Pg. 69: Dan Gilgoff's "The Jesus Machine"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Dan Gilgoff's new book, The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America Are Winning the Culture War.

About the book, from the book's website:

More than two-dozen amendments to state constitutions banning gay marriage. The reelection of George W. Bush by winning nearly 80 percent of the white evangelical vote. The Terri Schiavo congressional intervention. The Christian Right has achieved more in the last few years than at any time in its history. Yet the story of the man and the organization that have orchestrated those successes — James Dobson and his Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family — has gone almost entirely untold.

Until now. [Read more....]

Among the praise for the book:

"Dan Gilgoff has written an excellent account of the political activities of Focus on Family and its important role in national elections. Fair and factual, this book can be profitably read by allies and adversaries alike."
--John Green, Director, Bliss Institute, University of Akron

"In a time of overheated discussion about religion and politics, U.S. News reporter Dan Gilgoff went out and got the facts and reports them straightforwardly in The Jesus Machine. Gilgoff provides the definitive account of Dr. James Dobson, his Focus on the Family organization and other Christian activists, one that can be read with profit both by admirers and detractors of their movement."
--Michael Barone, Senior Writer, U.S. News & World Report, and co-author, The Almanac of American Politics

"Gilgoff is a writer and journalist of the first rank - dependably honest with the facts and yet able to interpret them in light of the big picture. This is a book that evangelicals, as well as the critics of our movement, should surely read."
--Richard Cizik, Chief Lobbyist, National Association of Evangelicals

"In the deluge of books rushing to explain the rise of conservative evangelicals' influence on American politics, Gilgoff's offering makes a unique contribution: he argues that press-shy James Dobson should be regarded as the most powerful evangelical spokesman of the last decade (surpassing Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson).... This is a smart piece of investigative journalism."
--Publishers Weekly

Visit The Jesus Machine website and read excerpts from the book.

The Page 69 Test: The Jesus Machine.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Alison McGhee's "Falling Boy"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Alison McGhee's Falling Boy.

About the book, from the author's website:

"Did you really rescue your mother from a fate worse than death on a cliff overlooking the sea?"

After a mysterious accident left him paralyzed, sixteen-year-old Joseph finds himself living with his father in Minneapolis and working hot summer days in a bakery. What happened to the life he used to live? How did he come to be here? Although they approach the mystery in different ways, two people in Joseph's new life -- seventeen-year-old Zap, who also works in the bakery, and Enzo, a fierce and funny nine-year-old girl--both want to find out.

"Are you really a superhero?" whispers Enzo, who secretly longs for her world to be transformed. "Please be a superhero."

Stoically quiet, Joseph has never thought of himself as a superhero, especially now that he is in a wheelchair and can't feel his legs. But others disagree. Who is the hero? Who is the enemy? Is redemption possible, and if so, where is it to be found? In Alison McGhee's strange and powerful Falling Boy, a small band of tough kids turn the myth of the superhero inside out as they face down the shadows of childhood.

Among the praise for Falling Boy:

"McGhee captures the special brand of homesickness felt in the flatlands by people who come from more varied terrain."
--Minneapolis Star Tribune

"[O]ffers compelling evidence that McGhee ... is a writer to watch."
--Chicago Sun-Times

"I haven't been so touched by a story in quite a while. McGhee's background in young adult fiction is plainly evident in this story of paraplegic teen adjusting to a new city, a new life and to one little girl's belief that he is, in fact, a superhero. Falling Boy is a wise meditation on dreams cast aside, only to be reborn in entirely new and thrilling ways. Would that all superhero books could be as poignant as this..."
--Sarah Weinman

Alison McGhee is an associate professor of creative writing at Metropolitan State University, where she coordinates the creative writing program. She is also on the faculty of Hamline University's MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults.

Her books include Rainlight, Shadow Baby, Was It Beautiful?, and All Rivers Flow to the Sea.

Visit Alison McGhee's website.

The Page 99 Test: Falling Boy.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Moira Crone reading?

Moira Crone is the author of four books of fiction, most recently the novel-in-stories What Gets Into Us.

Last month I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I am reading the first truly comprehensive anthology of New Orleans voices addressing the experience of the storm for individuals and artists, of which I am one. There have been many books of essays about what New Orleans was before the storm, and many journalistic accounts of the devastation and its many political causes and consequences. But this book is something new: a compendium of thoughtful voices (over eighty different ones here, and many photographers.) that speaks to what was lived and what has come after, and what could come after.

Read on to find out more about this collection.

Moira Crone lives in New Orleans. Her stories have appeared in New Stories From the South on five occasions, and in magazines such as The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, and many others.

Visit Crone's website, and read her Beliefnet essay on "Hurricane Katrina, being a refugee, and keeping our hearts open to those in need."

--Marshal Zeringue

Cracked's classic funny novels

Friend of the Blog "Cochise" alerted me to Cracked magazine's "Wit Lit 101: Five Classic Novels That Bring the Funny."

One title on the list:

Joseph Heller's Catch-22

A grisly war novel that somehow still comes off as gleefully absurd as anything in The Naked Gun, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 mingles the too-real horrors of war with absurdist, laugh-out-loud punch lines.

Through the character Captain John Yossarian, a bombardier who’s decided “to live forever or die in the attempt,” Heller picks apart commonly held beliefs about psychology, economics and religion. On the topic of patriotic heroism, Yossarian reasons, “There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can’t all be worth dying for.” This is also the book that spawned the term “Catch-22” — a mind-bending “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” logical paradox that quickly entered the pop culture lexicon after the book’s debut.

