alison Goodman & Xander

The current feature at Coffee with a canine: Alison Goodman & Xander.

Alison Goodman, author of novels including the highly acclaimed Eon: Dragoneye Reborn, and Xander Matthias Goodman, "a cross between a Jack Russell Terrier and a lower level demon," made a coffee-date at Laurent French Patisserie in Brighton, Melbourne, Australia. It didn't go exactly as planned.

Goodman’s Eon: Dragoneye Reborn (aka The Two Pearls of Wisdom) has sold into 13 countries and recently won the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel. It is also a James Tiptree Jr. Honour Book and a CBCA Notable Book. The Times wrote, “This intelligent, vividly written tale grips from the first page,” and SFX called it “addictive reading…the climax is gloriously tantalising.”

Read an excerpt from Eon: Dragoneye Reborn, and learn more about the author and her work at Alison Goodman's website and MySpace page.

The Page 69 Test: Eon: Dragoneye Reborn.

Read--Coffee with a canine: Alison Goodman & Xander.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Mary Daheim's "The Alpine Uproar"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The Alpine Uproar by Mary Daheim.

About the book, from the publisher:

The picturesque little town of Alpine in the foothills of Washington’s Cascade Mountains is no longer the rough-and-ready logging camp of yesteryear. So when a drunken brawl at the Icicle Creek Tavern leaves a loner named Alvin De Muth dead, the residents feel as if they’ve gone back to the Bad Old Days.

The inquiry into the unfortunate incident should be a no-brainer. There are plenty of witnesses to the fatal fight, but since most of them were half-tanked at the time, Sheriff Milo Dodge is left scratching his head over a fistful of conflicting stories. Luckily for Emma Lord, editor and publisher of The Alpine Advocate, the news breaks just before the paper’s Wednesday deadline, so for once she can give the radio station some real competition. But soon she has an even bigger story to report: a heartbreaking highway accident that leaves two people dead and a likable young local on life support.

From Front Street to River Road, from Stella’s Styling Salon to the Burger Barn, rumors are flying. Are the two tragedies linked in some inexplicable way? Was De Muth a mentor or a menace to Alpine’s teenage boys? What compels an ethereal female to visit Emma and insist that De Muth’s self-confessed killer is innocent? And (much to Emma’s chagrin) is it true that the sheriff is about to rewed his ex?

Emma senses that there’s a story behind the story and is determined to uncover the truth. Assisted by that human bulldozer Vida Runkel, the Advocate’s House & Home editor, Emma goes for the gold.

Welcome to another Daheim masterpiece that will challenge the cleverest reader–and a warmhearted world of small-town life, as richly addictive as it is dangerous.

Read an excerpt from The Alpine Uproar, and learn more about the book and author at Mary Daheim's website.

The Page 69 Test: Vi Agra Falls.

The Page 99 Test: The Alpine Uproar.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Greg Robinson reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Greg Robinson, author of By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans and A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America.

His entry begins:

While I like reading many kinds of books, fiction and nonfiction, I have no real system that governs my choices. The only important determinant of my reading is that I tend to study more attentively any book that seems directly relevant to my research or teaching, and take notes as I read. Conversely, I try to find other books to read for pleasure, to avoid too much of a “busman’s holiday.” I usually read two books at a time. One is a hardcover or large paperback that I keep at home, and particularly for unwinding before I go to sleep. I just finished reading (partly in French and partly in English) Claude Manceron’s 5-book series The French Revolution. He paints a really broad canvas, centering on the earlier life, before 1789, of all sorts of characters who will reappear in the revolution. He seems very fair and considered in his judgments. I particularly appreciate that he gives some depth to his portrait, positive and negative, of Marie Antoinette. I get irritated by the latter-day mythologizing and even hero-worship (à la Kirsten Dunst) of this not only frivolous but deeply reactionary and at least arguably traitorous woman....[read on]

Greg Robinson, a native of New York City, is associate professor of history at l'Université du Québec à Montréal.

Read more about A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America at the publisher's website, and visit Greg Robinson's faculty webpage at l'Université du Québec à Montréal.

Writers Read: Greg Robinson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie Compton's "Tell No Lies," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Tell No Lies by Julie Compton.

The entry begins:

As a novelist, the second most common question I hear after "Are any of your characters based on real people?" is, "If someone made a movie of Tell No Lies, who would you like to see play the characters?"

It's a tough question. The characters are crystal clear in my head, but I didn't write the novel with any particular actor or actress in mind.

Finding the right actor to play Jack, my main character, would be the toughest task. He must have the right look (ruggedly handsome but with a youthful face, not too pretty, but still, a golden boy), but he must also have the acting skills to convey Jack's personality. On the exterior, Jack is sensible, smart, always the professional. But inside, he's impulsive, over-analytical, and "a hopeless romantic" (which is what Jenny, the woman who causes him to stray, rightly accuses him of being). There was a time when I thought Brad Pitt could play Jack, but he's become too old and too famous; I find it hard to watch him and not be aware that I'm watching Brad Pitt play someone else. So, my vote goes to Bradley Cooper.

Claire is only slightly easier. Again, I'd want the actress to look like the Claire I imagine in my head...[read on]

Read an excerpt from Tell No Lies, and learn more about the novel and author at Julie Compton's website and her blog.

The Page 69 Test: Tell No Lies.

My Book, The Movie: Tell No Lies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sixty-one essential postmodern reads

At the Los Angeles Times Jacket Copy blog, Carolyn Kellogg, George Ducker, and David L. Ulin came up with a list of essential postmodern reads.

"The thing about postmodernism is it's impossible to pin down exactly what might make a book postmodern," Kellogg acknowledges. The attributes of the texts on the list include: "the author is a character, fiction and reality are blurred, the text includes fictional artifacts, such as letters, lyrics, even whole other books, and so on."

One title on the list:

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

Read about another book on the list.

Absalom, Absalom! also appears on Sarah Churchwell's list of "Six Books on the American Deep South."

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Nancy Thayer's "Summer House"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Summer House by Nancy Thayer.

About the book, from the publisher:

After years of wandering from whim to whim, thirty-year-old Charlotte Wheelwright seems to have at last found her niche. The free spirit enjoys running an organic gardening business on the island of Nantucket, thanks in large part to her spry grandmother Nona, who donated a portion of land on the family’s seaside compound to get Charlotte started. Though Charlotte’s skill with plants is bringing her success, cultivating something deeper with people–particularly her handsome neighbor Coop–might be more of a challenge.

Nona’s generosity to Charlotte, secretly her favorite grandchild, doesn’t sit well with the rest of the Wheelwright clan, however, as they worry that Charlotte may be positioning herself to inherit the entire estate. With summer upon them, everyone is making their annual pilgrimage to the homestead–some with hopes of thwarting Charlotte’s dreams, others in anticipation of Nona’s latest pronouncements at the annual family meeting, and still others with surprising news of their own. Charlotte’s mother, Helen, a Wheelwright by marriage, brings a heavy heart. She once set aside her own ambitions to fit in with the Wheelwrights, but now she must confront a betrayal that threatens both her sense of place and her sense of self.

As summer progresses, these three women–Charlotte, Nona, and Helen–come to terms with the decisions they have made. Revisiting the lives and loves that have crossed their paths and the possibilities of the roads not taken, they may just discover that what they’ve always sought was right in front of them all along.

Read an excerpt from Summer House, and learn more about the book and author at Nancy Thayer's website.

The Page 69 Test: Summer House.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: P. Machamer & J. E. McGuire's "Descartes's Changing Mind"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Descartes's Changing Mind by Peter Machamer & J. E. McGuire.

About the book, from the publisher:

Descartes's works are often treated as a unified, unchanging whole. But in Descartes's Changing Mind, Peter Machamer and J. E. McGuire argue that the philosopher's views, particularly in natural philosophy, actually change radically between his early and later works--and that any interpretation of Descartes must take account of these changes. The first comprehensive study of the most significant of these shifts, this book also provides a new picture of the development of Cartesian science, epistemology, and metaphysics.

No changes in Descartes's thought are more significant than those that occur between the major works The World (1633) and Principles of Philosophy (1644). Often seen as two versions of the same natural philosophy, these works are in fact profoundly different, containing distinct conceptions of causality and epistemology. Machamer and McGuire trace the implications of these changes and others that follow from them, including Descartes's rejection of the method of abstraction as a means of acquiring knowledge, his insistence on the infinitude of God's power, and his claim that human knowledge is limited to that which enables us to grasp the workings of the world and develop scientific theories.

Read an excerpt from Descartes's Changing Mind, and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.

Peter Machamer is professor of history and philosophy of science and associate director of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. J. E. McGuire is professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, and a resident fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science.

The Page 99 Test: Descartes's Changing Mind.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: J.C. Hutchins' "Personal Effects: Dark Art"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Personal Effects: Dark Art by J.C. Hutchins and Jordan Weisman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Personal Effects follows the extensive notes of therapist Zach Taylor’s investigation into the life and madness of Martin Grace, an accused serial killer who claims to have foreseen, but not caused, his victims’ deaths. Zach’s investigations start with interviews and art sessions, but then take him far from the hospital grounds—and often very far from the reality that we know.

The items among Grace’s personal effects are the keys to understanding his haunted past, and finding the terrifying truth Grace hoped to keep buried:

• Call the phone numbers: you’ll get a character’s voicemail.

• Google the characters and institutions in the text: you’ll find real websites

• Examine the art and other printed artifacts included inside the cover: if you pay attention, you’ll find more information than the characters themselves discover Personal Effects, the ultimate in voyeuristic storytelling, represents a revolutionary step forward in changing the way people interact with novels.

Watch the Personal Effects: Dark Art book trailer series and learn more about the book at the official website.

The Page 69 Test: Personal Effects: Dark Art.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six great moon novels

Accompanying his essay "Curse You, Neil Armstrong!," writer Ted Gioia offers a list of "six great moon novels."

One novel on the list:

From the Earth to the Moon
(1865)
by Jules Verne

Is Jules Verne the father of science fiction? Too bad they don’t have a DNA test to settle this paternity case. With an offspring so successful, there is no shortage of candidates seeking custody.

Read about another novel on Gioia's list.

Also see: Five best insider accounts of the moon landings.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Nicholas Ostler reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Nicholas Ostler, author of Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World and Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin.

His entry begins:

I'm reading Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, a novel from 1980 written in deformed, but in the end curiously readable, colloquial English, which speculates on Iron Age life in Kent some centuries after a nuclear apocalypse, as humanity is slowly but steadily building up a new path to power and self-destruction.

I grew up in Kent, so I wondered if I should recognize the locales, but it is set exclusively in East Kent, and with a geography deformed by flood, so all I can recognize is Cambry (Canterbury), whose Ardship (archbishop) is one of the characters.

I got into it because...[read on]

A scholar with a working knowledge of at least eighteen languages, Ostler has degrees from Oxford University in Greek, Latin, philosophy, and economics, and a Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT, where he studied under Noam Chomsky.

Read more about Ostler's Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin at the publisher's website. Among the praise for the book:

"Refreshingly, this book is serious and scholarly, though it wears its considerable learning lightly, and in a world of increasing Anglophone hegemony and globalization against a backdrop of the rapid extinction of thousands of languages, its implications are thought provoking."
—A.E. Stallings, American Scholar

"An impressively detailed account of how Latin has dominated later cultures and languages...Ostler provides a wonderfully geekish account of the intimate relationship between the empire and language of the Romans, and reminds us that there may be lessons for the English-speaking world in the history of the Latin language "
—Emily Wilson, Slate.com

Learn more about Nicholas Ostler at the Linguacubun website.

Writers Read: Nicholas Ostler.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Christina Schwenkel's "The American War in Contemporary Vietnam"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation by Christina Schwenkel.

About the book, from the publisher:

Transnational politics of war and remembrance

"A significant achievement, and one that does much to demonstrate the complexity of sites of war memory.... [Offers insights] that have an eerie resonance for today's political debates over the purpose and legitimacy of U.S. actions in the Middle East."—Geoffrey White, University of Hawaii

"The study of memory has been a common pursuit of historians of war and its aftermath, but Christina Schwenkel’s insightful and brilliantly written ethnography of the visual, political and semiotic processes that shape memory in Vietnam offers a new and transnational dimension to the field. Going far beyond the simple dichotomy of looking at 'both sides' of the war, her study of the commemorative concerns of both Americans and Vietnamese reveals the deep ambivalence over their 'shared history' and offers a profound window onto the present contemporary Vietnamese reality."
—Nora A. Taylor, Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Christina Schwenkel's absorbing study explores how the "American War" is remembered and commemorated in Vietnam today—in official and unofficial histories and in everyday life. Schwenkel analyzes visual representations found in monuments and martyrs' cemeteries, museums, photography and art exhibits, battlefield tours, and related sites of "trauma tourism." In these transnational spaces, American and Vietnamese memories of the war intersect in ways profoundly shaped by global economic liberalization and the return of American citizens as tourists, pilgrims, and philanthropists.

Read more about the book at the publisher's website and visit Christina Schwenkel's faculty webpage.

The Page 99 Test: The American War in Contemporary Vietnam.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: J. Courtney Sullivan's "Commencement"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan.

About the book, from the publisher:

A sparkling debut novel: a tender story of friendship, a witty take on liberal arts colleges, and a fascinating portrait of the first generation of women who have all the opportunities in the world, but no clear idea about what to choose.

Assigned to the same dorm their first year at Smith College, Celia, Bree, Sally, and April couldn’t have less in common. Celia, a lapsed Catholic, arrives with her grandmother’s rosary beads in hand and a bottle of vodka in her suitcase; beautiful Bree pines for the fiancé she left behind in Savannah; Sally, pristinely dressed in Lilly Pulitzer, is reeling from the loss of her mother; and April, a radical, redheaded feminist wearing a “Riot: Don’t Diet” T-shirt, wants a room transfer immediately.

Together they experience the ecstatic highs and painful lows of early adulthood: Celia’s trust in men is demolished in one terrible evening, Bree falls in love with someone she could never bring home to her traditional family, Sally seeks solace in her English professor, and April realizes that, for the first time in her life, she has friends she can actually confide in.

When they reunite for Sally’s wedding four years after graduation, their friendships have changed, but they remain fiercely devoted to one another. Schooled in the ideals of feminism, they have to figure out how it applies to their real lives in matters of love, work, family, and sex. For Celia, Bree, and Sally, this means grappling with one-night stands, maiden names, and parental disapproval—along with occasional loneliness and heartbreak. But for April, whose activism has become her life’s work, it means something far more dangerous.

Written with radiant style and a wicked sense of humor, Commencement not only captures the intensity of college friendships and first loves, but also explores with great candor the complicated and contradictory landscape facing young women today.

Read an excerpt from Commencement, and learn more about the book and author at J. Courtney Sullivan's website.

The Page 69 Test: Commencement.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best failed couplings in fiction

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best failed couplings in fiction.

One book on the list:

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

Edward is keen; Florence is terrified; both are virgins. No detail of the first (which is also the last) night of the honeymoon is spared. His premature ejaculation proves to be "a calamity". "If his jugular had burst, it could not have seemed more terrible."

Read about another book on Mullan's list.

On Chesil Beach also appears on Mullan's list of ten of the best marital rows in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Carol Muske-Dukes reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Carol Muske-Dukes, poet, novelist, and essayist.

Her entry begins:

I'm reading Murakami's Kafka on the Shore & re-reading a fascinating book called Comparative Perspectives, which provides several translations of well-known poems in different languages (I used it in a graduate course I taught at USC last semester called The Aesthetics of Translation), re-reading Auden's The Dyer's Hand, and...[read on]

Learn more about the writer and her work at Carol Muske-Dukes' website.

Writers Read: Carol Muske-Dukes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Sheila Curran's "Everyone She Loved"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Everyone She Loved by Sheila Curran.

About the book, from the publisher:

A wise and triumphant novel about four women who've come of age together only to discover that -- when it comes to the essentials -- life's little instruction book will always need revising.

Penelope Cameron, loving mother, devoted wife and generous philanthropist, has convinced her husband and four closest friends to sign an outlandish pact. If Penelope should die before her two daughters are eighteen, her husband will not remarry without the permission of Penelope's sister and three college roommates. For years, this contract gathers dust until the unthinkable happens. Suddenly, everyone she loved must find their way in a world without Penelope.

For Lucy Vargas, Penelope's best friend, and a second mother to her daughters, nothing seems more natural than to welcome them into a home that had once belonged to their family, a lovely, sprawling bed-and-breakfast on the beach. This bequest was only one of the many ways in which Penelope had supported Lucy's career as a painter, declaring her talent too important to squander. But now, in the wake of a disaster that only lovable, worrisome Penelope could have predicted, Lucy has put her work on hold as she and Penelope's husband, Joey, blindly grasp at anything that will keep the girls from sinking under the weight of their grief.

With the help of family and friends, the children slowly build new lives. But just when things start to come together, the fragile serenity they have gained is suddenly threatened from within, and the unbreakable bonds they share seem likely to dissolve after all.

In this entertaining and uplifting novel, Sheila Curran explores the faith one woman placed in her dearest friends, the care she took to protect her family and the many ways in which romantic entanglements will confound and confuse even the most determined of planners. A story about growing up and moving on, about the sacrifices people make for one another and the timeless legacy of love, Everyone She Loved is, above all, about the abiding strength of friendship.

Read an excerpt from Everyone She Loved, and learn more about the book and author at Sheila Curran's website, blog, and Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: Everyone She Loved.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best insider accounts of the Apollo moon landings

Harrison H. Schmitt, a former U.S. senator for New Mexico and, as Apollo 17’s geologist and lunar-module pilot, the last man to step on the moon, is the author of Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise and Energy and the Human Settlement of Space.

For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of insider accounts of the Apollo moon landings. One title on his list:

Rocket Boys
by Homer Hickam Jr.
Delacorte, 1998

The motivation of many of the young men who ­became miracle workers for Apollo ­began with the launch of Sputnik I in October 1957 by the Soviet Union. I know that my interest in space began at that point. So did Homer Hickam’s. His “Rocket Boys” (later released as “October Sky,” after the title of a 1999 movie based on the book) vividly describes his roots in West Virginia coal-mining country and his post-Sputnik attempts during high school to build and launch small rockets. Hickam went on to become an engineer and was part of the Saturn V rocket team that launched 27 astronauts to the moon. His story was typical of Apollo ­veterans across the country.

Read about another book on Schmitt's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen Harrington's "Janeology," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Janeology by Karen Harrington.

The entry begins:

When I was invited to participate in My Book, The Movie, I had the same thought as Daniel Wallace, author of Big Fish when he said something like “If you asked me if my novel could be made into a movie, I would have said it had just as likely a chance as being made into a car.”

Why?

Like Wallace’s work (which has been a big influence on my writing), I like reading and writing linked stories and novels that are short, but feature a large cast of loosely connected characters or ideas. Janeology is a such a composite novel so I’d be surprised if it could be adapted into a film. (Although you good-looking producer reading this, please don’t let that stop you from trying. In fact, I’m throwing down the challenge. Ha!) After all, I used a genealogy pedigree chart to keep track of eight of Jane’s eclectic ancestors as I was writing the novel. However, the novel has one narrator: Jane’s husband, Tom. From his point of view, the story reveals not only Tom’s own guilt about not really knowing his wife, but also shows the character of Jane through the lives of her ancestors, going back four generations, in hopes of teasing out that dark gene she may have inherited that predisposed her to violence.

Now, that’s a lot of casting. There’s her mother. Her mother’s mother. Her father. Her father’s mother. And so on.

But fear not! After I slept on it, I...[read on]

Read an excerpt of Janeology and learn more about the book and author at Karen Harrington's website.

The Page 69 Test: Janeology.

My Book, the Movie: Janeology.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Steven Luper's "The Philosophy of Death"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The Philosophy of Death by Steven Luper.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Philosophy of Death is a discussion of the basic philosophical issues concerning death, and a critical introduction to the relevant contemporary philosophical literature. Luper begins by addressing questions about those who die: What is it to be alive? What does it mean for you and me to exist? Under what conditions do we persist over time, and when do we perish? Next, he considers several questions concerning death, including: What does dying consist in; in particular, how does it differ from ageing? Must death be permanent? By what signs may it be identified? Is death bad for the one who dies? If so why? Finally he discusses whether, and why, killing is morally objectionable, and suggests that it is often permissible; in particular, (assisted) suicide, euthanasia and abortion may all be morally permissible. His book is a lively and engaging philosophical treatment of a perennially fascinating and relevant subject.

Read an excerpt from The Philosophy of Death, and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.

Steven Luper is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Trinity University in San Antonia, Texas. Read about his other books and many articles.

The Page 99 Test: The Philosophy of Death.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a Canine: Chris Grabenstein & Fred

The current feature at Coffee with a Canine: Chris Grabenstein & Fred.

Chris Grabenstein won the Anthony Award for "Best First Mystery" (given at Bouchercon 2006) for his debut novel Tilt A Whirl—the first in a series of John Ceepak stories to be set "Down The Shore" in a New Jersey tourist town called Sea Haven. It was followed by Mad Mouse, Whack A Mole, and Hell Hole. Mind Scrambler, the 5th John Ceepak mystery, was published last month.

Booklist called The Crossroads, his first YA novel featuring the intrepid Zack and his stepmother Judy, "An absorbing psychological thriller ... as well as a rip-roaring ghost story."

Grabenstein's dogs have influenced his writing:

My third Ceepak mystery "Whack A Mole" was dedicated to Fred and Buster, “one man’s best four-legged writing partners.” Fred is also the inspiration for Zipper, the dog in my YA books "The Crossroads" and "The Hanging Hill" (coming August 11th). In fact, in "The Hanging Hill," I wrote a couple chapters from the dog’s POV. Fred had a lot of input about what I should say when describing the effort required to find the perfect sunning position on a bed.

Learn more about the author and his work at Chris Grabenstein's website.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Chris Grabenstein & Fred.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Anna David's "Bought"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Bought by Anna David.

About the book, from the publisher:

Anna David turns her reporter's eye for detail toward Tinseltown's seedy underbelly yet again and "eloquently and humorously unveil[s] what could be a new subgenre: Chick Lit with a Message" (New York Post).

Tired of gathering banal quotes from the B-list on the sidelines of the red carpet, Emma Swanson publicly yearns for a more substantial career but privately dreams of a hotshot boyfriend to transport her into the beating heart of the Hollywood scene. Instead, she meets Jessica—beautiful, cavalier, manipulative—who shamelessly trades sex for the gifts it can bring. Convinced that writing a story about Jessica and her ilk would seriously boost her journalistic cred, Emma soon finds herself sucked into a world where the luxuries of prettied-up prostitution may cost more than she ever expected.