While the writing is literary and intellectually ambitious, the effect of the novel is, oddly enough, not unlike one of Jerry Seinfeld’s better stand-up routines, forcing readers to encounter concepts they’d always taken for granted — like they’re seeing them for the first time. The only difference: instead of revealing the underlying absurdity of airplane peanuts and expiration dates, Heller is debunking things like patriotism.

Read about the chart-topper on Cracked's list.

Last year I did a little write-up of comic novels for Spot-on.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "Our Undemocratic Constitution"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Sanford Levinson's, Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It).

About the book, from Oxford University Press:

The Constitution is one of the most revered documents in American politics. Yet this is a document that regularly places in the White House candidates who did not in fact get a majority of the popular vote. It gives Wyoming the same number of votes as California, which has seventy times the population of the Cowboy State. And it offers the President the power to overrule both houses of Congress on legislation he disagrees with on political grounds. Is this a recipe for a republic that reflects the needs and wants of today's Americans?

Taking a hard look at our much-venerated Constitution, Sanford Levinson here argues that too many of its provisions promote either unjust or ineffective government. Under the existing blueprint, we can neither rid ourselves of incompetent presidents nor assure continuity of government following catastrophic attacks. Less important, perhaps, but certainly problematic, is the appointment of Supreme Court judges for life. Adding insult to injury, the United States Constitution is the most difficult to amend or update of any constitution currently existing in the world today.

Democratic debate leaves few stones unturned, but we tend to take our basic constitutional structures for granted. Levinson boldly challenges the American people to undertake a long overdue public discussion on how they might best reform this most hallowed document and construct a constitution adequate to our democratic values.

Among the praise for Our Undemocratic Constitution:

"In an ideal world, every citizen would read this book and ponder the profound issues it raises about how to achieve democracy in our republic. As Socratic in spirit, as it is engaging in style, this is a marvelous guide to the pros and cons of democratic reform. Take up its invitation to look freshly at institutions you have taken for granted."
--James Fishkin, Stanford University

"Few scholars are in the same league with Professor Sanford Levinson when it comes to raising provocative questions about the Constitution and conventional modes of interpreting its provisions. Whether one agrees or disagrees with his analyses and prescriptions is largely beside the point; what matters is that he forces readers to think about dimensions of constitutional questions that ordinarily go unnoticed. In Our Undemocratic Constitution, Professor Levinson is at his thought-provoking best."
--Robert P. George, Princeton University

"A lucidly written and compelling work, Our Undemocratic Constitution asks hard questions about the nature of our founding document. Levinson, who is one of the nation's leading constitutional scholars, argues here that much about the Constitution stands in need of dramatic change. This is a timely and important book, and our country would benefit if its ideas provoked real debate."
--Elena Kagan, Dean, Harvard Law School

"Levinson's critical discussion of the founding document is bold, bracingly unromantic, and filled with illuminating insights. He accomplishes an unlikely feat, which is to make a really serious argument for a new constitutional convention, one that is founded squarely on democratic ideals. Levinson has valuably shown that parts of America's founding document are seriously flawed, and he has demonstrated that both representatives and citizens should treat the document not with "sanctimonious reverence" but as the revisable product of fallible human beings."
--Cass R. Sunstein, The New Republic

"Admirably gutsy and unfashionable."
--Michael Kinsley, New York Times

Sanford Levinson holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School.

His many publications include Torture: A Collection and Wrestling With Diversity. He is a regular participant at the group blogs "Balkinization" and "Open University."

The Page 69 Test: Our Undemocratic Constitution.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Days of Rage," the movie

The publisher's description of Kris Nelscott's Days of Rage reads in part:

It’s 1969 and the city of Chicago is in turmoil. The celebrity trial of the Chicago Eight -- charged with inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention -- has begun. Protests abound over the trial and the conflict has caught the attention of everyone from the Black Panthers to city gangs to local trade unions.

Meanwhile, African-American P.I. Smokey Dalton and his adopted son, Jimmy, are keeping a low profile. They’ve been on the run from their native Memphis since Jimmy witnessed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., but have slowly settled into a steady life in Chicago. Smokey continues to accept cases and to inspect property for Sturdy Investments, the real-estate company owned by Laura Hathaway, his on-again, off-again girlfriend.

So who would you cast as Smokey Dalton in the film adaptation of the novel?

Award-winning author Kris Nelscott has no doubt -- if she could choose any actor from any period:

Sidney Poitier is Smokey Dalton. Hands down. The man whom they call Mr. Tibbs has the right combination of pride, toughness, and intelligence to play the hero of these novels.

But Smokey is in his forties and Sidney is no longer, unfortunately. So I’ve played with the idea of many different actors playing Smokey. All would bring something different.

Read on to see the contemporary contenders for the role, and to get Nelscott's view of actors for the supporting roles.

--Marshal Zeringue

Books on the English Civil War

Diane Purkiss, author of The English Civil War: A People’s History, picked the "Critic's Chart" of books on the English Civil War for the London Times.

One title on her list:

The Century of Revolution by Christopher Hill

It’s not only the cavaliers who are Wrong but Wromantic. Hill is both, but he’s also passionate and readable.

Read about another book on the list, which Purkiss called "the war’s most beautiful consequence, and its strangest."

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre"

Richard Dunn, Professor of English at the University of Washington and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Jane Eyre (3rd edition, 2001), applied the "Page 99 Test" to Charlotte Brontë's classic novel.

Check out the Page 99 Test results for Jane Eyre.

View the Contents page of Jane Eyre, the Norton Critical Edition.