Read the first chapter of Bought, and learn more about the book and author at Anna David's website and blog, and at the Bought website.

Anna David, author of the debut novel Party Girl, has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Playboy, Details, and many other publications. She is the sex-and-relationship expert on G4's Attack of the Show and is a regular guest on Fox News's Red Eye.

The Page 69 Test: Bought.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten literary tear jerkers

David Nicholls named a top ten list of literary tear jerkers for Britain's Independent.

One book on the list:

THE ROAD BY CORMAC MCCARTHY

Yes, this is bleak, as you'd expect from a novel about the end of the world. But after all the horror and cannibalism and sudden death, there's just enough hope to prevent this being entirely depressing. It is, it must also be said, beautifully written and very possibly a future classic.

Read about another literary tear jerker on the list.

The Road also appears on Liz Jensen's top 10 list of environmental disaster stories.

Other fans of The Road include Paulette Jiles, Joshua Clark, David Dobbs, Andrew Pyper, Dan Rather, Jim Lehrer, Michael J. Fox, Mark McGurl, and this guy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best: studies of consumer culture

Paco Underhill is CEO of Envirosell Inc. and the author of Why We Buy and Call of the Mall.

In 2006 he named a five best list of studies of consumer culture for the Wall Street Journal. One title on the list:

"Not Buying It" by Judith Levine (Free Press, 2006).

Most of us could live the rest of our lives on fruits, vegetables, pasta, wine, olive oil and yearly doses of socks and underwear. In truth we need little. Judith Levine, in "Not Buying It," tries with her significant other to spend a year off the shopping grid as they move between their homes in Brooklyn and Vermont. The story swings from asking how crucial Q-tips really are to exploring the fine line between shopping as therapy and shopping as sickness. This is a charming book about trying to live small, and it is a fair-minded look at the "simply living" movement.

Read about another book on Underhill's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Peter Stromberg's "Caught in Play"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Caught in Play: How Entertainment Works on You by Peter Stromberg.

About the book, from the publisher:

Most of us have become so immersed in a book or game or movie that the activity temporarily assumed a profound significance and the outside world began to fade. Although we are likely to enjoy these experiences in the realm of entertainment, we rarely think about what effect they might be having on us. Precisely because it is so pervasive, entertainment is difficult to understand and even to talk about.

To understand the social role of entertainment, Caught in Play looks closely at how we engage entertainment and at the ideas and practices it creates and sustains. Though entertainment is for fun, it does not follow that it is trivial in its effect on our lives. As this work reveals, entertainment generates commitments to values we are not always willing to acknowledge: values of pleasure, self-indulgence, and consumption.

Read an excerpt from Caught in Play, and learn more about the book and author at the official website and blog.

Peter Stromberg is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tulsa. His books include Symbols of Community (University of Arizona Press, 1986) and Language and Self Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 1993).

The Page 99 Test: Caught in Play.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Jill Ciment's "Heroic Measures"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Heroic Measures by Jill Ciment.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the author of The Tattoo Artist (“Beautifully written”—Alice Sebold; “Boldly conceived”—The New York Times Book Review), a new novel—taut, moving, accomplished—set in a fraught, post-9/11 New York... about real estate, dog love, and a city on alert.

A gasoline tanker truck is “stuck” in the Midtown Tunnel. New Yorkers are panicked .... Is this the next big attack?

Alex, an artist, and Ruth, a former schoolteacher with an FBI file as thick as a dictionary, must get their beloved dachshund, whose back legs have suddenly become paralyzed, to the animal hospital sixty blocks north. But the streets of Manhattan are welded with traffic. Their dog, Dorothy, twelve-years-old and gray-faced, is the emotional center of Alex and Ruth's forty-five-year-long childless marriage. Using a cutting board as a stretcher, they ferry the dog uptown.

This is also the weekend that Alex and Ruth must sell their apartment. While house hunters traipse through it during their open house, husband and wife wait by the phone to hear from the animal hospital. During the course of forty-eight hours, as the missing truck driver terrorizes the city, the price of their apartment becomes a barometer for collective hope and despair, as the real estate market spikes and troughs with every breaking news story.

In shifting points of view—Alex’s, Ruth’s, and the little dog’s—man, woman, and one small tenacious beast try to make sense of the cacophony of rumors, opinions, and innuendos coming from news anchors, cable TV pundits, pollsters, bomb experts, hostages, witnesses, real estate agents, house hunters, bargain seekers, howling dogs, veterinarians, nurses, and cab drivers.

A moving, deftly told novel of ultrahigh-urban anxiety.

Read an excerpt from Heroic Measures, and learn more about the book and author at Jill Ciment's website.

The Page 69 Test: Heroic Measures.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Michael A. Elliott reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Michael A. Elliott, author of Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer.

One paragraph from his entry:

Mark Jude Porier’s novels are a delicious treat for me, and so I keep an eye out for anything that he blurbs. That is how I ended up reading The Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Poebus K. Dank, by Christopher Miller. The novel is a kind of Pale Fire for the sci fi set. Written as a kind of literary encyclopedia of a prolific (but awful) science fiction novelist -- loosely modeled on Philip K. Dick -- the book is both a satire of and a love letter to the genre. Any science fiction reader with a sense of humor should have it on the shelf. As an aside, I have been reading Dick sporadically over the last five years, and just acquired the Library of America compilations of his works to read as well.[read on]

Among the praise for Custerology:

“Michael Elliott’s Custerology is vivid, trenchant, engrossing, and important. The American soldier George Armstrong Custer has been the subject of very nearly incessant debate for almost a century and a half, and the debate is multicultural, multinational, and multimedia. Mr. Elliott’s book provides by far the best overview, and no one interested in the long-haired soldier whom the Indians called Son of the Morning Star can afford to miss it.”
—Larry McMurtry

Read an excerpt from Custerology and learn more about the book at the University of Chicago Press website.

Learn more about Michael A. Elliott's scholarship at his faculty webpage.

The Page 99 Test: Custerology.

Writers Read: Michael A. Elliott.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten novels featuring the internet or computers

In his new novel, Roadside Crosses, bestselling author Jeffery Deaver says "cyberbullying, social networking and blogging lead to a series of horrific crimes."

For the Guardian, Deaver named his top ten novels featuring the internet or computers.

One novel on his list:

The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

The authors who brought us cyberpunk (the concept and the term itself) penned a computer thriller with indeed a difference: It takes place in 19th-century London. The device in question operates on steam, and the plot is driven by missing punch cards. Figuring prominently in the story are the real-life mathematician and philosopher Charles Babbage and Lord Byron's daughter, Ada, who was in fact the world's first computer programmer.

Read about another novel on Deaver's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kathleen Collins' "Watching What We Eat"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Watching What We Eat: A Long Look at Television Cooking Shows by Kathleen Collins.

About the book, from the publisher:

What does over fifty years of television cooking shows reveal about how we eat—and how we live?

“Kathleen Collins’ Watching What We Eat is a book not only for foodies, but for anyone with an interest in this vital vein of American popular culture.” – Jane and Michael Stern, authors of Jane and Michael Stern's Encyclopedia of Pop Culture (HarperCollins) and American Gourmet (HarperCollins)

“In her lively and informative narrative of television food shows, Kathleen Collins captures the phenomenal growth of food as entertainment, what has evolved into a new form of spectator sport in America. The rise of TV celebrity chefs within the context of the nation's growing sophistication about food are stories that needed to be told, and Collins has told them well.” – Barbara Haber, food historian, author of From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals (Penguin)

“With an easy wit and a ‘me, too’ voice that pulls readers right in, Collins charts the rise of TV cooks as educators, mentors, entertainers and co-conspirators; indeed, as beloved, central and enduring characters in our national pop culture.” – Adam Ried, Equipment Guru, “America’s Test Kitchen” on PBS

Since the first black-and-white TV sets began to appear in American living rooms in the late 1940s, we have been watching people chop, sauté, fillet, whisk, flip, pour, arrange and serve food on the small screen. More than just a how-to or an amusement, cooking shows are also a unique social barometer. Their legacy corresponds to the transition from women at home to women at work, from eight-hour to 24/7 workdays, from cooking as domestic labor to enjoyable leisure, and from clearly defined to more fluid gender roles. As the role of food changed from mere necessity to a means of self-expression and a conspicuous lifestyle accessory, the aim of cooking shows shifted from education to entertainment, showing viewers not simply how to cook but how to live.

While variety shows and westerns have gone the way of rabbit ear antennae, cooking shows are still being watched by huge audiences. Watching What We Eat illuminates how cooking shows have both reflected and shaped significant changes in American culture and explores why it is that just about everybody still finds them irresistible.

Read an excerpt from Watching What We Eat, and learn more about the book and author at the Watching What We Eat website.

The Page 99 Test: Watching What We Eat.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Ewan Morrison's "Ménage"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Ménage by Ewan Morrison.

About the book, from the publisher:

Is the ménage a trois a way to live, or just a dream, impossible in reality?

In 1993, Dot, Saul and Owen lived together on the fringes of the Hoxton art scene, shoplifting, dole scrounging, doing drugs and swapping clothes and beds. Their year as a ménage, however, led to a suicide attempt, to art stardom, and to one of the three vanishing from the world.

Fifteen years later there is a big retrospective of Dot's art and they are each drawn back into each other's lives. But can they relive the past, or will they rekindle the passions that nearly destroyed them?

Ménage is a Jules et Jim for the jilted generation. A tale of heroin chic, fake moustaches, shoplifted sherry, pickled animals, and a love so insane that it could only be a work of art.

Learn more about the book and author at Ewan Morrison's website.

Read Morrison's essay "Death of a Nihilst or Obituary for a Nobody," which reveals the background for Ménage.

Ménage has been released only in the U.K. to date, yet it is available to readers around the globe via Amazon.co.uk.

Read Morrison's top ten list of literary ménages à trois.

The Page 69 Test: Ménage.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Lois Lowry reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Lois Lowry, author of over 30 books for children, including the Newbery Award-winning Number the Stars (1990) and The Giver (1994).

Of The Giver, she writes:

The Giver - and Gathering Blue, and the newest in the trilogy: Messenger - take place against the background of very different cultures and times. Though all three are broader in scope than my earlier books, they nonetheless speak to the same concern: the vital need of people to be aware of their interdependence, not only with each other, but with the world and its environment.

Her new book, Crow Call, is due out in October.

Lowry's entry begins:

I usually have more than one book going at the same time, and that is true now. I'm reading Rafael Yglesias's A Happy Marriage, which though written in fictional form is really a memoir: the story of his own long and happy marriage. The chapters are interspersed, going back and forth, beginning with his first meeting Margaret, immediately contrasted in chapter two with her last days as he cares for her during her final illness, then back to their courtship in chapter three. It's a -- I began to say "glimpse" but it is much more than a glimpse -- it is a study of a deep and lasting relationship through many years.[read on]

Visit Lois Lowry's website and blog.

Writers Read: Lois Lowry.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best smokes

One title from the Guardian's "ten of the best smokes" list:

The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler

Everyone seems to smoke in Chandler's novels, women often with particular panache. Philip Marlowe himself smokes with a kind of world-weary soulfulness, as when confronted by a sudden revelation in The Big Sleep. "I sat there and poisoned myself with cigarette smoke and listened to the rain and thought about it."

Read about another book on the list.

The Big Sleep also appears on Barry Forshaw's critic's chart of "six American noir masters" and on David Nicholls' list of favorite film adaptations.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Megan Abbott's "Bury Me Deep"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Megan Abbott's Bury Me Deep.

About the book, from the publisher:

In October 1931, a station agent found two large trunks abandoned in Los Angeles's Southern Pacific Station. What he found inside ignited one of the most scandalous tabloid sensations of the decade.

Inspired by this notorious true crime, Edgar®-winning author Megan Abbott's novel Bury Me Deep is the story of Marion Seeley, a young woman abandoned in Phoenix by her doctor husband. At the medical clinic where she finds a job, Marion becomes fast friends with Louise, a vivacious nurse, and her roommate, Ginny, a tubercular blonde. Before long, the demure Marion is swept up in the exuberant life of the girls, who supplement their scant income by entertaining the town's most powerful men with wild parties. At one of these events, Marion meets -- and falls hard for -- the charming Joe Lanigan, a local rogue and politician on the rise, whose ties to all three women bring events to a dangerous collision.

A story born of Jazz Age decadence and Depression-era desperation, Bury Me Deep -- with its hothouse of jealousy, illicit sex and shifting loyalties -- is a timeless portrait of the dark side of desire and the glimmer of redemption.

Read an excerpt from Bury Me Deep, and learn more about the book and author at Megan Abbott's website.

At The Rap Sheet: The Story Behind the Story: “Bury Me Deep,” by Megan Abbott.

The Page 69 Test: Bury Me Deep.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Frances Osborne's "The Bolter"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The Bolter by Frances Osborne.

About the book, from the publisher:

She was irresistible. She inspired fiction, fantasy, legend, and art.

Some say she was “the Bolter” of Nancy Mitford’s novel The Pursuit of Love. She “played” Iris Storm in Michael Arlen’s celebrated novel about fashionable London’s lost generation, The Green Hat, and Greta Garbo played her in A Woman of Affairs, the movie made from Arlen’s book. She was painted by Orpen; photographed by Beaton; she was the model for Molyneaux’s slinky wraparound dresses that became the look fo the age—the Jazz Age.

Though not conventionally beautiful (she had a “shot-away chin”), Idina Sackville dazzled men and women alike, and made a habit of marrying whenever she fell in love—five husbands in all and lovers without number.

Hers was the age of bolters, and Idina was the most celebrated of them all.

Her father was the eighth Earl De La Warr. In a society that valued the antiquity of families and their money, hers was as old as a British family could be (eight hundred years earlier they had followed William the Conqueror from Normandy and been given enough land to live on forever . . . another ancestor, Lord De La Warr, rescued the starving Jamestown colonists in 1610, became governor of Virginia, and gave his name to the state of Delaware). Her mother’s money came from “trade”; Idina’s maternal grandfather had employed more men (85,000) than the British army and built one third of the world’s railroads.

Idina’s first husband was a dazzling cavalry officer, one of the youngest, richest, and best-looking of the available bachelors, with “two million in cash.” They had a seven-story pied-à-terre on Connaught Place overlooking Marble Arch and Hyde Park, as well as three estates in Scotland. Idina had everything in place for a magnificent life, until the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand caused the newlyweds’ world—the world they’d assumed would last forever—to collapse in less than a year.

Like Mitford’s Bolter, young Idina Sackville left her husband and children. But in truth it was her husband who wrecked their marriage, making Idina more a boltee than a bolter. Soon she found a lover of her own—the first of many—and plunged into a Jazz Age haze of morphine. She became a full-blown flapper, driving about London in her Hispano-Suiza, and pusing the boundaries of behavior to the breaking point. British society amy have adored eccentrics whose differences celebrated the values they cherished, but it did not embrace those who upset the order of things. And in 1918, just after the Armistice was signed, Idina Sackville bolted from her life in England and, setting out with her second husband, headed for Mombasa, in search of new adventure.

Frances Osborne deftly tells the tale of her great-grandmother using Idina’s never-before-seen letters; the diaries of Idina’s first husband, Euan Wallace; and stories from family members. Osborne follows Idina from the champagne breakfasts and thé dansants of lost-generation England to the foothills of Kenya’s Aberdare moutnains and the wild abandon of her role in Kenya’s disintegration postwar upper-class life. A parade of lovers, a murdered husband, chaos everywhere—as her madcap world of excess darkened and crumbled around her.

Read an excerpt from The Bolter, and learn more about the book and author at Frances Osborne's website.

Osborne worked as a barrister and investment research analyst before becoming a full-time writer. Her first book, Lilla’s Feast: A True Story of Love, War and a Passion for Food, was listed as a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book.

The Page 99 Test: The Bolter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cheryl Norman's "Running Scared," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Running Scared by Cheryl Norman.

The entry begins:

I first wrote Running Scared so many years ago that the actors I had in mind at the time have aged beyond the roles. I based Ashley Adams, the newly divorced marathon runner who witnesses a murder while training, on Lisa Hartman-Black. Homicide Detective Rick Edwards was Ed Harris—when he still had hair. I rewrote the book several times, and the characters changed, too. Since both hero and heroine are mid-thirties, I’ve had to look for younger actors for casting my book.

If someone─the Lifetime Network, perhaps─offered to make a film of Running Scared, I hope they’d cast...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Cheryl Norman's website and MySpace page.

Cheryl Norman won the 2003 EPPIE award for her contemporary romance, Last Resort. Her debut with Medallion, Restore My Heart, earned her a mention in Publishers Weekly as one of ten new romance authors to watch.

My Book, The Movie: Running Scared.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a Canine: Kelly Dean Jolley & Ahab and Sadie

The current feature at Coffee with a Canine: Kelly Dean Jolley & Ahab and Sadie.

Kelly Dean Jolley is a Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University and author of The Concept 'Horse' Paradox and Wittgensteinian Conceptual Investigations: A Prolegomenon to Philosophical Investigations and the forthcoming Wittgenstein: Key Concepts as well as numerous scholarly articles and book chapters.

He was featured in a September 2008 article in the New York Times Magazine.

Jolley is also an occasional poet. Read his poem "Alabama Pits."

How did his pit bulls get their names?

I have typically used a formula to name my male pits: find the name of an ancient tyrant that is also the name of a memorable character in literature, and give it to your dog: hence, ‘Ahab’ (and before him, ‘Nero’). My wife named Sadie. I wanted to give Sadie the name, ‘Jezebel’ (the tyrant Ahab’s wife). It tickled my black-humor bone that dogs were on the scene at each of Ahab and Jezebel’s gruesome deaths. But my wife thought this was just too much (she so often saves me from myself), and so she chose ‘Sadie’.

Read--Coffee with a canine: Kelly Dean Jolley & Ahab and Sadie.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Alabama Pits" -- a poem by Kelly Dean Jolley

"Alabama Pits"
by Kelly Dean Jolley

Weedowee

Alabama. Pit Bulls

anchored fast to prone barrels

up and down sides of the

hollow

Remarkable

dogs. Capable

of a canine podvig

left untutored in a canine

Gulag

Brindle

coats. Red

and chocolate

but left outside as

livestock

Killers

no. Rather

gladiators unfazed by

being governesses for

children

We

upright. Sires

and bitches two-legged

confuse the flesh with the

body

Fighting

flesh. We crucify

body and think we are

purifying ourselves of deep

sins

These

dogs. Southern

hounds bear

wounds teeth-carved in

hide

Body, Flesh, Blood: We require them to live and die

by Cajun rules but we will not do the same.

Queequeg, remember, Queequeg dies game. So said Pip.

And it’s a mutual, joint-stock world in all meridians

These dogs could help us men

Little

child. And dog in

a bridegroom embrace

both smiling

Scratch

unanswered. Starved

and broken between

reddened plywood

walls

We

despise. Gameness

embarrasses us and

strands us in

cowardice

So we fear these dogs

Copyright © 2009 Kelly Dean Jolley

What is Arika Okrent reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers and the Mad Dreamers who tried to Build a Perfect Language.

Part of her entry:

I ... wouldn't have thought to pick up Science from Your Airplane Window by Elizabeth Wood if it hadn't been suggested to me. I wrote about how Mark Shoulson, my guide to the world of Klingon, pulled it out of his bag when we settled in for our flight to a Klingon conference in Phoenix. That detail was meant to add to a portrait of his nerdy pursuits, but I later bought the book, thinking it would be a fun, educational diversion for my son the next time we took a flight. (Here's to the passing along of nerdy pursuits!) I haven't yet remembered to pack it for a flight, but I have been picking it up occasionally to learn a fascinating tidbit about the shapes of lakes, the polarization of light, or the plow lines in farms. It is written in a very simple, direct style that gives you exactly what the title promises. The simplicity is almost poetic; it captures the essence of good non-fiction. It says, "Here, sit by me. Let's look out of this tiny window together. I will show you things you never noticed and change your perspective on the things you have noticed. Even though this window is tiny, through it you can..."[read on]

Read excerpts from In the Land of Invented Languages.

Arika Okrent received a joint PhD in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Psychology's Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Program at the University of Chicago. She has also earned her first-level certification in Klingon. She lives in Philadelphia.

Learn more about Arika Okrent and her work at her official website and at the In the Land of Invented Languages website.

Writers Read: Arika Okrent.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chris Dodd's best books

Chris Dodd is the senior U.S. senator from Connecticut and author of Letters From Nuremberg, a tribute to his father, who was one of the lead prosecutors in the Nazi war-crime trials.

Last year he named a best books list for The Week. One title on the list:

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Every time I read this endlessly fascinating novel it’s a completely new book. Today, I see Melville’s classic as a warning against obsessive pursuit of a personal and subjectively defined notion of “evil.”

Read about another book on Dodd's list.

Moby-Dick also appears among Jane Yolen's five most important books, Augusten Burroughs' five most important books, Norman Mailer's top ten works of literature, David Wroblewski's five most important books, Russell Banks' five most important books, and Philip Hoare's top ten books about whales.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Meg Gardiner's "The Memory Collector"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: The Memory Collector by Meg Gardiner.

About the book, from the publisher:

The second pulse-pounding thriller in Meg Gardiner’s Jo Beckett series, whose “thrilling,”1 “crackerjack,”2 “adrenaline-filled”3 debut was an Independent Mystery Booksellers Association bestseller.

Forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett’s specialty is the psychological autopsy— an investigation into a person’s life to determine whether a death was natural, accidental, suicide, or homicide. She calls herself a deadshrinker instead of a head-shrinker: The silence of her “patients” is a key part of the job’s attraction. When Jo is asked to do a psychological autopsy on a living person—one with a suspect memory who can’t be trusted to participate in his own medical care—she knows all her skills will be put to the test.

Jo is called to the scene of an aircraft inbound from London to help deal with a passenger who is behaving erratically. She figures out that he’s got anterograde amnesia, and can’t form new memories. Jo finds herself racing to save a patient who can walk and talk and yet can’t help Jo figure out just what happened to him. For every cryptic clue he is able to drag up from his memory, Jo has to sift through a dozen nonsensical statements. Suddenly a string of clues arises, something to do with a superdeadly biological agent code-named “Slick,” a missing wife and son, and a secret partnership gone horribly wrong. Jo realizes her patient’s addled mind may hold the key to preventing something terrible from happening in her beloved San Francisco. In order to prevent it, she will have to get deeper into the life of a patient than she ever has before, hoping the truth emerges from the fog of his mind in time to save her city—and herself.

Read an excerpt from The Memory Collector, and learn more about the book and author at Meg Gardiner's website and blog.