--Marshal Zeringue

"What is Rick Kushman reading"

Rick Kushman, co-author of the new book, A Moveable Thirst: Tales and Tastes from a Season in Napa Wine Country and a nationally syndicated television columnist for the Sacramento Bee, is the writer currently featured at "Writers Read."

He confessed up front to a professional hazard that may make some readers envious:

[M]y reading habits are weird. I’ll be sitting on my couch, reading, and I'm thinking, “I ought to be watching TV right now.” It’s a freaky little life.

Then he named several books that he was reading, including:

I’m just finishing ... Four Days To Glory: Wrestling With the Soul of the American Heartland, about high school wrestling in Iowa. It’s by Mark Kreidler and it’s a joy to read for the rhythm and the writing alone. But it’s also a mesmerizing story, about sports and challenges, about Iowa grit, and about the hard, hard work that both makes champions, and that simply comes when you love something like wrestling. It brought me back to my far-less-impressive years in high school and college sports, and it reminded me of why I still go for those long, achy runs on Saturdays.

Read about Kushman's other recent reads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ian McEwan: "On Chesil Beach"

Ian McEwan, whose On Chesil Beach is due out in the U.S. this summer, was recently interviewed by Boyd Tonkin for the Independent.

The article that resulted opens:

If you stroll along the "infinite shingle" of Chesil Beach in Dorset, as Ian McEwan did while composing his new novel, you will find that millennia of tides and winds have "graded the size of pebbles" along its 18-mile length, "with the bigger stones at the eastern end". The writer went to check this out, and felt - as he weighed the pebbles in his palms - that it was true.

Already, critics have lauded On Chesil Beach as a major achievement from a painstaking micro-historian of the inner life. Edward and Florence, its loving but fatally innocent couple, stumble into a wedding-night disaster in the "buttoned-up", respectable England of July 1962, the victims not merely of "their personalities and pasts" but of "class, and history itself". Yet long-haul admirers of McEwan will detect some even deeper rhythms at work here. Once again, he traces the ominous crossing of a threshold from one human state to another: a step into the dark framed - as often in his fiction - by the inexorable onward movement of maturing and ageing bodies, of biological evolution, of climate and even geology itself.

Read on: there's a lot more there about subjects beyond the immediate scope of the novel, including the role of science in our salvation.

--Marshal Zeringue

Vargas Llosa on "The Old Man and the Sea "

Mario Vargas Llosa has an interesting essay on Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea in the Guardian.

It opens:

The story of The Old Man and the Sea seems very simple: after 84 days without any success, an old fisherman manages to catch a giant fish after a titanic struggle of two and a half days. He ties it to his skiff, but loses it the next day, in a no less heroic combat, to the jaws of the voracious sharks of the Caribbean. This is a classic motif in Ernest Hemingway's fictions: a man is caught up in a fight to the finish with an implacable adversary, after which, no matter whether he wins or loses, he achieves a greater sense of pride and dignity, becomes a better human being. But in none of his earlier novels and stories does this recurrent theme find as perfect an expression as in this tale, written in Cuba in 1951, with a limpid style, an impeccable structure, and a wealth of allusions and meanings to rival his best novels. He won the Pulitzer prize for it in 1953 and also the Nobel prize in 1954.

The apparent clarity of The Old Man and the Sea is deceptive, like certain biblical parables or Arthurian legends that, beneath their simplicity, contain complex religious and ethical allegories, historical references and psychological subtleties. As well as being a beautiful and moving fiction, this tale is also a representation of the human condition, according to Hemingway's vision. And, to some extent, it was also a resurrection for its author.

Read on....

Last year, N.M. Kelby made the case here on the blog that The Old Man and the Sea is the Great Florida Novel.

--Marshal Zeringue

A neurologist's favorite books on memory

Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel, author of In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, named his favorite books on memory for Opinion Journal.

One title on his list:

The Seven Sins of Memory by Daniel L. Schacter (Houghton Mifflin, 2001)

In The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, Harvard professor Daniel L. Schacter shows that declarative memory (the kind involving people, places and objects) is highly fallible and susceptible to distortion and suggestion. The seven "sins" refers to memory's various weaknesses: its transience, absentmindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias and persistence. Schacter, another pioneer in the study of human memory, employs his insights not only to reveal the fragility of memory and its extraordinary vulnerability to influence by authority figures but also to indicate effective ways of understanding how memory is normally encoded.

Read about the only work of fiction to make Kandel's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Michael Prescott's "Final Sins"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Michael Prescott's Final Sins.

About the book, from the author's website:

A decade ago, artist Peter Faust murdered a woman and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Today, unrepentant and living in Los Angeles, he's become a celebrity among the radical fringe. When one of his fans turns to stalking him, he hires rogue security consultant Abby Sinclair for protection. Unfortunately for Abby, her longtime adversary, FBI agent Tess McCallum, also gets drawn into the case.

Tess came face-to-face with Faust once before - and discovered the true meaning of evil. But both she and Abby have even more to learn. Because another series of murders has been uncovered ... because the stalker is no ordinary vigilante ... and because Faust has one more sin in which he has yet to indulge. And one final victim on his mind.

Among the praise for Prescott's series featuring Abby Sinclair and Tess McCallum:

"Michael Prescott is a master of suspense."
--The Daily Oklahoman

"Prescott is a master at the thriller genre."
--The Romance Readers Connection

"Stunning ... Prescott has created two of the fiercest and most commanding heroines to come along in a while... Simply fascinating ... Highly recommended."
--New Mystery Reader Magazine

"Fans of psychological thrillers can never go wrong with Prescott ... Thoroughly absorbing."
--Roundtable Reviews

Visit Michael Prescott's website and his blog.