The Dirty Secrets Club, the first Jo Beckett novel, was chosen one of 2008’s top ten thrillers by Amazon.com and won the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Procedural Novel of the year.

The Page 69 Test: The Dirty Secrets Club.

The Page 69 Test: The Memory Collector.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books about arduous journeys

Rose Tremain’s novels include ­Music and Silence and The ­Colour. Her most recent work, The Road Home, has just been released in paperback.

For the Wall Street Journal, she named a five best list of novels about arduous journeys.

Number One on the list:

As I Lay Dying
By William Faulkner
Jonathan Cape, 1930

The Bundren family, poor white farmers in Mississippi, attempts to keep a pledge to its dead matriarch, Addie, to bury her with her kin a hundred miles away. The coffin is put aboard a mule-drawn wagon, and the Bundrens climb in and set off—just as a storm sweeps in, drenching the travelers and raising the river levels. Every jolt and tip of the cart is felt by the reader in this anguished under­taking, but William Faulkner is charting far more than a hazardous journey. At its core, “As I Lay Dying” is a powerful story of ­domestic entropy, a tale ­perfectly served by its elliptical, multi-voiced narration, in which nobody is ­listening to anybody else. As Addie’s body ­begins to putrefy and buzzards start to circle under the leaden sky, as the wagon is almost lost in the swollen Mississippi, so the secrets and lies of the Bundrens are washed up on some lonely and silent shore, where, still, no individual cry can be heard.

Read about another book on Tremain's list.

As I Lay Dying also appears on Roy Blount Jr.'s five best list of books of Southern humor.

Also see Sebastian Beaumont's top 10 list of books about psychological journeys and Hugh Thomson's top ten books about South American journeys.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Vincent J. Cannato's "American Passage"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: American Passage: The History of Ellis Island by Vincent J. Cannato.

About the book, from the publisher:

For most of New York's early history, Ellis Island had been an obscure little island that barely held itself above high tide. Today the small island stands alongside Plymouth Rock in our nation's founding mythology as the place where many of our ancestors first touched American soil. Ellis Island's heyday—from 1892 to 1924—coincided with one of the greatest mass movements of individuals the world has ever seen, with some twelve million immigrants inspected at its gates. In American Passage, Vincent J. Cannato masterfully illuminates the story of Ellis Island from the days when it hosted pirate hangings witnessed by thousands of New Yorkers in the nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century when massive migrations sparked fierce debate and hopeful new immigrants often encountered corruption, harsh conditions, and political scheming.

American Passage captures a time and a place unparalleled in American immigration and history, and articulates the dramatic and bittersweet accounts of the immigrants, officials, interpreters, and social reformers who all play an important role in Ellis Island's chronicle. Cannato traces the politics, prejudices, and ideologies that surrounded the great immigration debate, to the shift from immigration to detention of aliens during World War II and the Cold War, all the way to the rebirth of the island as a national monument. Long after Ellis Island ceased to be the nation's preeminent immigrant inspection station, the debates that once swirled around it are still relevant to Americans a century later.

In this sweeping, often heart-wrenching epic, Cannato reveals that the history of Ellis Island is ultimately the story of what it means to be an American.

Browse inside American Passage, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

Visit Vincent J. Cannato's website.

The Page 99 Test: American Passage.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Jonathan Tel reading?

This weekend's featured contributor to Writers Read: Jonathan Tel, author of the short story collection, The Beijing of Possibilities.

His entry begins:

I have several books on my desk, reading a chapter of one, a chapter of another, as the fancy takes me. I'm going through some books about China, related to my own writing, as well as those about places and times I know little of.

The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu is oral history: a series of interviews with Chinese at the bottom of the ladder. Most of his subjects are elderly, having lived through the turbulence of the last half century. Fascinating stories from a professional mourner, a safecracker, a mortician, a restroom attendant, and more. The interviews are skilfully edited, so that each has the shape of a short story, with the help of Wen Huang, who was also the translator. I like that the translation has...[read on]

Jonathan Tel is the author of the story collection Arafat’s Elephant (Counterpoint, 2002) and the novel Freud’s Alphabet (Counterpoint, 2003). His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and Zoetrope. He has worked as a quantum physicist and an opera librettist.

Read "Year of the Gorilla" and "Though the Candles Flicker Red," selections from The Beijing of Possibilities, at The China Beat.

Read more about The Beijing of Possibilities at the publisher's website.

Writers Read: Jonathan Tel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Jennifer McMahon's "Dismantled"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Dismantled by Jennifer McMahon.

About the book, from the publisher:

The New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Island of Lost Girls and Promise Not to Tell returns with a chilling novel in which the secrets of the past come back to haunt a group of friends in terrifying ways.

Dismantlement = Freedom

Henry, Tess, Winnie, and Suz banded together in college to form a group they called the Compassionate Dismantlers. Following the first rule of their manifesto—"To understand the nature of a thing, it must be taken apart"—these daring misfits spend the summer after graduation in a remote cabin in the Vermont woods committing acts of meaningful vandalism and plotting elaborate, often dangerous, pranks. But everything changes when one particularly twisted experiment ends in Suz's death and the others decide to cover it up.

Nearly a decade later, Henry and Tess are living just an hour's drive from the old cabin. Each is desperate to move on from the summer of the Dismantlers, but their guilt isn't ready to let them go. When a victim of their past pranks commits suicide—apparently triggered by a mysterious Dismantler-style postcard—it sets off a chain of eerie events that threatens to engulf Henry, Tess, and their inquisitive nine-year-old daughter, Emma.

Is there someone who wants to reveal their secrets? Is it possible that Suz did not really die—or has she somehow found a way back to seek revenge?

Full of white-knuckle tension with deeply human characters caught in circumstances beyond their control, Jennifer McMahon's gripping story and spine-tingling plot prove that she is a master at weaving the fear of the supernatural with the stark realities of life.

Read an excerpt from Dismantled, and learn more about the book and author at Jennifer McMahon's website and MySpace page.

Watch the video trailer for Dismantled.

The Page 69 Test: Promise Not to Tell.

The Page 69 Test: Island of Lost Girls.

The Page 69 Test: Dismantled.

--Marshal Zeringue

The fifty best summer reads ever

The editors at the Guardian picked their 50 best summer reads ever.

One book on the list:

The Beach - Alex Garland

An account of the search for a secluded utopia off the Thai coast, Garland's novel remains a cult read for young travellers.

Read about a couple of crime novels on the list.

Last year The Independent came up with a list of the 50 best summer reads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a Canine: Barbara Techel & Frankie

The current feature at Coffee with a Canine: Barbara Techel & Frankie.

Barbara Techel is the author of Frankie, the Walk ‘N Roll Dog and the forthcoming Frankie, the Walk 'N Roll Therapy Dog Visits Libby's House.

She is also a therapy dog team volunteer, publisher, and lover of dogs. Frankie, more formally known as Francesca, is her 10-year-old dachshund, the “walk ‘n roll dog.”

Learn more about Frankie and Barbara Techel at the Joyful Paws website and blog, and at Frankie's blog and Facebook page.

Frankie, the Walk 'N Roll Therapy Dog Visits Libby's House is due for release around January 2010.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Barbara Techel & Frankie.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Matthew Amster-Burton's "Hungry Monkey"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father's Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater by Matthew Amster-Burton.

About the book, from the publisher:

Matthew Amster-Burton was a restaurant critic and food writer long before he and his wife, Laurie, had Iris. Now he’s a full-time, stay-at-home Dad and his experience with food has changed …a little.

Hungry Monkey is the story of Amster-Burton’s life as a food-lover--with a child. It’s the story of how he came to realize that kids don’t need puree in a jar or special menus at restaurants and that raising an adventurous eater is about exposure, invention, and patience. He writes of the highs and lows of teaching your child about food--the high of rediscovering how something tastes for the first time through a child’s unedited reaction, the low of thinking you have a precocious vegetable fiend on your hands only to discover that a child’s preferences change from day to day (and may take years to include vegetables again). Sharing in his culinary capers is little Iris, a budding gourmand and a zippy critic herself--who makes hug sandwiches, gobbles up hot chilis, and even helps around the kitchen sometimes.

A memoir on the wild joys of food and parenting and the marvelous mélange of the two--Hungry Monkey takes food enthusiasts on a new adventure in eating, with dozens of delicious recipes and notes on which can accommodate help from "little fingers." In the end, our guide reminds us: "Food is fun, and you get to enjoy it three times a day, plus snacks!"

Read an excerpt from Hungry Monkey, and learn more about the book and author at the official Hungry Monkey website.

Matthew Amster-Burton writes frequently for Gourmet.com, Culinate, Seattle Magazine, and the Seattle Times. He has been featured in the Best Food Writing anthology repeatedly. His food blog is Roots and Grubs.

The Page 99 Test: Hungry Monkey.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Tom Standage reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Tom Standage, author of An Edible History of Humanity and other books.

One part of his entry:

On the non-fiction side, I'm reading Empires of the Word by Nicholas Ostler. It's a megahistory that looks at world history through the prism of language, and it's fascinating, particularly in the way it draws analogies across space and time. I enjoy megahistories a great deal, which is why I have written two myself (looking at world history from the perspectives of drink and food).[read on]

Tom Standage is the business affairs editor at the Economist and the author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses, The Victorian Internet, The Turk, and The Neptune File. He has written for Wired, the New York Times, and numerous magazines and newspapers.

Among the early praise for An Edible History of Humanity:

“A fascinating history of the role of food in causing, enabling and influencing successive transformations of human society. This is an extraordinary and well-told story, a much neglected dimension of history.”
—Financial Times

“It’s history you can sink your teeth into.”
—Los Angeles Times

“[Standage] writes with an eye to comprehension and a sure touch with anecdote and illustration… his account of the shift from hunter-gathering to settled agriculture [is] a masterpiece of summary and explanation.”
—The Guardian

Read an excerpt from An Edible History of Humanity.

Writers Read: Tom Standage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Catherine Crier's five top crime books

Catherine Crier is a former district court judge turned television personality. She is also the author of several non-fiction books, including A Deadly Game: The Untold Story of the Scott Peterson Investigation.

A few years ago she named her five top crime books for the Wall Street Journal.

One title on the list:

"In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote (Random House, 1966).

In this riveting story of the murder of five members of a Kansas farm family in 1959, Capote dissects more than the horrific, seemingly senseless crime. He famously got to know the murderers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, and sustained his relationship with them right up to the moment a rope carried them to their deaths. The title tells us as much about the author as the convicts: Capote demonstrates an almost bloodthirsty need to gain the confidences of the people involved and a willingness to betray their trust in his quest for the story. With a Poe-like twist, the telling of this murderous tale took its toll on Capote, who was never quite the same after it was published.

Read about another crime book on Crier's list.

In Cold Blood also appears on Ann Rule's five best list of true-crime books and Bryan Burrough's six best books list. Kansas' first poet laureate Jonathan Holden's chose In Cold Blood for The Great Kansas novel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Karen E. Olson's "The Missing Ink"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Karen E. Olson's The Missing Ink.

About the book, from the publisher:

Murder leaves a mark

Brett Kavanaugh is a tattoo artist and owner of an elite tattoo parlor in Las Vegas. When a girl makes an appointment for a tattoo of the name of her fiancé embedded in a heart, Brett takes the job but the girl never shows. The next thing Brett knows, the police are looking for her client, and the name she wanted on the tattoo isn’t her fiancé’s...

Read an excerpt from The Missing Ink, and learn more about the author and her work at Karen E. Olson's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Missing Ink.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dan Elish's "The Misadventures of Justin Hearnfeld," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: The Misadventures of Justin Hearnfeld by Dan Elish.

The entry begins:

Who would I want to star in my novel, The Misadventures of Justin Hearnfeld, if it were turned into a movie? I’ll answer like this: it almost was. Well, not quite. But there was a long weekend in the fall of ’07 where it looked like the movie rights were going to be bought. What happened was my literary agent hooked me up with a movie agent, who fell in love with the book and sent it out en masse. Within hours, I was being forwarded these wildly enthusiastic emails from producers.

“I love this!” one said.

“Oh, my God!” gushed another. “Yes!”

One (whose name I won’t mention) was so excited it looked like the whole thing was a lock. All she needed was approval that Monday morning from the studio head. Apparently, that studio head didn’t exactly share her enthusiasm. Just like that, the emails stopped coming. Seventy-two hours after it began the ride was over.

But for those three days I spent a lot of time thinking about the movie version of the novel. The book tells the tale of a slightly hapless, slightly horny, highschool English teacher who gets stuck teaching at the New York City private school that he attended and detested as a boy. “Good-bye, Mr. Chips meets Portnoy's Complaint meets The 40-Year-Old Virgin in contemporary Manhattan” – that’s how Kirkus Reviews described it (much to my delight), and I was happy to note that all the reviews took note Justin’s general good heartedness.

So the movie? Well, sometimes the most obvious answer is the right one. In this case, Judd Apatow to direct with...[read on]

Read an excerpt from The Misadventures of Justin Hearnfeld, and learn more about the author and his work at Dan Elish's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Misadventures of Justin Hearnfeld.

My Book, The Movie: The Misadventures of Justin Hearnfeld.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten tales of the American frontier

Scottish playwright Chris Hannan set Missy, his first novel, in 1862 California.

For the Guardian, he named his top ten tales of the American frontier. The context for his list:

I suppose when you think of the frontier – any frontier, a gold rush or an oil workers' camp – the people are the same size but somehow the place is lonelier and seems bigger, and that makes people go just a little bit mad. The American west in 1862 was – in terms of suicide, drug consumption, divorce and sexual freedom – a hundred years ahead of its time. What went on in their heads? Then, when I started writing Missy, I got interested in other writers and all their completely different ideas of the frontier ...

One title on the list:

My Antonia by Willa Cather

"I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction." Something about the loneliness of the west and its landscape seems to act as a magnifier at the moral level, lending in this wonderful 1918 novel enormous scale to small acts of kindness or spite between isolated pioneer farmers in Nebraska, and a sense of the epic to the small-town life of the heroine.

Read about another book on Hannan's list.

Visit Chris Hannan's website.

Linda L. Richards advises readers to not judge Hannan's Missy by its original cover, and calls it "a quite marvelous and original book.... [U]nforgettable. Carefully wrought, beautifully executed. And definitely not for kids."

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Noralee Frankel's "Stripping Gypsy"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Stripping Gypsy: The Life of Gypsy Rose Lee by Noralee Frankel.

About the book, from the publisher:

Whenever stripper Gypsy Rose Lee encountered public criticism, she spoke frankly in her own defense. "Thousands have seen me at my--ah--best; and thousands have made no objections."

Noralee Frankel's lively biography, Stripping Gypsy, the first ever published about the highly mythologized Gypsy, examines the struggles Lee faced in making a lucrative and unconventional career for herself while maintaining a sense of dignity and social value. Frankel shows that the famous Miss Lee was an enigma, clearly struggling with her choices and her desire to be respected and legitimized. Those who know Gypsy Rose Lee only from the musical and film based on her rise to stardom will be surprised by what they uncover in Stripping Gypsy. In all ways, Lee trafficked in the incongruous: she was at once sex object, intellectual, and activist. In addition to her highly successful strip-tease act and film career, she published two mystery novels and a memoir, wrote two plays, and showed her original artwork in famed Modern Art-impresario Peggy Guggenheim's gallery. Lee also gained notoriety for her participation in liberal politics. As photographer Arnold Newman said, "She was a lady, a brilliant, bright woman who was the friend of many writers and intellectuals." Though she wasn't above using her femininity to full advantage, Lee aspired to much more than admiration for her physical beauty.

Frankel places Lee's life in social and political context while detailing a fascinating entertainment career, in which Lee created and recreated her own identity to fit changing times. Frankel's biography transcends the sensationalism of stripping and asks the public to see the woman beneath the costume, a woman who always kept a little of herself shrouded in mystery.

Read more about Stripping Gypsy at the Oxford University Press website.

Noralee Frankel is the Assistant Director, Women, Minorities, and Teaching at the American Historical Association. Her books include Freedom's Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi and Break Those Chains at Last: African Americans, 1860-1880.

The Page 99 Test: Stripping Gypsy.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan, author of Love Marriage.

One novel from her entry:

Beloved by Toni Morrison—I read this many years ago and picked it up again when I was going through old books. I was thinking about what my former Iowa classmate Nam Le wrote about it on The Millions blog. I’ve been struck anew by how painful and simultaneously lovely this book is. How does one make a reading experience out of pain? How does beauty of style and language balance against raw and powerful content? How do the two work together? These are among the most basic questions we ask about writing—form and content—but it’s useful to think about them again in this framework. And I’m concerned with morality in my fiction, and obviously Beloved tackles that. I’m loving reading it again.[read on]

Among the praise for Ganeshananthan's Love Marriage:

"Ganeshananthan has created a slow-burning and beautifully written debut in Love Marriage. It is an evocative examination of Sri Lankan cultural mores, and the way one family is affected by love and war."
—Financial Times

"Innovative….this is an ambitious family drama about an underreported part of the world, filled with well-shaded characters [and] gorgeous flourish…Buy it."
—New York Magazine

"...Love Marriage is surprisingly feminine and fable-like in its inquiry into chilling moral choices... some lines are as evocative as forgotten tunes..."
—Washington Post Book World

Read an excerpt from Love Marriage, and learn more about the book and author at V.V. Ganeshananthan's website.

Writers Read: V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Caleb Fox's "Zadayi Red"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Zadayi Red by Caleb Fox.

About the book, from the publisher:

A compelling new voice in fantasy brings us a tale like no other in the genre.

A young Shaman of the Galayi people has had a powerful and frightening vision: it is of the Eagle Feather Cape, the gift of the Thunderbird, which is worn by the Seer of the People to see the future and gain the guidance of the gods. The cape is torn and bloody, and it will no longer bring visions to the Seer of the People. But the Shaman's vision also tells her of the cure: a child will be born to the People, a hero who will restore the cape and return the goodwill of the gods to the People.

Dahzi may be that hero, if he can survive the hatred of his grandfather. He was born after his mother’s death, as she fled from her father’s anger. But Dahzi carries the hope of all of his People, along with the power to become a great Chief. He will be tested--by his family, by his people, and by the Gods.

Zadayi Red is a magnificent retelling of a Cherokee legend. It brings to life an ancient people and a time of magic in a warm and intimate storyteller’s voice.

Read an excerpt from Zadayi Red, and learn more about the book and author at Caleb Fox's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Zadayi Red.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a Canine: Katie Alender & Winston

The current feature at Coffee with a Canine: Katie Alender & Winston.

Katie Alender's first brush with publication was the article “So You Want to Live On Mars?” published in Sassy magazine in December 1991. More recently, she was the head writer on the 48-Hour Film Project “Best of Los Angeles 2007” winner, Project 96-B, and won a Backspace.org short story contest with a story entitled Deliverance Smith. For the past five years she has produced dog shows for TV (like in the mockumentary Best In Show), which she calls "the best day job ever."

Her new YA novel is Bad Girls Don’t Die.

Winston, her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, is a dog of many talents. Alender:

He’s a very fast learner and loves to work on tricks. We clicker-train, which I recommend for anyone wanting to teach their dog new behaviors. Winston can sit, stay, lie down, leave it, shake, high-five, double-high-five, spin, walk in a circle around me, play dead, swat kisses that are blown at him, and “go say hi.”

He learned “go say hi” when I was working on the dog show—he came to the office with me every day from the time he was 8 weeks old. We had a gate at the office door, and when someone came by, we apparently would say, “Go say hi!” I don’t know exactly how we realized it, but even if he’s asleep, you can say, “Go say hi!” and he’ll get up and run to the nearest door.

Read--Coffee with a canine: Katie Alender & Winston.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books for you and your dog

Back in 2005 at the Wall Street Journal, Kari Harendorf named a five best list of books for your canine, and you.

One title on the list:

"Bones Would Rain From the Sky" by Suzanne Clothier (Warner Books, 2002).

Suzanne Clothier turns the tables on the usual "training manual," making us examine the behavior we exhibit toward our animals. Dogs need leaders, she notes, but leaders need not be tyrants. Or even raise their voices. For instance, though possession is nine-tenths of canine law, we can still encourage a dog to cooperate. (You give me the toy, I'll give you a treat, plus the toy back.) A vital tactic especially if the object in the dog's mouth is roach-bait and not a toy. The book stresses leading in ways that make sense from the canine perspective and avoiding behavior that undermines the relationship with our dogs, which can result when we act in certain very human but--from a dog's viewpoint--very crazy ways.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best jewels in fiction

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best jewels in fiction.

One novel on the list:

Diamonds Are Forever, by Ian Fleming

James Bond is on the track of diamond smugglers and, being a connoisseur, understands perfectly "the passion that diamonds had inspired through the centuries, the almost sexual love they aroused among those who handled them". He knows that the illicit diamonds are "indestructible, as permanent as death".

Read about another jewel on Mullan's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Ron Currie, Jr.'s "Everything Matters!"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Ron Currie, Jr.'s Everything Matters!.

About the book, from the publisher:

In infancy, Junior Thibodeaux is encoded with a prophesy: a comet will obliterate life on Earth in thirty-six years. Alone in this knowledge, he comes of age in rural Maine grappling with the question: Does anything I do matter? While the voice that has accompanied him since conception appraises his choices, Junior’s loved ones emerge with parallel stories—his anxious mother; his brother, a cocaine addict turned pro-baseball phenomenon; his exalted father, whose own mortality summons Junior’s best and worst instincts; and Amy, the love of Junior’s life and a North Star to his journey through romance and heartbreak, drug-addled despair, and superheroic feats that could save humanity. While our recognizable world is transformed into a bizarre nation at endgame, where government agents conspire in subterranean bunkers, preparing citizens for emigration from a doomed planet, Junior’s final triumph confounds all expectation, building to an astonishing and deeply moving resolution. Ron Currie, Jr., gets to the heart of character, and the voices who narrate this uniquely American tour de force leave an indelible, exhilarating impression.

Read an excerpt from Everything Matters!, and learn more about the book and author at Ron Currie, Jr.'s website.

Ron Currie, Jr.'s first book, God is Dead, won the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library and the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Page 69 Test: God Is Dead.

My Book, The Movie: God Is Dead.

The Page 69 Test: Everything Matters!.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kevin Mattson's "'What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?'"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: 'What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?': Jimmy Carter, America's 'Malaise,' and the Speech that Should Have Changed the Country by Kevin Mattson.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 1979 the country was poised for great change, as it is now, and in an effort to right our national malaise Jimmy Carter delivered a speech that risked his reputation and the future of the Democratic Party, changing the course of American politics for the next 25 years.