The Page 69 Test: Final Sins.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Christopher Buckley reading?

Christopher Buckley, the editor of ForbesLife magazine and author of Thank You for Smoking and the new novel Boomsday, talked to the Christian Science Monitor about what he was watching and listening to.

And reading:

Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire [by Niall Ferguson]. It's a stunning work. There is more knowledge on each page than I have accumulated in 54 years. He's turned me around a bit on things like Iraq. He's pro-empire. I have been anti-empire, but now I'm beginning to wonder. Though what a mess over there.... [Also], anything by Christopher Hitchens, whom I consider the greatest living essayist in the English language. And absolutely anything by P.J. O'Rourke, whom I consider the funniest – and brightest – writer in the language. I [also] confess to an enduring tropism toward the Drudge Report.

(Could he have meant at least one of those sentences ironically?)

Read about Buckley's taste in television and music.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Hanne Blank's "Virgin"

Hanne Blank's new book, Virgin: The Untouched History, is the subject of today's feature at the Page 69 Test.

About the book, from the author's website:

Virgin: The Untouched History is the first-ever history of virginity in Western culture from the Greeks to the present day. What do astrology, the French Revolution, leeches, Queen Victoria's wedding dress, body-snatching, Fanny Hill, gynecological speculums, Aristotle, bicycle riding, and a sex toy called the Lotus Blossum Pocket Pal all have in common? They are among the thousands of people and things -- many of which you never imagined -- that play a part in the history of virginity.

Read a more detailed overview of the book.

Among the early praise for Virgin:

“Entertaining and erudite…. Virgin is a treasure trove of obscure and fascinating material ... presented with wit and clarity. Blank's eye-opening cultural history will make you re-think everything you ever thought you knew about its familiar yet under-analyzed subject.”
—Rachel Mania Brown, author of All the Fishes Come Home to Roost

Also, follow the reviews coming in at www.virginbook.org.

Hanne Blank is a writer, editor, public speaker, and historian whose work has appeared to great acclaim in many print and online publications, anthologies and collections, as well as in book form. A classically-trained musician who has also been formally educated as an historian, she has been writing full-time since 2000.

She is the author/editor of the following books:

• Virgin: The Untouched History (March 2007, Bloomsbury USA)
• Unruly Appetites (2003, Seal Press)
• Shameless: Women’s Intimate Erotica (2002,Seal Press)
• Best Transgender Erotica (with Raven Kaldera, 2002, Circlet Press)
• Zaftig: Well Rounded Erotica (2001, Cleis Press)
• Big Big Love: A Sourcebook on Sex for People of Size and Those Who Love Them (2000, Greenery Press)

Visit Hanne Blank's website, her blog, and the book's official website.

The Page 69 Test: Virgin: The Untouched History.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: "The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Elise Blackwell's The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish.

About the book, from the publisher:

Set in southern Louisiana in the weeks preceding the great flood of 1927, this novel depicts a place and way of life about to be forever changed. On the verge of manhood and a stone’s throw of the rising Mississippi River, Louis Proby is pulled between his love of the natural world and the glittering temptations of New Orleans, between the beautiful Nanette Lançon and a father who no longer seems larger-than-life, between the simplicity of childhood and the complicated decisions of adulthood.

Louis comes of age at a time when the country is coming of age. In Louisiana, it’s a time when the powerful prove themselves willing to sacrifice the poor to protect their position. As the people of Cypress Parish go about their daily lives, bankers in New Orleans are plotting to alter those lives irrevocably. Like so many calamities, the one that befalls Cypress Parish has both natural and human causes.

Based on historical events and narrated on the eve of another disaster, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish tells the story of a young man growing up in a time and place not quite like any other. And in doing so it reveals the complexity of our own relationship to the past. This a beautifully turned novel of love and natural history, married to the shadowy politics of Louisiana, a novel about what manhood means now and what it meant in the south in the 1920s.

Among the praise for the novel:

“The present haunts the past in this beautiful and timely book. Blackwell burns time, love, and loss down into a bed of discrete mnemonic coals. The voice is so true that it reads like the purest, most authentic memoir. This novel is tough, and sad, and lovely.”
—Brad Watson, author of Heaven of Mercury and Last Days of the Dog Men

“On the eve of Hurricane Katrina, the now elderly narrator, Louis Proby, remembers the great floods of his small Louisiana town in 1927, recounting an intimate, resonant history of the era…. Blackwell … elegantly chronicles Louis’s conflict between protecting his first love and his obligations to his father, though Louis finds he betrays both.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Blackwell weaves human history with the natural history and, with an assortment of vibrant characters, tells a compelling story of a river that still resists the best math and science humanity can construct. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal, starred review

In The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, Elise Blackwell once again demonstrates her marvelous talent for braiding together public and private history. The result is a beautifully written and absorbing novel.
—Margot Livesey, author of The Missing World

“Elise Blackwell’s novels are sublime. Rendered with precision and humanity, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish is, like Hunger, about memory, history, and what guilt can do to a person over the course of a life. It is also a tour de force. I cannot recommend it highly enough.”
—Anthony Doerr, author of The Shell Collector and About Grace

Read an excerpt from The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish.

Elise Blackwell is the author of a prior novel, the highly acclaimed Hunger, chosen as a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the year in 2003. Her short prose has appeared in Witness, Seed, Global City Review, Topic and other publications.