At a critical moment in Jimmy Carter's presidency, he gave a speech that should have changed the country, instead it led to his downfall and ushered in the rise of the Conservative movement in America. Kevin Mattson gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the weeks leading up to the speech, a period of great upheaval in the US: the energy crisis had generated mile-long gas lines, inciting suburban riots and violence, the country's morale was low and Carter's ratings were even lower. The administration, wracked by its own crises, was in constant turmoil and conflict. What came of their great internal struggle, which Mattson conveys with the excitement of a political thriller, was a speech that deserves a place alongside Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" or FDR's First Inaugural. Prominent politicians on both sides of the aisle play important roles, including President Jimmy Carter, Vice President Walter Mondale, and speechwriter Hendrik Hertzberg, within the administration, and Jerry Falwell, Ronald Reagan, and Ted Kennedy, without. Like the best of political writing, Mattson provides great insight into the workings of the Carter White House as well as the moral crisis that ushered in a new, conservative America.

Visit Kevin Mattson's website and blog.

The Page 99 Test: 'What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?'.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is David Castronovo reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: David Castronovo, author of Edmund Wilson (a New York Times Notable Book), Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit: Books from the 1950s that Made American Culture, Critic in Love: A Romantic Biography of Edmund Wilson (with Janet Groth), The English Gentleman, and other important works on literary subjects.

His latest book is Blokes: The Bad Boys of English Literature (Continuum International, 2009).

He is C. Richard Pace Professor at Pace University, NY, and lives in New York City.

One paragraph from his Writers Read entry:

Now while kicking back I have enjoyed Irish Brooklyn of the 1950s in Colm Toibin’s beautifully controlled and evocative novel Brooklyn: having been a boy in that borough back then, I can say that he captures the restrained mores of the time and the feel of old downtown with its department stores and nearby row houses. Joseph O’Neill’s masterpiece Netherland is a crazy mix of Brooklyn elements from a different period; it’s an exuberant and very sad treatment of West Indians, American dreaming--and a dream of making cricket a major American sport.[read on]

Learn more about David Castronovo and Blokes: The Bad Boys of English Literature.

Writers Read: David Castronovo.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a canine: Krista Davis & company

The current feature at Coffee with a Canine: Krista Davis & Han, Buttercup, and Queenie.

Davis is the author of the Domestic Diva Mystery series. The most recent release is The Diva Takes the Cake.

Reviewer David Marshall James says "Davis has devised a delightful romp, with engaging characters and a nicely crafted setting in which to place them."

Watch the video for The Diva Takes the Cake.

Learn more about Davis and her canines (and feline) at her website and blog.

Read--Coffee with a canine: Krista Davis & Han, Buttercup, and Queenie.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Emily St. John Mandel's "Last Night in Montreal"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel.

About the book, from the publisher:

Lilia Albert has been leaving people behind for her entire life. She spends her childhood and adolescence traveling constantly and changing identities. In adulthood, she finds it impossible to stop. Haunted by an inability to remember her early childhood, she moves restlessly from city to city, abandoning lovers along with way, possibly still followed by a private detective who has pursued her for years. Then her latest lover follows her from New York to Montreal, determined to learn her secrets and make sure she’s safe. Last Night in Montreal is a story of love, amnesia, compulsive travel, the depths and the limits of family bonds, and the nature of obsession. In this extraordinary debut, Emily St. John Mandel casts a powerful spell that captures the reader in a gritty, youthful world—charged with an atmosphere of mystery, promise and foreboding—where small revelations continuously change our understanding of the truth and lead to desperate consequences. Mandel’s characters will resonate with you long after the final page is turned.

Read an excerpt from Last Night in Montreal, and learn more about the book and author at Emily St. John Mandel's website.

The Page 69 Test: Last Night in Montreal.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best books that compare Einstein with others

Walter Isaacson is the author of Einstein: His Life and Universe (April 2007), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), and Kissinger: A Biography (1992), and coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986).

In 2005, for the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of books that "compare Einstein with other great minds."

One title on the list:

"A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein" by Palle Yourgrau (Basic Books, 2005).

Along with Rebecca Goldstein's fine biography, "Incompleteness," Mr. Yourgrau's book should revive interest in the tantalizing logician Kurt Gödel. It also shows how these two men, who each enjoyed the way the other's mind worked, formed a late-life friendship that led Gödel to extend Einstein's theory of time to--and perhaps past--its logical implications.

Read about another book on Isaacson's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joel Shepherd's "Crossover," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Crossover by Joel Shepherd.

The entry begins:

Casting Crossover the movie actually isn’t going to be that easy... or at least not if it’s done well. The supporting cast could be relatively straight forward, but Cassandra Kresnov herself is another story -- maybe someone reading this would have a better idea than me.

Cassandra (Sandy) is an android, but unlike anything Hollywood’s ever seen. She was created from technology that copies human beings in synthetic form, with appropriate improvements. So she’s basically human, only made of different stuff. The ‘improvements’ are that she’s death on legs, the ultimate killing machine. The catch is that the same added intelligence that makes her the most deadly of her kind, also makes her more emotional, more vulnerable, and sends her in search of a life free from violence (that bit doesn’t work out so well for her though).

The actress playing Sandy would need to be very pretty (no shortage there) but would also need to have a strong physical presence -- what Sandy can do is pretty scary, and the intimidation factor needs to be convincing. Unfortunately Hollywood actresses are encouraged to starve themselves more and work out less, which limits the pool. She also needs to be capable of abandoning all the standard cliches of ‘sexy female action hero’, because Sandy doesn’t really understand any of them -- despite her active libido she’s not the type to seduce the camera with sultry poses, and as a life-long soldier, she barely knows a mini skirt from a ball gown. Not that she’s not intrigued by the difference, as she’s intrigued by all civilian and pointless things. It’s just that she is what she is, and isn’t going to...[read on]

Read an excerpt from Crossover, and learn more about the author and his work at Joel Shepherd's website and blog.

Joel Shepherd was born in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1974. He has studied Film and Television, International Relations, has interned on Capitol Hill in Washington, and traveled widely in Asia. His first trilogy, the Cassandra Kresnov Series, consists of Crossover, Breakaway and Killswitch.

My Book, The Movie: Crossover.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best shipwrecks in literature

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

One title on the list:

The Odyssey by Homer

Odysseus is freed from Calypso's island by the command of Zeus, and sails for home. But Poseidon, his divine foe, sends a great wave crashing over his boat, "which then went to pieces as though it were a heap of dry chaff tossed about by a whirlwind". Our hero clutches a plank and is wafted ashore Phaeacia by a breeze sent by Athena.

Read about another shipwreck on Mullan's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Susan A. Brewer's "Why America Fights"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq by Susan A. Brewer.

About the book, from the publisher:

On the evening of September 11, 2002, with the Statue of Liberty shimmering in the background, television cameras captured President George W. Bush as he advocated war against Iraq. This carefully stage-managed performance, writes Susan A. Brewer, was the culmination of a long tradition of sophisticated wartime propaganda in America.

In Why America Fights, Brewer offers a fascinating history of how successive presidents have conducted what Donald Rumsfeld calls "perception management," from McKinley's war in the Philippines to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Brewer's intriguing account ranges from analyses of wartime messages to descriptions of the actual operations, from the dissemination of patriotic ads and posters to the management of newspaper, radio, and TV media. When Woodrow Wilson took the nation into World War I, he created the Committee on Public Information, led by George Creel, who called his job "the world's greatest adventure in advertising." In World War II, Roosevelt's Office of War Information avowed a "strategy of truth," though government propaganda still depicted Japanese soldiers as buck-toothed savages. In the Korean War, the Truman administration delineated differences between "good" and "evil" Asians, while portraying the conflict as a global battle between the Free World and Communism. After examining the ultimately failed struggle to cast the Vietnam War in a favorable light, Brewer shows how the Bush White House drew explicit lessons from that history as it engaged in an unprecedented effort to sell a preemptive war in Iraq. Yet the thrust of its message was not much different from McKinley's pronouncements about America's civilizing mission.

Impressively researched and argued, filled with surprising details, Why America Fights shows how presidents consistently have drummed up support for foreign wars by appealing to what Americans want to believe about themselves.

Learn more about Why America Fights at the Oxford University Press website.

Susan A. Brewer is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Her publications include To Win the Peace: British Propaganda in the United States during World War II.

The Page 99 Test: Why America Fights.

--Marshal Zeringue

Review: Bernardo Atxaga's "The Accordionist’s Son"

Ray Taras, who covers contemporary world literature for the blog, reviews Bernardo Atxaga's The Accordionist’s Son (Graywolf Press, 2009):

This ambitious novel paints a broad canvas of social and political life in the Basque Country. Centered on the obscure village of Obaba, we are introduced to the cleavages that have scarred Basque society for three-quarters of a century. The Spanish Civil War polarized Obabans as General Franco’s forces moved in: “The first thing the forces opposed to the Republic did when they ‘liberated’ a village was to bring in a priest to celebrate mass in the church, as if they were afraid that, under the Republicans, the devil had established himself there” (188). Right-wing Catholic extremists, like the Navarrese integristas who “liberated” Obaba, were brutal. But Falangists were the most feared of all. Inevitably, collaborators were found to be introduced into their ranks. One of them is the narrator’s father.

David, who had moved from Obaba to a ranch in California as a young man, returns to his native village to discover the controversial figure that his father had represented. Which people had Ángel, the Christian name David uses without affection to refer to his Dad, betrayed to the fascists? Was he implicated in the first killings of a group of villagers? Had he shot a horse adored by the youth of the area in order to spite a man he did not like? The verdict is clear to David but he is emotionally torn whether to embrace it. Just as he is torn whether to replace his father as the accordionist at village fêtes, which would turn him into a public symbol of acquiescence to the village authorities and the contemptible Guardia Civil.

David’s role model is Uncle Juan who, by contrast, stands as a symbol of Basque anti-fascist resistance. The tender portrayal of their long relationship, especially poignant since Juan is not David’s real uncle, is arguably the romantic centerpiece of this novel. Because of his politics, Juan becomes David’s figurative father.

David is infatuated with a series of village girls, who figure among the subjects of a shortlist he draws up, together with friends, identifying the area’s five top beauty queens. The extended account of young men in a bar over a long night making the case for ranking the doctor’s or farmer’s daughter --replete with comparisons of the most striking physical attributes of each-- on this list can make for tedious reading. To be sure, female interests that David has while away at university are condemned to only passing mention. The callousness towards the women of his youth stands in sharp relief to the male bonding that permeates David’s adolescence.

There is more to this narrative than we anticipate. Circulating copies among villagers over the next few days of the beauty queen list appears downright crude. But in a subterfuge way, the story of this list serves Atxaga’s literary purpose. When some time later ETA (“Basque Homeland and Freedom”) leaflets are distributed in the area, the Guardia’s suspicions immediately fall on the boorish young men. Were they not, perhaps, carrying out a trial run of colportage of political literature with the Obaba beauty queens’ list?

There is much subtlety in the author’s narrative structure, as there is to his politics. Atxaga is aware that Euskadi independence is not exactly an international cause célèbre to rival Tibet. Bilbao, where nearly half of all Basques live, does not have the cachet, or economic might, of Barcelona, capital of Catalonia. So he does not proselytize for the Basque independence movement but, instead, is content to reveal its inner struggles (the hardcore ideologue on the farm across the border in France), its devoted adherents (Papi), its twisted betrayals (as on the train carrying David and two companions to a mission in Barcelona), and its often tragic outcomes (Lubis’ death).