The Page 99 Test: The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ian Jack's list

This week at The Week, Granta editor Ian Jack named "The List."

One of his titles:

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

Orwell’s 1937 investigation into the life of an English mining town showed what “documentary” writing could do, and it still remains one of reportage’s great achievements, though its socialist politics are history. Most things written by Orwell could be on any list of my favorite books.

Jack also named a collection of stories which he described thus:

These are a belated discovery for me: I read them for the first time only a year or two ago. Together with Chekhov’s I would put them among the finest stories ever written. As fresh and modern-seeming, especially about women, as when they were first published, around the time of the First World War.

Try to guess the author of these stories -- "among the finest stories ever written" -- before peeking at the answer and the rest of the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Holly Goddard Jones reading?

I recently asked the writer Holly Goddard Jones what she has been reading.

Her reply mainly discusses a book of short stories by a fellow Kentucky writer.

And then there are these books:

I’ve read other books recently that I loved — Claire Messud’s The Emperor's Children, William Trevor’s Felicia's Journey, and I finally succumbed to Jane Austen after resisting her for a long time, which means I’ve plowed through Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma the way I once plowed through C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle....

Read about what Holly Goddard Jones is reading and check out an interview with her at The Kenyon Review last year.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Maile Meloy's "A Family Daughter"

Maile Meloy, who has been listed as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists, is the subject of today's feature at the Page 99 Test with her book, A Family Daughter.

About the novel, from the author:

A new novel about families, love, and the desire to re-imagine one’s own history.

It’s 1979, and seven-year-old Abby, the youngest member of the close-knit Santerre family, is trapped indoors with the chicken pox during a heat wave. The events set in motion that summer will span decades and continents, as the Santerres become entangled with an aging French playboy, a young eastern European prostitute, a spoiled heiress, and her ailing, jet-set mother.

Among the praise for A Family Daughter:

“A thoroughly original and undeniably brilliant companion piece to Meloy’s debut novel, Liars and Saints.... Each novel stands alone; together they pack a seismic wallop.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

“In evanescent scenes distinguished by clean, wry prose, Meloy observes the Santerre family, whom readers met in 2003’s Liars and Saints, from a crafty new angle.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Riveting and engrossing, Meloy’s tale of a family struggling with guilt and forgiveness spans decades and crosses continents, proving her status as one of the best literary observers of contemporary American life.”
—Booklist (starred review)

Maile Meloy's short stories have been published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Her first story collection, Half in Love, received the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters , the John C. Zacharis Award from Ploughshares, and the PEN/Malamud Award. Her first novel, Liars and Saints, was shortlisted for England’s 2005 Orange Prize. Both books were New York Times Notable Books. She has also received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Visit Maile Meloy's website and read an excerpt from A Family Daughter.

The Page 99 Test: A Family Daughter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Kim Garcia's "Madonna Magdalene"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Kim Garcia's Madonna Magdalene.

Garcia's contribution to the series includes the truly excellent poem from page 69 of the volume, "Genesis Suite: Cain."

About the poetry collection, from the publisher:

With the sensual lushness of the Song of Solomon, Kim Garcia’s Madonna Magdalene meditates on passion and the bruised heart’s negotiations with love, through the Madonnas and Magdalenes of history and within us. Employing dramatic monologues reminiscent of the Psalms in their yearning humanity, Madonna Magdalene stirs us to consider what bright flowers arise from desire and consent.

Among the praise for Madonna Magdelene:

“Kim Garcia has a gift for re-creating--rethinking--primary stories. She moves fluently between her own experiences and her interrogation of religious myths. Her inquisitive lyric mode and powerful religious passion have flowered into a startling book of origins, a mature and passionate first book of poems.”
--Edward Hirsch

“Kim Garcia has given us a book brimming with wonder, wisdom and searing observation. She has an unerring ear and does not flinch from the big questions. In Kim Garcia’s poetry, the ancient stories are alive, tangible and breathtakingly lush.”
--Rachel Kadish, author of From a Sealed Room

“Kim Garcia seduces through the lack of seductiveness. The utmost seriousness of her poetry has a taste of truth--a taste we’ve almost forgotten under the constant shower of irony.”
--Adam Zagajewski

Kim Garcia's work has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Rosebud, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, Mississippi Review, Brightleaf, Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops, Negative Capability and Lullwater Review, among others. She is the recipient of the 2004 Ursala LeGuin Prize, the 2002 Willard R. Espy Award, an AWP Intro Writing Award, a Hambridge Fellowsip and an Oregon Individual Artist Grant.

Visit Kim Garcia's website and check out some of her poetry available online.

The Page 69 Test: Madonna Magdalene.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 books set in Japan

Fiona Campbell began writing after moving to Tokyo. On her return she wrote Death of a Salaryman.

"I fell in love with Japanese fiction after reading Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto," she explains. "I was 21 at the time and immediately went on to read many more of her books. For me they were about the chance encounters between strangers that can touch lives, and the miraculous events scattered throughout daily existence. Next I discovered Haruki Murakami, where characters disappeared, questions went unanswered, the bizarre was commonplace. I was very much influenced by these two authors and tried to capture something of what they do in Death of a Salaryman."

She named her top 10 books set in Japan for the Guardian.

The only title on her list not written by a Japanese author:

Dreaming Pachinko by Isaac Adamson

As an example of foreign fiction set in Japan I've chosen Dreaming Pachinko by Isaac Adamson. It's a fun book that by the author's own admission shouldn't be taken too seriously. It's also the third novel to feature Youth In Asia (a magazine based in Cleveland) journalist and amateur detective Billy Chaka. When Chaka gets sent to Tokyo to interview a former rock star turned pachinko addict he thinks it's going to be an easy assignment. That's until he witnesses a woman suffer a violent seizure and finds himself embroiled in a blackmail plot. Fans of Raymond Chandler will find much to enjoy in this book.

Read about Number One on Campbell's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rollback," the movie

Science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer, winner of Best Novel Hugo and Nebula Awards, has a brand new novel -- Rollback -- in bookstores this week.

At "My Book, The Movie" the author shares some casting ideas for a film adaptation of the novel.

His entry opens:

Rollback is a novel about rejuvenation, and so contains an interesting casting challenge. At the beginning of the book, the main character, Don Halifax, is 87 years old, but as the story progresses he ends up having his body rolled back to the way it was when he was just 25.

After offering some ideas about how to cast this role -- and how not to cast it -- Sawyer turns to the other lead:

The other lead role is Sarah Halifax, Don's wife. She's an astronomer who, in her youth, decoded the first-ever radio signal received by aliens; as the novel opens, a reply to the message she sent them is finally received. She's the one who was really supposed to get the rollback -- Don was just along for the ride -- but the process fails for her while succeeding for him, and the tragedy of that tests their marriage to the limit.

Read the entire entry on Rollback, the movie to see who Sawyer would cast.

Visit Robert Sawyer's website and blog, and read an excerpt from Rollback.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wine books: the ten best

Williamson Moore named the ten best wine books for The Independent (U.K.).

A couple of titles by or about wine experts made the list:

A Life Uncorked by Hugh Johnson

The autobiography of one of the most poetic and erudite of wine commentators of the past five decades is an interesting read. Johnson is the world's best-selling writer on wine.

The Emperor of Wine by Elin McCoy

An absorbing warts 'n' all biography of Robert Parker, the world's most influential wine figure. Hugh Johnson called him a "dictator of taste." Read both books and decide if that's fair.

See which title topped the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Sharan Newman's "Heresy"

Today's feature at the Page 99 Test: Sharan Newman's Heresy.

About the book, from the publisher:

Catherine LeVendeur is a creature of twelfth-century France. Her life is a mirror of that time but she is a unique spirit, determined to make her way in the world and armed with a keen mind and a curiosity that often puts her in peril. Her life is both a reflection of the bonds placed upon a woman in her society and the ways in which a strong personality can triumph and succeed in spite of those strictures. Catherine is fiercely loyal to both her faith and her family ... and this loyalty is sometimes sorely tested because of a dreaded family secret. Raised a devout Catholic, she knows that if her family’s Jewish roots are exposed, all she loves will be destroyed.

But how far will she go to protect that secret? When her dearest friend in the world, Astrolabe, the son of the fabled theologian Peter Abelard and Heloise, flees wrongful prosecution for the vicious murder of a young woman, Catherine’s family takes him in to hide. But there are darker forces than murder at work here. Someone wishes to use Astrolabe to complete the destruction of his father’s fame in the name of faith ... and there are those who would see the destruction of the very order of Christian life.

And Catherine’s family is caught right in the middle of the conflict. While she has experienced love and loss, her life is committed to preserving what peace she can for those she loves. How far will Catherine go to save her friend, and what will this sacrifice do to her family’s future?

Heresy is the eighth title in Sharan Newman's critically acclaimed Catherine LeVendeur medieval mystery series. Sharan Newman has used extensive research to give us a fascinating panorama of twelfth-century France that is rich in historical detail, and she puts flesh to bone by creating portraits of people who are not so different from ourselves. Filled with fascinating details of medieval life and the intricate interplay between the Christian and Jewish cultures of the time, Heresy is a compelling mystery and a riveting historical rolled into one.

Heresy is the 8th volume in the Catherine LeVendeur series.

Read an excerpt from Heresy.

Visit Sharan Newman's website.

The Page 99 Test: Heresy.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Cañón's "Tales from the Town of Widows"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: James Cañón's debut novel, Tales from the Town of Widows.

About the book, from the author:

When a band of guerrillas arrives in the mountain village of Mariquita and forcibly “recruits” all the men to fight for the communist cause, the women are left behind to fend for themselves. Now virtual widows, they must get beyond their grief and pull together to survive. As they go about rebuilding their lives, the women of Mariquita challenge the male orientation that once governed them so completely and eventually replace it with a vision all their own: an all-female utopia founded on the very socialist ideals the guerrillas claim to be fighting for.

Among the praise for the novel:

"Cañón’s strong and simple writing, which is touched by humor and magic realism, never falters.”
— The New Yorker

“Enchanting ... a rollicking and often shocking tale that Cañón tells with charm and bite.”
— Washington Post Book World

“The story of these women touches our deepest emotions.... Highly recommended.”
— Library Journal

“Prime magic realism à la Márquez, Cortázar and Vargas Llosa, updated with a pop-culture twist.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“The characterizations are drawn as compellingly as the storyline itself, which simply gets increasingly delicious as the pages turn.”
— Booklist

“A much-loved tradition of Colombian fiction has been gorgeously re-imagined.”
— Joan Silber

“Cañón is a gifted storyteller, as full of his radical purpose as Jonathan Swift, as enchanting as Gabriel García-Márquez, as brainy as Pamuk, yet his anger and compassion, as well as his humor, are distinctly his own.”
— Maureen Howard

"[A]n imaginative, hilarious, and wise exploration of gender and utopian idealism in Colombia."
— Michele Morano

Visit James Cañón's website and his blog, and read an excerpt from Tales from the Town of Widows.