If Atxaga has made any inroads in attracting sympathy for the Basque cause, it is in tantalizing the reader with the Basque language. There are just enough Basque phrases—and a whole lot of Basque names for the different species of butterflies found in the region—to pique our interest. Euskalerriko Tximeletak?—“Butterflies and Moths of the Basque Country.” Music to Nabokov’s ears.

In some measure the author raises awareness of the Basque diaspora in the United States, too. David meets his future wife in Sausalito, but Basques have generally preferred life in the open spaces of California and the Intermountain West, above all Idaho. Boise and Gernica (Basque spelling), where one of the novel’s protagonists lost family in the 1937 Luftwaffe bombing, are twin cities.

It takes a village to populate The Accordionist’s Son. The Basque village is Axtaga’s idyllic model. It spawns a lengthy list of characters. Some of them leave more profound marks on David--and Obaba (though the egalitarian Axtaga would dispute this)--than others. The author’s most admirable achievement is his political restraint. He subordinates the significance of Basque politics to that of the Basque people.
--Ray Taras

Ray Taras is a visiting scholar at Stanford University. His many books include the recently released Europe Old and New: Transnationalism, Belonging, Xenophobia and Understanding Ethnic Conflict, 4th edition.

He has reviewed the following fiction for the blog:
Elina Hirvonen's When I Forgot
Joseph Boyden's Through Black Spruce
Per Petterson's To Siberia
Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger
Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses
M.G. Vassanji's The Assassin's Song
3 Works by Dorota Masłowska
Andreï Makine's L’amour humain
Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island
Emmanuel Dongala's Johnny Mad Dog
Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best baseball books

A few years ago, former major league catcher Tim McCarver named a five best list of baseball books for the Wall Street Journal.

One title on his list:

"Ball Four" by Jim Bouton (World, 1970).

Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" was a terrifically revealing book, and for writing it he was ostracized by the baseball establishment--both by the players and by Bowie Kuhn, the baseball commissioner at the time. He'd kept a diary about his 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and the Houston Astros--material filled with locker-room stories and other forbidden topics. It was hilarious stuff. Now here it is 35 years later, and it all seems so tame--so innocent! The innocence is one of the book's charms today. But back when it first appeared, and this says something about where we've come, it was like "Peyton Place."

Read about another book on McCarver's list.

Also see Tom Werner's six favorite baseball books, Fay Vincent's five best list of baseball books, and Nicholas Dawidoff's five best list of baseball fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Timothy J. Shannon reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Timothy J. Shannon, a history professor at Gettysburg College and author of Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier and other works.

His entry begins:

It is summer, the time of year when I try to squeeze in most of my pleasure reading. My usual tactic is to pick one contemporary work of fiction and one long-neglected (on my part at least) classic and then to see what those titles lead me to next.

I started off with Dear American Airlines, a well-reviewed debut novel by Jonathan Miles last year. The story is told by the protagonist, a recovering alcoholic and divorced father who is trying desperately to make it to his daughter’s wedding, only to find himself thwarted by the capricious nature of modern air travel. His angry letter of complaint, composed during an interminable and unplanned layover, becomes a confessional account of his life, told with hearty doses of black humor. Of course, I may have been cajoled into reading this one simply by the description of the author’s day job on the dust jacket: he is the cocktails editor for the New York Times.

The classic novel I have selected for the summer is...[read on]

In addition to Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (2008), Tim Shannon is the author of Atlantic Lives: A Comparative Approach to Early America (2004), and Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 (2000), which won the Dixon Ryan Fox Prize from the New York State Historical Association and the Distinguished Book Award from the Society of Colonial Wars. He is also co-author with Victoria Bissell Brown of Going to the Source: The Bedford Reader in Early American History (second edition, 2008). His articles have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, the New England Quarterly, and Ethnohistory.

Writers Read: Timothy J. Shannon.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Julia Gregson's "East of the Sun"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: East of the Sun by Julia Gregson.

About the book, from the publisher:

As the Kaisar-i-Hind weighs anchor for Bombay in the autumn of 1928, its passengers ponder their fate in a distant land. They are part of the "Fishing Fleet" -- the name given to the legions of Englishwomen who sail to India each year in search of husbands, heedless of the life that awaits them. The inexperienced chaperone Viva Holloway has been entrusted to watch over three unsettling charges. There's Rose, as beautiful as she is naïve, who plans to marry a cavalry officer she has met a mere handful of times. Her bridesmaid, Victoria, is hell-bent on losing her virginity en route before finding a husband of her own. And shadowing them all is the malevolent presence of a disturbed schoolboy named Guy Glover.

From the parties of the wealthy Bombay socialites to the poverty of Tamarind Street, from the sooty streets of London to the genteel conversation of the Bombay Yacht Club, East of the Sun is graced with lavish detail and a penetrating sensitivity -- historical fiction at its greatest.

Read an excerpt from East of the Sun, and learn more about the book and author at Julia Gregson's website.

"Gregson delivers 1928 India in livid, vivid color. East of the Sun is a fantastic book, one that endures in the mind long after the final page is turned."
--Monica Stark, January Magazine

The Page 69 Test: East of the Sun.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jay Wexler's "Holy Hullabaloos"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars by Jay Wexler.

About the book, from the publisher:

Prayer in schools? Animal sacrifices in public? Ten Commandments on the courthouse lawn? Jay Wexler has seen it all...

After ten years spent riddling over the intricacies of church/state law from the ivory tower, law professor Jay Wexler decided it was high time to hit the road to learn what really happened in some of the most controversial Supreme Court cases involving this hot-button issue. In Holy Hullabaloos, he takes us along for the ride, crossing the country to meet the people and visit the places responsible for landmark decisions in recent judicial history, from a high school football field where fans once recited prayers before kickoff to a Santeria church notorious for animal sacrifice, from a publicly funded Muslim school to a creationist museum. Wexler's no-holds-barred approach to investigating famous church/state brouhahas is as funny as it is informative.

Read more about Holy Hullabaloos at the publisher's website, learn more about the author at Jay Wexler's faculty webpage.

Wexler teaches at the Boston University School of Law. He studied religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School and law at Stanford, and worked as a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He has published numerous academic articles, and reviews, as well as nearly three dozen short stories and humor pieces in outlets such as Spy and McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

The Page 99 Test: Holy Hullabaloos.

--Marshal Zeringue

Coffee with a canine: Julia Buckley & Simon

The current feature at Coffee with a Canine: Julia Buckley & Simon.

Buckley lives and writes in the Midwest. The Dark Backward was her first mystery and is available at your local bookseller. Her novel Madeline Mann was called “A bright debut” by Kirkus, and Library Journal has dubbed her “a writer to watch.” Simon, her half Jack Russell, half Beagle, inspired the Beagle who lives with the protagonist of her third novel.

She posts at three online blogs: Mysterious Musings, Poe’s Deadly Daughters, and The Inkspot.

View The Dark Backward book trailer and learn more about the author and her books at Julia Buckley's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Dark Backward.

Read--Coffee with a canine: Julia Buckley & Simon.

--Marshal Zeringue

Oprah's summer list: 7 indie titles

Books from independent publishers have been an extreme rarity on Oprah's recommended summer reading lists. Until this year.

MobyLives identified seven books (out of a total 25) by independent publishers on Oprah's current list.

One of the indie books:

The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards: Stories
By Robert Boswell
Graywolf

Read about another indie book on Oprah's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Isla Morley's "Come Sunday"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Come Sunday by Isla Morley.

About the book, from the publisher:

A wonderful new storyteller unleashes a soaring debut that sweeps from the hills of Hawaii to the veldt of South Africa.

Come Sunday is that joyous, special thing: a saga that captivates from the very first page, breaking our hearts while making our spirits soar.

Abbe Deighton is a woman who has lost her bearings. Once a child of the African plains, she is now settled in Hawaii, married to a minister, and waging her battles in a hallway of monotony. There is the leaky roof, the chafing expectations of her husband’s congregation, and the constant demands of motherhood. But in an instant, beginning with the skid of tires, Abbe’s battlefield is transformed when her three-year-old daughter is killed, triggering in Abbe a seismic grief that will cut a swath through the landscape of her life and her identity.

What an enthralling debut this is! What a storyteller we have here! As Isla Morley’s novel sweeps from the hills of Honolulu to the veldt of South Africa, we catch a hint of the spirit of Barbara Kingsolver and the mesmerizing truth of Jodi Picoult. We are reminded of how it felt, a while ago, to dive into the drama of The Thorn Birds.

Come Sunday is a novel about searching for a true homeland, family bonds torn asunder, and the unearthing of decades-old secrets. It is a novel to celebrate, and Isla Morley is a writer to love.

Preview Come Sunday, and learn more about the book and author at Isla Morley's website.

The Page 69 Test: Come Sunday.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Guobin Yang reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Guobin Yang, author of the newly released The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online.

His entry begins:

I have just read Kristen Ross's book May '68 and Its Afterlives (2002). The book shows that in the decades after 1968, mainstream social science has constructed a mellow and tame image of the May Movement as a student movement about lifestyles and cultural identity. Ross argues that this image distorted historical reality, contending that the May Movement was a violent, not tame, revolutionary movement about social equality rooted in the fundamental crises of capitalist society and involving broad cross-sections of French society, notably workers, but also farmers, as well as students.

I have always been struck by the numerous parallels in the social activism of the 1960s in Western societies and in China. It is sobering to realize that the mainstream image of the 1960s movements in the West is mellow and quiescent, whereas that of the Red Guard movement and the Cultural Revolution in China is just the opposite -- violent, bloody, and cruel. The unstated commonality between these two images is that neither has anything to do with revolutionary transformation. Ross's book shows how this image is false.[read on]

Guobin Yang is an associate professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College, Columbia University. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and is coeditor, with Ching Kwan Lee, of Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China.

Watch a video of Guobing Yang discussing The Power of the Internet in China, and read more about the book at the Columbia University Press website.

Learn more about Guobin Yang and his scholarship.

Writers Read: Guobin Yang.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 10 worst books in international relations

Daniel W. Drezner named the 10 worst books in international relations for Foreign Policy. His criteria:

to earn a place on this list, we're talking about:

* Books by prominent international policymakers that put you to sleep;
* Books that were influential in some way but also spectacularly wrong, leading to malign consequences.

One title on the list:

Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb.

The first of many, many, many books in which Ehrlich argued that the world's population was growing at an unsustainable rate, outstripping global resources and leading to inevitable mass starvation. Ehrlich's book committed a triple sin. First, he was wrong on the specifics. Second, by garnering so much attention by being wrong, he contributed to the belief that alarmism was the best way to get people to pay attention to the environment. Third, by crying wolf so many times, Ehrlich numbed many into not buying actual, real environmental threats.

Read about another book on Drezner's list.

Also see: Top 10 books for students of international relations.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Chris Grabenstein's "Mind Scrambler"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Mind Scrambler by Chris Grabenstein.

About the book, from the publisher:

John Ceepak and Danny Boyle are making the rounds in Atlantic City when Danny runs into his former crush, Katie. She’s working for a magician named Rock, and her life seems to be in better order than Boyle could have hoped for. But Ceepak and Boyle soon find themselves on another case when Katie is found strangled to death. It is up to Ceepak and Boyle to find out who killed her. Their lives and the lives of others depend on it.

Learn more about the author and his work at Chris Grabenstein's website.

Mind Scrambler is the 5th