His English short fiction has been anthologized in Bésame Mucho (Painted Leaf Press), and Virgins, Guerrillas & Locas (Cleis Press).

Read an interview with James Cañón.

The Page 69 Test: Tales from the Town of Widows.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is George Levine reading?

George Levine, author of Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World, shared an account of what he's been reading recently.

His list includes a few "second line Victorian novels" as well as several "popular discussions of questions of religion and science" -- and a capolavoro [masterpiece] by Pirandello.

Read Levine's write-up at Writers Read.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Such a Pretty Girl," the movie

The book description for Such a Pretty Girl reads almost like a movie pitch:

Meredith was promised nine years of safety, but they only gave her three. Her father, who was sent to prison for sexually abusing Meredith and other children in their small town, has been released on good behavior. He was supposed to be locked up until Meredith's eighteenth birthday, when she could legally be free of both her abusive father and her delusional mother who dwells on a fantasy that the three of them will be a happy family once more.

But Meredith is only fifteen, and her father is out of prison ... and her mother is bringing him home. And Meredith won't let him hurt her, or anyone else, ever again. No matter what the cost.

So what does the author Laura Wiess think about the casting of this hypothetical film adaptation of her novel? Read her write-up at "My Book, The Movie."

Visit Laura Wiess's website, her blog, her other blog, and her MySpace page.

Read the results of the Page 69 Test for Such a Pretty Girl.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Alex Scarrow's "A Thousand Suns"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Alex Scarrow's A Thousand Suns.

About the book, from the author:

Off the coast of New England, a trawler tangles its nets on wreckage from sixty years ago - a B17 'flying fortress' , perfectly preserved and containing the final and most terrifying secret of WWII. When freelance photographer, Chris Roland, enters the sunken plane , what he discovers in the dark, tomb-like interior changes everything he knows about the end of the war and how desperately close it came to being the end of everything.

A Thousand Suns is a tale that cuts breathlessly between the present, as a long dormant and sinister agency stirs once more, readying to preserve the secret at any cost - and the past, as a young crew of German airmen, the very last of Hitler's Luftwaffe, fight impossible odds to save their country. As both plots race towards a conclusion, this most horrifying wartime revelation hangs in the balance.

Visit the Scarrow Brothers' website and read reviews of A Thousand Suns.

The Page 69 Test: A Thousand Suns.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Clausewitz's "On War"

Beatrice Heuser, Professor at the University of the German Federal Armed Forces, Munich, and editor of the new abridged edition of On War in the Oxford World Classics series, applied the "Page 99 Test" to Carl von Clausewitz's classic treatise.

About the book, from the publisher:

On War is one of the most important books ever written on the subject of war. Clausewitz, a Prussian officer who fought against the French during the Napoleonic Wars, sought to understand and analyze the phenomenon of war so that future leaders could conduct and win conflicts more effectively. He studied the human and social factors that affect outcomes, as well as the tactical and technological ones. He understood that war was a weapon of government, and that political purpose, chance, and enmity combine to shape its dynamics. On War continues to be read by military strategists, politicians, and others for its timeless insights.

Check out the Page 99 Test results for On War.

For further reading see Beatrice Heuser, Reading Clausewitz (London: Pimlico, 2002).

--Marshal Zeringue

Andreï Makine, "Cette France qu’on oublie d’aimer"

Ray Taras, who regularly reviews contemporary world literature for the blog, turns again to the work of Andreï Makine, whose L’amour humain Taras reviewed here earlier this year.

Andreï Makine, Cette France qu’on oublie d’aimer. Paris: Flammarion, 2006.

Throughout much of the twentieth century it was said that the best omelettes you could eat anywhere in Paris were at number 1, Place de l’Odéon. For more than a century the Café Voltaire made its home here, and it became a celebrated meeting place for writers, artists, journalists, politicians. It was where the intelligentsia — Verlaine, Mallarmé, Gide, and “all the Americans in Paris” — came to drink, discuss, and dream.

The French publisher Flammarion has turned the location of the Café Voltaire into the editorial offices of its literature department. Recently it launched a book series by the same name, intended to recapture l’esprit français that haunts its premises. Authors such as Régis Debray, Jacques Julliard, and Tzvetan Todorov have written their reflections about various dimensions of contemporary French life and letters. One seeming parvenu to this select group is the Russian-born novelist Andreï Makine.

The short volume he has written for the series can be translated as “This France that we forget to love.” Those who have read some of the ten or so novels he has published since arriving in France in 1987 are aware of his tortured grappling with French national identity. In my view, the most shattering story he has narrated, revealing the disillusion of an ardent Russian Francophile with contemporary France, is found in A Hero’s Daughter, published in the U.S. in 2003. Here he describes a fictional Soviet reporter sent to Paris to interview people living near the Place de Stalingrad about what they knew about the decisive World War II battle in that city. In Makine’s novel the journalist could not, in the end, carry out interviews in the square because “nobody but Blacks and Arabs” lived in the area. Any recorded interviews would make the Soviet audience “think that we filmed this in Africa, not Paris.”

Makine’s extended essay for Café Voltaire doesn’t offer a much more nuanced approach to French national identity. The quotation taken from the book printed on its jacket is that “I wouldn’t have written this book if I didn’t believe deeply in France’s vitality, its future, and the capacity of the French to say ‘enough!” But, we may ask, enough of what?

For Makine, France’s greatest contribution to civilization lies in its intellectual life. He twists the question Stalin is said to have asked about the Vatican and writes: “‘Voltaire? Proust? Camus? How many divisions do they have?’” (p. 31). Immaterial divisions, Makine replies, but with a fighting spirit that matches all the world’s military-industrial complexes.

Makine admires France for all the habitual reasons — the arts, the way of life, the gastronomy, fashion, chivalry, the affection for verbs. He cites from a letter written by Pushkin: “I want to speak to you in the language of Europe” (p. 60) — le francais naturellement. There is the French winemaster who says “This is an intelligent wine. It wants us to talk about it” (p. 44). Makine adores France because it is where the preference for the cerebral over the natural, the artistic over the material, hold sway.

It is no surprise, then, that he decries the reduction of French to just one of the many vernacular languages of Europe. But it is the shackles of political correctness that this native of Siberia cannot tolerate. “Can we get up and start talking in a louder voice?” he asks rhetorically (p. 66). He describes the disconnect between official multicultural propaganda celebrating black-blanc-beur (“black-white-Arab”) and the private attitudes of the French. The same doublespeak and collective schizophrenia exist here as in the former Soviet Union, he observes.

Makine worries about the existence of taboo subjects, the absence of serious public debate on issues of identity, the erosion of free speech, the censorship by “professional anti-racists” — reasons why France is becoming unloved. He lashes out at “Decades of lies about France as multicultural paradise — multiracial, multi-denominational, multi-what? Multi everything. Too many lies and now the sovereign reality explodes in front of our eyes” (p. 97). Part of this reality is France’s proxénétisme — an intriguing, out-of-style term referring to an affection for all things foreign — which has forced the state to negotiate with leaders of street gangs engaged in violent disturbances, to tolerate drug traffickers, to recognize the wealth accumulated by car thieves, to excuse the behavior of les jeunes-des-banlieues. For Makine the lyrics of one rap song sum it up: “I’ll fuck France until she loves me” (p. 98).

The responsibility for this degradation of France’s stature lies less with immigrant groups and more with French-French (this hyphenated term is actually now used to refer to ethnic French). “France is hated because the French have allowed it to be emptied of its substance, permitted it to be transformed into a simple populated territory, a little corner of a globalized Eurasia” (p. 99).

Ah! we might respond to Makine, who may be too Francophile for our taste, there is the French national soccer team that all French people love. Black-blanc-beur has made France into a winning side — everyone boasts — notwithstanding the injustice of the ethnically-pure Italian side winning the 2006 World Cup in a match it should have lost.

But the thrust of Makine’s argument would have us not overlook another victorious French national squad, the rugby XV which won this year’s Six Nations Championship and will be a force at the Rugby World Cup starting in Paris this July. I may stand in need of correction, but as I reviewed the names on the 40-man squad no player had a North African name — an irony considering that French rugby is most popular in the southwest where much of the first wave of North African immigration settled.

The ethnic and racial composition of the rugby XV is more in keeping with Makine’s articulated view of French identity. It is also closer to the concept of Frenchness that National Front presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen embraces. As les présidentielles head towards the finish line in April-May, it is surprising that the conservative and socialist candidates have also emphasized increasingly nationalistic understandings of Frenchness. In his campaign conservative Nicolas Sarkozy has pointed proudly to his record as interior minister when he was responsible for expelling tens of thousands of illegal immigrants from France. In 2005 he attacked “scum” living in ethnic Arab and Muslim neighborhoods who took part in three weeks of violent protests about living conditions. His electoral promise is to establish a ministry of immigration and national identity that would oversee the propagation of French secular values among all immigrants.

Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal has also emphasized the importance of Frenchness. Instead of broadsides against France’s minorities — oops, officially France does not acknowledge that it has any — she has called on all residents to memorize the words to La Marseillaise and to publicly display the French flag on Bastille Day.

This Café Voltaire volume has raised contentious issues about France that have been echoed by much of the French political class. It has joined this Soviet-educated author in announcing “enough.” But Voltaire, the conscience of the French Enlightenment, would not be pleased.

Many thanks to Ray for the thorough and insightful review.

Ray Taras, professor of political science at Tulane University and director of its World Literature program for the past three years, is the author of a forthcoming book on xenophobias in old and new Europe.

He has reviewed the following fiction for the blog:
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

Recently, Taras also reviewed a work of nonfiction, Andrei S. Markovits' Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "Big Numbers"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Jack Getze's Big Numbers.

The skinny on Big Numbers, from the author's website:

Three weeks ago, stockbroker Austin Carr lived in a truck-mounted camper. Behind in alimony and child-support payments, Carr was desperate to earn his children back and escape the Jersey Shore's third-rate stock and bond trade. But life has gotten worse. Now he's about to be murdered, tied to a live, six-hundred-pound tuna.

Edgar Allan Poe Award-winner T.J. MacGregor: "Darkly comic, with an engaging protagonist. BIG NUMBERS is a definite winner."

Read Jack Getze's backstory.

Visit Getze's website and read an excerpt from Big Numbers.

The Page 69 Test: Big Numbers.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Maureen Ogle reading?

Last month I asked Maureen Ogle, author of Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, what she was reading.

She named a few history books (research for her work-in-progress, Carnivore Nation: The History of Meat and America), three mysteries, and quite a few books, fiction and non-fiction, with Hollywood themes or settings.

Check out Ogle's recent reading list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The best P.G. Wodehouse books

Tony Ring named his six top P.G. Wodehouse books for the London Times.

Five of the titles are by Wodehouse, and one is a biography of the writer:

Wodehouse: A Life by Robert McCrum

Extensively researched and written in masterly fashion.

Read more about Ring's list.

--Marshal Zeringue